The Starship spacecraft completed its first orbital flight, deploying Starlink satellites into orbit
Kyiv • UNN
Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites despite an engine failure. The mission was shortened from 10 hours to 3.
On Monday, SpaceX's giant Starship rocket reached orbit for the first time and deployed new Starlink satellites into orbit, achieving important milestones despite an engine malfunction early in the flight and the decision to shorten the mission by seven hours, UNN reports, citing Reuters.
The mission was supposed to last 10 hours, but after engine problems arose, it was shortened to three hours. This flight from the Texas launch site was the rocket's fourteenth since 2023; Elon Musk's company plans to begin regular operations with it this year.
Unlike previous Starship flights, Monday's mission was not merely a test of a next-generation rocket but also an operational task involving the deployment into orbit of Starlink satellites worth millions of dollars. This made it the first revenue-generating Starship mission, although the spacecraft's final design is still under development.
SpaceX shares, which had previously risen by nearly 9% from their IPO price, fell by about 1% on Monday. A significant portion of SpaceX's market value and investors' confidence in the company—which was valued at $2 trillion as of Friday's market close—depends on the success of Starship, the world's first fully reusable spacecraft.
The unmanned vehicle, as tall as a 40-story building and consisting of the Super Heavy booster and the main upper stage mounted on it (the Starship spacecraft itself), lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase complex on the Gulf Coast near the city of Brownsville.
The Super Heavy booster carried Starship's upper stage into space, after which it returned to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, making a controlled splashdown (the booster's previous two landing attempts ended in hard impacts with the surface). According to SpaceX, some of the booster's engines shut down during its descent.
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After reaching space, one of Starship's three main engines shut down prematurely; as a result, SpaceX representative Dan Huot announced during the mission's livestream that the spacecraft would not be able to reach orbit.
"The team has decided not to go to orbit," Huot said. However, a few minutes later, Huot changed the decision after engineers reported that the vehicle could still try to ignite the other onboard engines to reach orbit—which Starship successfully did shortly afterward.
We would add
Once in orbit, Starship deployed 26 next-generation Starlink satellites one after another at an altitude of approximately 269 km (161 miles), marking the first time the spacecraft had deployed a payload in orbit.
"All 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites have been deployed, and they are functioning nominally," Musk wrote on the social media platform X.
"Deploying all 26 Starlink V3 satellites into their target orbit is a huge achievement, especially given that this is the first commercial Starship flight to generate revenue," said Dean Slayden, a quality control manager and aerospace engineer at Accu Components. "But from an engineering perspective, the most interesting moment was how the team handled the engine failure during ascent."
The publication notes that engine problems also occurred during some of Starship's previous suborbital flights; this is a longstanding issue for the program involving a critically important aspect—the rocket's ability to maneuver in space. Although this capability is less important for deploying Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, it is crucial for Starship's future missions, including delivering NASA astronauts to the Moon.
Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on the social media platform X for managing "to get the ship to orbit and complete every phase of the flight safely, responsibly, and, most importantly, inspiringly."
The controlled descent of Starship into the waters of the Pacific Ocean—seven hours earlier than scheduled—ended with an engine maneuver that turned the vehicle into a vertical position for a nose-up splashdown. At the moment it touched the ocean’s surface, flames engulfed the rocket’s base; it subsequently tipped onto its side, followed by a powerful explosion that produced a large fireball. The company had not planned to recover and reuse the spacecraft after the mission.
Context
Starship was created to enable more frequent launches of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and to carry out future NASA missions to the Moon. Reaching orbit—a key measure of the success of any new rocket intended to deliver payloads into space—was a long-awaited achievement for Starship. Musk once predicted that this would happen as early as 2022, with satellite launches following in 2023.
All 13 previous Starship test flights, conducted since 2023, had been limited to suborbital space as part of a development campaign that has lasted nearly a decade and cost SpaceX more than $15 billion. Musk said that in the future he plans to conduct hundreds or even thousands of Starship flights per year—launch rates unprecedented in the space industry.
"We are 2–3 years away from Starship flights at one-hour intervals," Musk wrote on the social network X on Sunday.