For three and a half years, ever since the spring of 2023, when SpaceX launched the first of its massive Starship rockets, the company has been promising that before too long the towering, stainless steel machine would get to orbit. This morning, on the 14th such launch, it made good on that boast. ET, along with a video of that engine maneuver.
It took just 25 minutes and 17 seconds for the spacecraft to travel from its launch pad in Starbase, Texas, to its circular orbit 170 miles high. There is no overstating how important today’s success was to SpaceX’s—and NASA’s—long-term plans. Starship is pivotal to getting human beings to the moon and Mars, and SpaceX sees it as an ultimate replacement for its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which accounted for nearly 51% of the global total of commercial launches—including 85% of all satellites—in 2025.
Starship’s far larger payload bay can carry a cargo equivalent of nearly five Falcon 9s, ultimately consolidating launches and cutting costs. Starship is a two-part rocket. Standing 407 ft. on the launch pad, it is equipped with 33 first stage engines, which produce 16.7 million lbs. of thrust, making it far and away the most powerful rocket ever successfully launched—easily eclipsing NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and its 8.8 million lbs.
Starship’s first stage represents 236 ft. of the overall stack. Atop it is the 171-ft. spacecraft—also dubbed Starship—a six-engine machine intended for satellite deployment and for crew travel. In 2021, NASA selected Starship as one of two spacecraft that will land astronauts on the moon as early as 2028. (Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, will provide the other.) In 2027, NASA is planning a crewed test of either or both spacecraft in Earth orbit during the mission of Artemis III.
Four minutes into the rocket’s inaugural launch on April 20, 2023, it exploded spectacularly. Concrete and steel debris rained down in a near-400-acre footprint in the surrounding Boca Chica State Park, and a 3.85-acre fire burned south of the launch site. Environmental organizations mounted multiple legal challenges to slow or halt the launches until hazards could be eliminated.
But the flights proceeded apace at a rate of once every three months, none achieving stable orbit—until today. The launch this morning was both imperfect and stripped down to its orbital essentials. On the way up, one of the Starship’s six engines failed to burn properly, requiring the other engines to compensate for the missing thrust to get the ship in orbit.
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