SpaceX’s giant Mars rocket completes nearly flawless test flight

A rear-facing image provided by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS from the Perseverance Mars rover as it drives up toward the rim of the planet’s Jezero Crater, Nov. 11, 2024. After several disappointing failures, SpaceX’s Starship — the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars — made it all the way up to space and all the way back down to Earth during a 10th test flight Tuesday night. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS via The New York Times)

By Kenneth Chang

After several disappointing failures, SpaceX’s Starship — the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars — made it all the way up to space and all the way back down to Earth during a 10th test flight Tuesday night.

The largely successful mission was likely a relief to both SpaceX and NASA, suggesting that the development program is back on track. NASA is counting on Starship as the lander to put its astronauts on the moon in the coming years.

“They appeared to achieve all of their test objectives,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said in an interview. “I think this puts SpaceX back on track.”

On the social platform X, Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX and said it was a great day for NASA and its commercial partners.

The flight could, at least for now, silence some critics of Musk and SpaceX who suggested that the Starship project was suffering from serious engineering flaws.

Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Even more ambitiously, Musk says it will be fully reusable, with both stages returning to the launch site and caught by giant mechanical arms.

If SpaceX can pull off this vision, Starship could revolutionize the space industry, enabling the launching of bigger and heavier payloads at much lower costs.

The 400-foot-tall vehicle consists of an upper-stage spacecraft, the Starship, and a powerful booster stage, with 33 engines, known as the Super Heavy.

SpaceX has a “break it and fix it” philosophy of development, unlike the traditional approach of NASA and older aerospace companies that attempt to anticipate all of the engineering problems before a test flight. That leads to more failures, but SpaceX has shown it can be faster and more efficient.

But the seventh, eight and ninth test flights were disappointing, because the upper-stage Starship failed at an earlier part of the flight than on the fifth and sixth test flights, which survived reentry and simulated a landing over the Indian Ocean.

On the 10th flight, the booster successfully simulated a soft landing over the Gulf of Mexico, and the upper stage made it all the way to the Indian Ocean. While in space, the upper stage deployed eight dummy prototypes of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink internet satellites, successfully testing a Pez dispenserlike apparatus to push each one into space.

Video coverage of the reentry indicated that the spacecraft’s heat shield was more effective at keeping Starship’s structure intact as it belly-flopped through the atmosphere.

Harrison noted that some problems did occur along the way, including the shutdown of one of the booster’s 33 engines. The booster’s other engines were able to compensate and the mission continued.

During the upper stage’s reentry into the atmosphere, the rear flaps used for controlling the vehicle were partially burned through. A part of the aft portion of the spacecraft also appeared to explode along the way.

“They’ll have to do some work there,” Harrison said. “But even with that, it maintained perfect control and was able to do the splashdown as intended.”

The mission ended with the spacecraft flipping to a vertical orientation and simulating a landing. It then toppled over into the waters of the Indian Ocean. A camera on a buoy that SpaceX had placed in the water there captured Starship’s final moments as the ship exploded.

That is not a surprising fate when a structure as tall as a 17-story building that contains leftover methane fuel topples over. The Super Heavy booster similarly exploded in the Gulf of Mexico after its simulated landing. Each blast was anticipated by SpaceX’s flight planners.

SpaceX had hoped to accomplish most of the objectives of Tuesday’s launch during the test flights earlier this year.

“So maybe they’re six months behind where they wanted to be,” Harrison said. “If they can get another test flight within six weeks or so, they can start to catch up, especially if they have more successes like this.”

Then Musk’s company can tackle other technical challenges that it will have to overcome in order to reach the moon and Mars.

On Monday night, Musk said during SpaceX’s coverage of a launch attempt that he hoped the company would demonstrate next year the ability to transfer propellants between two Starships while in orbit.

Without refueling, a Starship can only reach low-Earth orbit. Before heading to more distant destinations, its tanks will have be refilled with liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants carried by multiple additional Starship launches. SpaceX therefore has to also demonstrate the capability to launch multiple Starships in quick succession.

Last year, Musk said that SpaceX would launch the first Starships to Mars, without any people aboard, in 2026. More recently, he said that is still the goal but is less confident that it is achievable.

Then there is SpaceX’s contract to land NASA astronauts to the moon.

Artemis III, the mission that is to take two astronauts to the lunar surface in the south polar region, is scheduled for late 2027. A version of Starship is to be used as the lander, to take the astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.

With the delays in Starship’s development, Artemis III will almost certainly not launch until 2028 or later.

As NASA’s moon efforts slip into the future, China is making steady progress with its program to land its astronauts there before 2030. It announced this month that it had successfully tested a lunar lander.

Even after Tuesday’s successful test flight, Harrison said he thought there was a greater than 50/50 chance that China would reach the moon before NASA did with Artemis III. If that happens, “it’s not the end of the world,” he said. “It is more of a psychological kind of hit than anything.”

China’s steady, methodical pace could lead to it establishing a moon base first as well.

But for one night at least, Harrison had fun watching SpaceX succeed instead of stumble. He is looking forward to an upcoming test flight when the upper-stage spacecraft is to return to the Texas launch site and be caught by the launch tower.

Harrison said he wanted to see how frequently SpaceX can launch Starship for the next test flights. If it is every six weeks or so, “They can get this back on schedule,” he said.

But if two to three months pass between launches, Harrison warned, “that’s really going to grind things to a halt in terms of Artemis III.”