SpaceX's Starship deployed upgraded Starlink satellites and returned to Earth largely unscathed, advancing Elon Musk's IPO-fueled plans to scale his dominant rocket business into an artificial intelligence and satellite communications empire.
Starship is central to Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk's ambitions to expand SpaceX's Starlink network, send humans to the moon and beyond and put data centers in space. But it has faced an unstable development path marred by explosive setbacks, malfunctions and delays.
Starship, perched atop its Super Heavy booster, lifted off from the company's Starbase facility in South Texas at 5:51 p.m. local time on Friday. The company executed a largely successful test, completing its major objectives although suffering a small glitch as its booster returned for a water landing after launch.
Around six minutes into the flight, with Starship hurtling to space, the Super Heavy booster landed off the Gulf of Mexico but didn't light all of its engines as planned, leading to a faster-than-expected splashdown.
Still, it marked an improvement from the company's last flight in which the booster spun out of control and one of its engines shut down early.
The company again opted to skip the dramatic midair catch they nailed during a 2024 mission, a feat that is key to the rocket's rapid reusability.
While in space, Starship deployed 20 Starlink satellites, as employees chanted “USA, USA.” The satellites successfully communicated with the broader network and downloaded data, the company said later.
Starship then plunged through Earth's atmosphere before landing in the Indian Ocean with a controlled and seemingly sluggish bellyflop. It then promptly erupted into flames.
“This is the softest splashdown we have ever had with the Starship there in the Indian Ocean,” Dan Huot, communications manager at SpaceX, said on a livestream.
SpaceX is betting its future on the vehicle, having spent more than $15 billion on its development. Musk has predicted Starship will be fully reusable — similar to a commercial jetliner — before the end of the year.
The company has stopped taking reservations from satellite operators for dedicated rides to orbit beyond 2028 on its workhorse Falcon rockets, underscoring the need to make Starship work as advertised, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
Read More: SpaceX's Money-Losing Rockets Are Biggest Asset in AI Dream
A selloff of SpaceX's shares partly fueled by earlier mission delays demonstrates how certain investors are sensitive to the type of risks that are baked into SpaceX's fly-fail-fix development strategy. Shares closed 3% lower on Friday in regular US trading and are down about 25% over the last month — well below their $135 IPO price.
SpaceX also holds roughly $4 billion worth of NASA contracts for Starship to land astronauts on the moon as soon as 2028. To do so, SpaceX will have to refuel the vehicle in space, launch it a dozen times or more in a row and ensure it's safe to hold humans — a demanding list of tasks for a vehicle which has yet to complete a full orbital mission.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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