Starship finally flew, and this time the Starlink satellites were real
On its 13th test flight Starship deployed 20 genuine Starlink V3 satellites and settled gently into the Indian Ocean. The booster had a rougher time of it.
After two scrubbed attempts, the largest rocket ever built finally left Starbase in south Texas on Friday. And Starship’s 13th test flight came with the detail that had been missing all along: there were real satellites inside it.
What did Starship carry this time?
Twenty third-generation Starlink satellites, the V3s, and all of them deployed smoothly. That sounds like a footnote and is not one. Earlier flights carried mass simulators, blocks with the right weight and no function whatsoever. This was the first time Starship put working Starlink satellites into space, which is, after all, the job the rocket was built to do.
Did everything go to plan?
Not quite, and that is where it gets interesting. The upper stage had a near-flawless return, settling into the Indian Ocean in what SpaceX called its softest splashdown yet. The vehicle stayed intact, tipped over to float belly-up and kept transmitting telemetry from the water.
The Super Heavy booster fared less well. There was no attempt to catch it with the launch tower; the target was a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. But not all the Raptor engines needed for the landing burn lit, and the booster hit the water faster than intended.
Why did this flight take so long to happen?
Because SpaceX had already aborted twice. The first time, four of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite, forcing extra ground testing and several engine swaps. The second time it was Tropical Storm Bertha, which brought heavy cloud over south Texas and would have ruined the imagery the company needed to study the heat shield during ascent.
The result is both a success and a work in progress, which is roughly how experimental programmes always look. Starship sits at the centre of SpaceX’s plans for next-generation satellites and NASA’s lunar missions, and a rocket that now delivers real payloads is a good deal closer to that than it was a month ago. The specifications live on SpaceX’s official site.
Image: Forest Katsch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
