As in August, Starship placed eight simulated satellites into orbit. NASA intends to send astronauts to the Moon by the end of the decade, but it won’t be able to do so without Starship.
Aerospace company SpaceX, owned by tycoon Elon Musk, completed the 11th launch test of the Starship rocket, which covered half the diameter of the planet and simulated the launch of satellites.
Starship – the largest and most powerful rocket ever built – took flight into the night sky on Monday at 6pm:25 (00:25 today in Lisbon), from the southern tip of Texas in the southern United States.
The booster detached and made a controlled entry into the Gulf of Mexico, as planned, with the spacecraft gliding through space before descending into the Indian Ocean, and was not recovered.
The rocket is composed of the Super Heavy propellant and the Starship spacecraft, and SpaceX’s objective is find the key so that both parts can be reused in future missions and thus reduce costs in efforts to return to the Moon and reach Mars.
The three previous tests had also ended with the loss of Starship, so SpaceX made modifications, removing a significant number of parts from the vehicle to test the limits of vulnerable areas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Hey, welcome back to Earth, Starship,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot announced as employees applauded. “What a day!” he added.
Just like in August, Starship placed eight simulated satellites into orbit.
The North American space agency NASA intends to send astronauts to the Moon by the end of the decade, but it will not be able to do so without Starship, the 123 meter long reusable vehicle intended to take them to the lunar surface and back to orbit.
NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy praised Starftship’s progress.
“Another big step towards taking North Americans to the south pole of the Moon”, he said, on the social network X, also owned by Elon Musk.
“It is highly unlikely that we will reach the Moon before China”
In theory, SpaceX should carry out flights to Mars from 2026 and allow Americans to return to the Moon in 2027, but these deadlines seem increasingly difficult to meet, with “thousands of technical challenges” still to be overcome, Musk himself admitted.
“We are about to lose the Moon,” warned three former senior NASA officials in an opinion piece published in SpaceNews in September, while a panel of independent experts estimated that, at this rate, the modified version of Starship to serve as a lunar lander could be years behind schedule.
“It is highly unlikely that we will reach the Moon before China,” former NASA head Jim Bridenstine told a Senate committee, the upper house of the US parliament, urging Washington to develop a Plan B.
The risks are even greater, given that President Donald Trump openly refers to “a second space race”, in reference to the dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War (1947-1991).
