In a highly anticipated but brief test flight from the Texas Gulf Coast, Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempted to launch the company’s next-generation Starship spacecraft atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket for the first time on Thursday.
The company’s Starbase launch pad east of Brownsville, Texas, was making final preparations for a liftoff three days after an earlier launch attempt was aborted owing to a frozen pressurisation valve towards the conclusion of the countdown.
Barring further show-stoppers on Thursday, the two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, was due to blast off between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. EDT (1330 to 1430 GMT) on a planned 90-minute debut flight into space, just shy of Earth orbit.
Getting the newly combined Starship and booster rocket off the ground for the first time would represent a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending humans back to the moon and ultimately on to Mars – playing a pivotal role in NASA’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight program, Artemis.
A successful flight would instantly rank the Starship system as the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth.
Both the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Starship spacecraft are intended to be reusable parts that may return to Earth for soft landings, a procedure that has become commonplace in hundreds of missions for SpaceX’s more compact Falcon 9 orbital-class rocket.
Nevertheless, neither stage from the launch on Thursday would be recovered. Instead, both components will make a splashdown into the water to end their first trip into space. Separating from the upper stage, which will splash down in the Pacific Ocean after completing nearly one full Earth orbit, the lower stage will land in the Gulf of Mexico.
The booster rocket has never taken off, despite five sub-space test flights by Starship cruise vessel prototypes in recent years to heights of 6 miles (10 km).
SpaceX tested the Super Heavy in February by firing 31 of its 33 engines for around 10 seconds while it was attached vertically on a platform.
The Federal Aviation Administration last Friday granted a license for the first test flight of the fully stacked rocket system, clearing a final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.
The SpaceX announcement this week on Twitter that it planned a second launch attempt on Thursday, April 20, after the first was scrubbed, amused many of Musk’s fans and detractors alike.
The tweet set off a flurry of jokes on the social media platform making reference to 4/20 as a date widely associated with cannabis culture, and to the notoriety Musk gained in 2018 for smoking marijuana on a live web show.
Musk, who purchased Twitter last year for $44 billion, is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX. He also is chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla Inc (TSLA.O).
If all goes as planned on Thursday, the Starship will ascend on a flight most of the way around the Earth before it re-enters the atmosphere and free-falls into the Pacific at supersonic speed, about 60 miles off the coast of the northern Hawaiian islands.
After separating from the Starship, the Super Heavy booster is expected to execute the beginnings of a controlled return flight before plunging into the Gulf.
As designed, the Starship rocket is nearly two times more powerful than NASA’s own Space Launch System (SLS), which made its first uncrewed flight to orbit in November, sending a NASA cruise vessel called Orion on a 10-day voyage around the moon and back.