Dramatic video from an onboard camera showed fiery debris flying off the spaceship as it descended over the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. Despite losing many tiles and sustaining a damaged flap, the Starship held together and survived atmospheric reentry, achieving a soft landing in the ocean.
"Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X, calling it a great day for humanity's future as a spacefaring civilization.
The powerful rocket launched from SpaceX's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:50 am (1250 GMT) and soared to space, coasting halfway across the globe in a journey lasting around an hour and five minutes. Starship's fully reusable design is critical for Musk's vision of colonizing Mars and making humankind a multiplanetary species. NASA has also contracted a modified version to land astronauts on the Moon under the Artemis program later this decade.
This success follows three previous test flights that ended in destruction, all part of SpaceX's rapid trial-and-error approach. "The payload for these flight tests is data," SpaceX stated on X.
During the last test in March, the spaceship flew for 49 minutes before being lost in the atmosphere at nearly 17,000 mph. Since then, SpaceX made several software and hardware upgrades.
Seven minutes after liftoff, the first stage booster, Super Heavy, achieved an upright splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, receiving massive applause from engineers at mission control in Hawthorne, California. The cheers grew even louder as the upper stage glowed red, generating a plasma field from atmospheric friction. Despite a camera lens crack from debris, Starship nailed the landing.
"Congratulations SpaceX on Starship's successful test flight this morning!" NASA chief Bill Nelson wrote on X, highlighting the progress toward returning humanity to the Moon through Artemis and looking onward to Mars.
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