The largest and most powerful rocket built by SpaceX was launched at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas on August 27. It had previously been delayed due to a ground systems issue on August 24.
“Great work by the SpaceX team,” confirmed Musk on Twitter (X).
Starship is the collective name for the SpaceX Super Heavy booster rocket and Starship spacecraft, it’s hoped that the combination will carry astronauts and cargo to the moon and Mars in future.
Starship spacecraft is carried by the stainless steel, reusable Super Heavy booster with 33 Raptor engines.
Upon reaching space, the craft deployed a number of Starlink simulators and relit one of its six engines to return to Earth with a landing burn, splash and explosion in the Indian Ocean.
Earlier this year, SpaceX was noticeably closing in on launching Starship 25 times a year after passing a crucial FAA environmental assessment.
The latest clearance, delivered in a 53-page report, said increasing the number of launches would not “significantly impact the quality of the human environment”.
It added that as a condition of the clearance, SpaceX must perform community duties to offset its environmental impact, including hosting quarterly beach clean-ups and donating to environmental organisations.
The decision will be welcomed by the Elon Musk-founded company, but will likely draw criticism from the aviation industry, which has previously had to ground flights when previous Starship prototypes have exploded.
During Starship’s eighth, an upper stage broke apart, causing debris to rain down on Earth.
The incident, later blamed on an “energetic event” in the vehicle’s rear, led to airports in Florida halting flights for 80 minutes as fragments of Starship streaked through the sky like fireworks.
The company’s founder, Elon Musk, called the failure a “minor setback” despite it closely mirroring the result of the previous blast-off in January.
“Rockets are hard. Not easy, making life multi-planetary,” Musk said. “But we learnt a good amount in building the new ship design and the flight.”
Starship’s eighth flight test lifted off from Starbase in Texas on Thursday, 6 March.
Roughly three minutes into the flight, the Super Heavy booster separated from its upper stage before returning to its launch pad to be caught for the second time in a row.
Starship continued onwards on its planned journey to space before an incident led to the loss of several Raptor engines.
Footage from the livestream showed the upper stage spinning before communication was lost nine minutes and 30 seconds after lift-off.
The explosion led to four airports – Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Orlando – issuing a ground stop while vehicle fragments could reportedly be seen hurtling through the sky as far away as the Caribbean and Pennsylvania.
Afterwards, SpaceX doubled down on its philosophy that failures during test flights are part of its natural development cycle.
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability,” it said.
“We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”
Starship testing began in April 2023 when the spacecraft failed to reach orbit, but culminated in the first stage incredibly returning to the original launch pad and being caught by mechanical arms in October last year.