By Joey Roulette
STARBASE, Texas, Sept 28 (Reuters) - SpaceX's next-generation Starship rocket reached orbit for the first time on Monday despite having one of its engines down, overcoming this hitch mid-flight to deploy the first batch of new Starlink satellites as Elon Musk's company plans to put the vehicle into routine use starting later this year.
The uncrewed 40-story-tall vehicle, consisting of a Super Heavy booster rocket topped by the main upper-stage Starship vessel, thundered off its launch
pad from SpaceX's Starbase complex along the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville.
The Super Heavy booster lofted the Starship upper stage into space before returning itself to Gulf waters for an engine-controlled splashdown, following hard landings for the booster on two previous missions.
Upon reaching space, one of Starship's three main engines shut down earlier than planned, a development that led SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot to announce on the company's live stream of the mission that the craft would be unable to reach orbit.
"The team has made the call not to commit to orbit," Huot said.
But Huot reversed course minutes later after an update from engineers confirmed that the craft could still attempt an engine firing that would boost it into orbit, which Starship successfully did minutes later.
Once in orbit, Starship began deploying 26 next-generation Starlink satellites one by one at a planned altitude of roughly 269 km (161 miles).
Starship, built to launch SpaceX's Starlink satellites more frequently and carry future NASA missions to the moon, was expected to complete six Earth orbits during a 10-hour voyage — its longest yet — before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile.
Reaching orbit, a primary benchmark for any new rocket designed to deliver payloads to space, has been a long-delayed feat for Starship, which Musk once predicted would be achieved in 2022, to be followed by satellite deployments in 2023.
Since 2023, however, all 13 of Starship's previous test flights have been limited to suborbital space, despite a nearly decade-long development campaign that has cost SpaceX more than $15 billion to date. Musk has said he envisions ultimately flying hundreds or thousands of Starships a year, a launch pace unprecedented in the space industry.
TEST MISSION WITH REAL PAYLOAD
Monday's voyage technically counts as the 14th test flight of Starship. But it nonetheless is carrying the group of new Starlink internet satellites potentially worth millions of dollars, the first orbital payload for Starship.
Analysts estimate Monday's launch of SpaceX's new V3 Starlink satellites equals hundreds of millions of dollars in projected revenue for the company's Starlink unit, based on the network's added customer capacity — underscoring Starship's fundamental role in serving the company's profit nucleus.
According to SpaceX, the V3 Starlink satellites on Monday's mission can handle 10 times more data than their predecessor V2 mini-sats that the company has been launching 20 or 30 at a time on its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets.
Seeking to build out his broadband satellite constellation at a faster pace, Musk wants to launch the higher-capacity V3s in batches of 60 per launch once Starship goes into routine operation, a goal he now aims to reach late this year.
Starship's planned orbital debut also comes three months after SpaceX went public with a record-shattering IPO in June that made it the sixth-biggest US company by value and turned Musk, who founded the company in 2002, into the world's first trillionaire.
Much of SpaceX's market worth and continued investor confidence in the company — valued at $2 trillion as of Friday's close — rides on the success of Starship, which was designed as the world's first fully reusable spacecraft.
The silver-colored, multi-finned rocketship will be key to achieving Musk's ambitions of slashing launch costs, vastly expanding his Starlink business and deploying thousands of orbital AI data centers to space.
Starship is also set to play a pivotal role in NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon's surface for the first time since 1972 and build a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
As a measure of Starship's integral place in SpaceX's corporate future, investors wiped roughly $100 billion off SpaceX's market value after test flight 13 was aborted at the last second in July. The flight ultimately got off the ground five days later.
SURVIVING THE RETURN TO EARTH
One critical objective for Starship's 14th outing will be surviving its return flight to Earth, starting with the deorbital firing of one Raptor engine while in space and precisely angling the vehicle for atmospheric re-entry.
The spacecraft's final controlled descent is designed to culminate with a thruster maneuver to flip the vehicle vertically so that it hits the sea in a nose-up position. While future missions call for Starship to execute a similar touchdown on land back in Texas, no recovery of the spacecraft is planned for its latest flight, contrary to Musk's previous hopes.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Christian Plumb and Will Dunham)
