The two stages of the rocket successfully separated a few minutes after liftoff using the important “hot staging” method. This is when the Starship’s Raptor engines started while still linked to the Super Heavy booster.
After that, the Super Heavy booster, which was powered by 33 Raptor engines and was the first stage of the launch system, started its planned fall. It successfully re-entered the atmosphere in a controlled way and did a landing burn experiment as it “boosted back” into its splashdown zone in the Gulf of Mexico (which President Donald Trump commonly calls the Gulf of America). The booster made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf, but there was a loud explosion and no recovery, which was in line with the test goals.
The Indian Ocean is the target of the Starship Upper Stage.
During its journey, the Starship top stage deployed eight fake satellites that looked like SpaceX’s Starlinks. The main goal was to practice how to land in the future:
Starship did a bunch of tests while it was coming back down over the Indian Ocean. These included a dynamic banking maneuver and subsonic guiding algorithms. These were all to get ready for future landings back at the Starbase launch site.
As predicted, the Starship upper stage landed in the Indian Ocean about an hour after launch.
The successful flight, which came after a series of explosive failures in earlier testing, was seen as a big win for the program. Sean Duffy, who is currently in charge of NASA, complimented the development on X and called the mission “Another major step toward landing Americans on the moon’s south pole.”
Starship is meant to be a transportation system that can be used again and over again. It can carry a huge load of 100 to 150 tons into orbit, which makes it perfect for NASA’s needs for the Human Landing System (HLS) on future Artemis lunar missions.