The company achieved a key set of ambitious goals on the fourth test flight of a vehicle that is central to Elon Musk’s vision of sending people to Mars.
SpaceX’s launch of its mammoth Starship rocket on Thursday accomplished a set of ambitious goals that Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, had set out before the test flight, the fourth.
Lifting off from SpaceX’s launchpad at 7:50 a.m. in South Texas, near Brownsville, Starship rumbled into the sky.
After it dropped away from the upper stage, the booster was able to gently set down in the Gulf of Mexico while the second-stage spacecraft traveled halfway around the world, survived the searing temperatures of re-entering the atmosphere and also made a controlled splashdown, in the Indian Ocean.
The flight was not flawless, and tough technical hurdles remain. The successes, surpassing what was accomplished during the previous test flight in March, offered optimism that Mr. Musk can pull off his vision of a rocket that is the biggest and most powerful ever and yet entirely reusable.
The outcome also helps validate the company’s break-it-then-fix-it approach to engineering, with steady progress since the first test launch in April last year when the rocket had to be deliberately destroyed when it flew off course.
“They are showing a capability to make progress more rapidly than we may have thought they’d been able to make,” said Daniel L. Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a professional society for engineers. “They’ve got a team that knows what they’re doing, has the capability is willing to learn, and just as importantly, is not beholden to past assumptions.”
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