US airspace giant SpaceX on Monday launched its Starship spacecraft into orbit for the first. The firm hopes the Starship can complete six full laps around Earth in order to prove its readiness for NASA’s Artemis moon program.
“Starship is orbital,” Mission Control announced to cheers. The Launch took place at Starbase, Texas.
The laps were supposed to last around 10 hours, ending with a Pacific splashdown near Chile.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful spacecraft ever built. It was loaded with 26 of the latest and most advanced Starlink satellites, which were released one by one, to join the 11,000 older models already providing internet service.
SpaceX began flying Starship in 2023 and the program has seen its successes and failures of successive tests. Technical challenges remain before Starship can fulfill its mandates, such as conduct commercial flights, deploy data centers in orbit or reach the Moon or the Red Planet.
This is a developing story, more details to come…
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