After a series of failures during recent test flights, SpaceX’s massive Starship had a smooth ride for Tuesday’s blast-off, and successfully deployed some fake satellites.
SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket racked up some much-needed successes on its 10th test flight, hitting key test objectives and breaking a streak of failures that bedeviled the spaceship this year.
The silver and black two-stage rocket, which stands about 400 feet tall, blasted off from the SpaceX facility in south Texas near Boca Chica Beach right when the launch window opened at 7:30 pm ET on Tuesday evening.
The largest and most powerful rocket ever built, Starship is an essential part of NASA’s effort to return astronauts to the moon, and of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s goal of colonizing Mars.
SpaceX also wants to use Starship to deploy a huge number of its Starlink satellites. But on the last test flight the ship’s payload bay door failed to open.
This time, the door opened and SpaceX workers on the ground could be heard cheering on a live webcast as video beamed back the view from inside of Starship’s upper stage. The video showed a metal device, similar to a huge PEZ dispenser, ratcheting up and ejecting eight dummy satellites out the door and into space.
