SpaceX's Starship goes orbital, deploying first next-gen Starlinks

The company’s flight control team had a few minutes to decide whether to proceed with the next phase of the flight: a restart of one of Starship’s Raptor engines to add the final bit of speed required to reach orbital velocity. For a brief period, it appeared as if SpaceX was going to forego the orbital flight and allow Starship to continue coasting toward a reentry over the Indian Ocean, as it had done many times before. The question of what to do next centered on the performance of the rocket’s Raptor engines. One of the six Raptors on Starship shut down prematurely during its ascent burn, and the five others burned longer to compensate for the malfunction. Less of a worry for Starship’s orbital flight, but still a concern for future launches, was the apparent failure of two of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster—one during launch and another during the booster’s return maneuvers. Dan Huot, a SpaceX commentator providing live updates on the company’s webcast of Monday’s flight, initially reported that mission managers were going to abort the orbit insertion burn. Officials ultimately decided to proceed. The failed Raptor engine was not the same one that needed to fire to place the rocket into low-Earth orbit and steer it toward reentry and splashdown at the end of the flight. The Raptor engine selected for the insertion burn performed flawlessly, reigniting for 19 seconds to give Starship the nudge it needed to overcome the pull of Earth’s gravity. The maneuver added approximately 204 mph to Starship’s speed, a little more than 1 percent of the rocket’s overall velocity, to reach a stable orbit at an altitude of about 171 miles (276 kilometers). Achieving orbit meant SpaceX could continue with the next phase of the mission. This involved the first deployment of commercial-grade Starlink V3 satellites for the company’s global broadband network. SpaceX launched a batch of Starlink V3s on the previous Starship flight in July, but that mission was suborbital, and the satellites quickly burned up as they fell back into the atmosphere. The Starlink V3s will bring significant upgrades to the Starlink constellation. The satellites can only launch on Starship. They’re too large to fit inside the payload fairing of the Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX has used to deploy more than 12,000 Starlinks since 2019. The Starlink V3s, each weighing about 2 metric tons (4,400 pounds) at launch, are fitted with larger power-generating solar arrays and improved antennas. The changes enable each Starlink V3 platform to add 1 Tbps of capacity to the Starlink network, 10 times more than the older satellites launching on Falcon 9, according to SpaceX. There were 26 Starlink satellites aboard Monday’s launch. Future Starships could deliver up to 60 Starlink V3s to orbit on a single flight. On its website, SpaceX wrote that Starlink V3s will “greatly expand the network’s capacity and user speeds.” Upgraded Starlink satellites will also improve the network’s performance for direct-to-device connectivity. Future Starlink V3s could also be used for SpaceX’s Starshield service for the US military. SpaceX reported that its satellite team established contact with all 26 Starlink V3s after separating from Starship. The satellites launched Monday were initially deployed into a low-inclination orbit, ranging about 30 degrees north and south of the equator, due to strict range safety rules restricting overflight of populated areas during launch. SpaceX is expected to launch Starship into higher-inclination orbits as it gains flight experience with Starship and debuts new launch pads in Florida and Louisiana. Soon after completing the satellite deployment sequence, SpaceX officials decided to bring Starship home earlier than planned, giving up on a chance to test the vehicle’s long-duration endurance in orbit. “Out of an abundance of caution given the engine issue experienced during ascent, the flight control team decided to limit the duration spent on orbit and proceeded with de-orbiting Starship to a splashdown location in the northern Pacific Ocean,” SpaceX wrote in a recap of Monday’s test flight. “This area was one of two pre-coordinated landing zones identified before launch that was cleared of sea and air traffic.” The de-orbit burn went off without a hitch, and Starship plunged back into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, guiding itself toward a splashdown north of Hawaii, one of multiple backup return sites mapped out in advance of Monday’s flight. The reentry was uneventful, and Starship’s heat shield appeared to hold up well against temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as the vehicle streaked over the remote Pacific. “Most importantly, Starship made it to orbit,” Huot said after splashdown. “We did our first ever orbital insertion burn. We kept the drama up a little bit as we were going through that coast time making sure everything was good. We were only going do all this stuff today if we were really, really sure that those sea level engines on Starship were going to perform because we needed to do that de-orbit burn. “We were able to get there,” Huot said. “We got on orbit. Teams continued to look at it. We were going to get the data that we wanted, so we made the call due to this earlier reentry to [near] Hawaii.”