SpaceX launched its 11th test flight of the powerful Starship and Super Heavy rocket from its Texas site Starbase on Monday as it moved ahead in its goals to achieve an operational rocket that could eventually launch from Florida.<\/p>\n
Liftoff came at 7:23 p.m. EDT, looking for a repeat of the successful 10th test flight<\/a> in August and avoiding the calamities of its explosive test flights<\/a> earlier in the year. Clear skies meant the streaking upper stage was visible from Florida.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the first of two launches for SpaceX on Monday night, with a Cape Canaveral mission<\/a> set for liftoff at 9:58 p.m.<\/p>\n For the second time, SpaceX used a Super Heavy booster that had previously been flown, having been one of three times the company successfully captured the booster back at the launch site using the launch tower\u2019s \u201cchopsticks.\u201d This booster flew on Flight 8 in March<\/a> The first-ever Super Heavy booster catch came a year ago in October 2024<\/a>.<\/p>\n For this flight, though, there was no retry to capture back at the tower, with the booster instead making a controlled descent with an ultimate water landing in the Gulf. The company reused 24 of the 33 Raptor engines on the booster, and adjusted its landing burn to mimic the burn planned for the next generation of Super Heavy booster.<\/p>\n This is the final flight of what SpaceX has been calling version 2 of Starship and Super Heavy, and final launch from pad 1 at Starbase.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have liftoff. Go Super Heavy. Go Starship. Thanks for all the historic flights, pad one,\u201d said flight director Ty Huntington.<\/p>\n The upper Starship stage is doing the same flight plan as previous attempts, aiming for a suborbital trip more than halfway around the Earth with a controlled water landing in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia.<\/p>\n Once again, SpaceX will try to deploy some payloads that simulate the size of future Starlink satellites. The simulators will follow the upper stage\u2019s trajectory and burn up on reentry or fall into the Indian Ocean. The company will also attempt again a relight of one of the six Raptor engines midflight.<\/p>\n \u201cThe flight test includes several experiments and operational changes focused on enabling Starship\u2019s upper stage to return to the launch site on future flights,\u201d the company posted on its website. \u201cFor reentry, tiles have been removed from Starship to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n Starship is the most powerful rocket to ever make it to space, with nearly 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which is nearly double the power of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket<\/a> used on Artemis missions.<\/p>\n Future test flights aim to bring the Starship upper stage back to Texas for a controlled landing that would recover the vehicle, part of the company\u2019s plans for a fully reusable rocket.<\/p>\n The company is in the midst of building out launch sites<\/a> at both Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station that could handle as many as 120 launches a year, if approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. Construction of a Starship manufacturing site at KSC called the \u201cGigabay\u201d is underway, part of a $1.8 billion infrastructure<\/a> project to support Space Coast launches.<\/p>\n