SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian Ocean.
The rocket’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines roared to life at 6:23 pm CDT (7:23 pm EDT; 23:23 UTC), throttling up to generate some 16.7 million pounds of thrust, by a large measure more powerful than any rocket before Starship. Moments later, the 404-foot-tall (123-meter) rocket began a vertical climb away from SpaceX’s test site in Starbase, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.
From then on, the rocket executed its flight plan like clockwork. This was arguably SpaceX’s