Today Thursday, SpaceX launched its Starship rocket again, in what has been its third test flight. Elon Musk’s company launched Starship around 14:25 (Spanish peninsula time) from its Starbase facilities, located near Boca Chica, Texas.
A complete success finally, Starship managed to reach space, going now further than in previous tests. SpaceX expects the flight to last one hour before ending in an attempt to land in the Indian Ocean.
In a tweet published shortly after the launch, Elon Musk congratulated the company on the milestone achieved today: “Starship has reached orbital velocity! Congratulations to the @SpaceX team!”.
SpaceX conducted two flight tests of Starship in April and in November of last year. Both flights lasted several minutes and gathered valuable information for the company, although they ultimately ended up exploding due to various contingencies.
When developing the Starship, SpaceX has placed special emphasis on an approach based on “what we have learned from previous flights”. The company states that its strategy focuses on the “recursive improvement” of the rocket, in which even test flights with “explosive results” represent progress towards its goal of achieving a fully reusable rocket that can take people to the Moon and Mars.
