The richest man in the world dreamed that now, in the fall of 2026, he would be sending a flotilla of Starships to Mars. He made that firm promise two years ago. But the reality of the space race is always slower than the plans and, this Monday, Elon Musk has finally taken his first step to visit other worlds: putting the ship destined for that space adventure into orbit around the Earth.
The Starship reached this milestone for the first time 25 minutes after its takeoff from the Starbase spaceport on the coast of Texas (USA), carried out at 2:49 p.m., Spanish peninsular time, when the rocket took off after turning on its 33 engines of its Super Heavy lower booster, which gently returned to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, about eight minutes after launch. However, after separating from that first stage of the rocket, the upper part—the Starship—continued its ascent to exit into space, but one of its six engines shut down. The SpaceX teams at the control base began to review the cause of this unforeseen event and, despite this, at 3:11 p.m. they decided to go ahead with the orbital insertion maneuver. It has been more than 10 minutes of suspense.
The fourteenth flight of the largest spacecraft in history is its first operational mission, with practical use, after a long and bumpy road of testing that began in April 2023. Its objective is to deploy 26 third-generation Starlink satellites, shortly after entering orbit, releasing them into space with a mechanism reminiscent of a gigantic Pez candy dispenser. They are the first of a new megaconstellation of up to 100,000 devices with which SpaceX, Musk's space company, wants to expand its satellite internet service by directly providing coverage to mobile phones around the world (and thus threatening astronomical planetary defense systems).
If it finally manages to reach orbit, the colossal ship, 52 meters high and nine meters in diameter, aspires to complete six revolutions around the Earth at an altitude of 275 kilometers, during almost 10 hours of space flight that will conclude—already past midnight in peninsular Spain—with a soft splashdown in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Chile. If achieved, it will be a crucial advance for NASA's Artemis 3 mission to meet its plans to take off in mid-2027; and that, in this way, the United States can keep up with China in the race to return astronauts to the Moon before 2030.
Until now, Starship had never attempted to orbit Earth. According to a recent message from Musk on his social network X, “we could have tried it much earlier, but we wanted to optimize security.” The truth is that, as a precaution, this Monday's flight takes off from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico like the previous ones: with an initial design of a suborbital flight, which catapults the ship to go out into space and then continue on a parabolic trajectory until it falls into the Indian Ocean, west of Australia. As always, when the Starship has detached itself from its gigantic booster — called Super Heavy, it is the rocket that initiates the launch — it will continue to ascend until after eight minutes it turns off its engines. Then, in the mission control center, a frantic check of hundreds of sensors will begin to determine whether or not the ship is ready to take the next steps: first insert itself into the correct Earth orbit (shortly after 3:00 p.m., Spanish peninsular time) and, more importantly, then deorbit in an operation that, if it fails, can leave that space mass spinning until it falls in an uncontrolled manner on the Earth's surface.
The key to performing those two maneuvers is to restart the ship's engines in space and make them work with precision. Until now, Starship had only turned them back on for a few moments in its latest tests, to demonstrate that it was possible to attempt insertion and deorbiting. In addition to the complexity of operating all the propulsion mechanisms in a vacuum, there is that of controlling the exact trajectory of a spacecraft much larger and heavier than any other ever built. Compared to the 52-meter height of Starship, which can weigh more than a thousand tons, the Orion spacecraft with which the crew of the Artemis 2 mission surrounded the Moon measures only eight meters high and weighed 35 tons upon reaching orbit. In the entire history of the space race, only NASA's retired space shuttles, 37 meters long, have come close to the dimensions of the Starship, but not its weight.
Faced with an unprecedented orbital flight, due to the size of the ship, SpaceX has announced that it will carry out two intermediate checks throughout a mission designed to last a maximum of almost 10 hours. First, after an hour in orbit and also at seven hours, Musk's space company plans to check if the Starship has its systems in order to continue forward. If not, they will proceed to lower it ahead of time. Both in these two cases of possible premature abortion of the mission and if it reaches its planned limit of six orbits, the final destination is a controlled landing, planned over the waters of the Pacific Ocean, west of Chile.
