SpaceX Starship reaches Earth orbit for the first time

SpaceX’s Starship rocket reached Earth orbit for the first time — though not without some drama along the way.

The company’s mega-rocket launched into space from South Texas early Monday morning and ticked all the early boxes of its flight. But shortly after the upper stage Ship separated, it lost one of its six Raptor engines. While SpaceX can still reach orbit if it loses an engine, the company initially called off the attempt, before reversing course just a few minutes later.

Reaching orbit is a critical milestone that could let the company start using the mega-rocket for regular commercial missions and inch closer to the goal of making it fully reusable. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is orienting the entire company around Starship. It’s central to the company’s plans to perform moon missions for NASA, and far-out ideas like putting AI data center satellites in space.

SpaceX planned to have the Starship upper stage orbit the Earth six times over the next nine hours while deploying 26 third-generation Starlinks into its constellation of internet satellites. It’s not immediately clear if any of that plan changed with the delayed entry into Earth orbit.

The company was also able to make progress on returning the Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket back to the launchpad. After separating from the upper stage of Starship a few minutes into the flight, the booster returned to the Gulf coast and performed a simulated landing over the water. It was the cleanest simulated landing SpaceX has performed with the V3 version of Starship, which it started testing in May.

This story is developing…