SpaceX launches Starship rocket on third test flight

SpaceX just shared on the social media platform X that a propellant transfer demo planned for this flight is finished.

If successful, it's yet another massive win for the company.

The goal is to move some of the propellant on board the Starship vehicle from one tank to another, according to a December email from NASA explaining the test.

SpaceX engineers designed that demo to begin hashing out how Starship will be refueled on future missions while it’s in orbit. It could take more than a dozen refueling flights to get Starship to the moon.

NASA previously told CNN that SpaceX could receive more than $50 million for completing this test.

The SpaceX livestream is turning some heads with its surprising choice in music, which is entertaining listeners as the Starship spacecraft coasts through space before reigniting its engines.

Currently, the song is "Caribbean Cruise" by Werner Tautz.

Thomas Zurbuchen, the former associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, chimed in about the tunes.

SpaceX — and NASA — have huge goals for this rocket.

NASA wants to use Starship to carry out the final leg of the journey to put astronauts back on the moon for the first time in five decades as part of its Artemis program. The space agency gave SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract in 2021 to get the job done, and it inked another $1 billion deal after that.

Starship is also the linchpin of SpaceX's goal of getting humans to Mars. The company's founding purpose is to make humans a multi-planetary species, sending them to live on other planets in case Earth becomes unsuitable for life.

That task would require a truly massive rocket.

Whether that goal is feasible — economically, technologically and politically — remains to be seen. But Musk and SpaceX have garnered a diehard fanbase rallied around the idea.

Other items on the agenda for Starship:

The Starship spacecraft made it through its entire engine burn, shutting down its engines about 9 minutes into flight.

The vehicle is traveling at speeds roughly fast enough to enter orbit — but it's not aiming for orbit today. It's just on a flight test.

This marks a massive milestone and is undoubtedly a win for SpaceX, which had lost both the spacecraft and rocket booster by this point on both prior test flights.

"We're farther than we've ever been before," Dan Huot, a SpaceX communications manager said.

The Super Heavy booster just hit the water. Not many of its engines were firing when it hit the water.

SpaceX said it's working to get a shot of how things went down. This is farther into flight than a Super Heavy booster has previously made it.

On the last two flights, Super Heavy was destroyed mid-air before it had a chance to try out landing maneuvers.

The Super Heavy booster that provided the initial thrust of power at liftoff — sending deafening waves of noise across the South Texas launch site — is now heading back for a (hopefully) controlled landing in the ocean.

The Starship spacecraft, meanwhile, is using its own engines to continue propelling itself faster.

The booster will be discarded in the ocean, but SpaceX is hoping to test out some maneuvers on this flight to pave the way for recovering the booster in the future.

The overall goal is to eventually develop a rocket system that can be entirely reused — from top to bottom.

The Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket booster just made it through a crucial moment in the mission: stage separation.

That's when Super Heavy shut down its engines, as the rocket booster has now burned through most of its fuel.

Starship then ignited its own engines and thrust itself away from the Super Heavy booster in a maneuver SpaceX calls "hot staging."

Hot staging is essentially pushing the Starship booster away from Super Heavy by way of blunt force trauma.

SpaceX is once again putting Starship through a fascinating test.

It's called "hot staging," which is a method for separating the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket after liftoff when Super Heavy has burned through most of its fuel and is ready to break away.

Almost all rockets go through a process during launch called "stage separation," in which the bottommost rocket booster diverges from the rest of the rocket or spacecraft.

When SpaceX launches its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, for example, the first-stage booster — or the bottommost portion of the rocket — breaks away from the upper part of the rocket less than 3 minutes into flight.

The Falcon 9 does so using “pneumatic pushers" that are housed within the rocket's interstage. That's the black band that can be seen around the middle of the Falcon 9.

Starship, however, won't use pneumatic pushers. Instead, the Starship spacecraft will simply fire up its own engines to push itself away from the Super Heavy booster.

Essentially, it's separation by blunt force trauma.

Starship's interstage has some large vents installed to direct the blow of the engines — aiming to make this method safe for the booster.

Hot staging was a huge point of interest during the last test flight, as SpaceX hadn't tried such a method before.

Ultimately, the hot-staging attempt in November appeared to work.

Starship's next attempt at hot staging should occur 2 minutes and 44 seconds into the mission.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket just hit “Max Q,” an aerospace term that refers to the point during flight at which a vehicle experiences its maximum dynamic pressure.

Put simply: It’s when the rocket is moving at very high speed, at a time when the atmosphere is still pretty thick, putting a lot of pressure on the vehicle.