SpaceX launches Starship rocket on third test flight

SpaceX has made it through some crucial milestones. But the company just revealed it won't attempt to reignite Starship's engines after a half-hour coasting phase.

Starship is on a "pretty steep trajectory," said Dan Huot, a SpaceX communication manager said. That means Earth's gravity will rapidly drag Starship back toward Earth, whether or not engines are re-lit.

It's not clear why SpaceX decided to forgo that test.

Engineers noted a lot of data needs to be evaluated in the hours and days ahead.

Yet another key milestone was hit during this test flight.

The company shared footage of the checkout. These doors will have to open on future flights if Starship deploys satellites.

But SpaceX engineers said on the webcast they still need to do some "data reviews" on how the door action and the propellant transfer demo went.

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.