SpaceX’s Starship hit its marks for the second time in a row on Monday night. 🚀
Last night, Starship’s 11th launch began at 6:23 Central time from its Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas. It was the second liftoff for the 403-foot-tall rocket’s first stage, which flew before on Starship’s eighth launch.
Three of the four previous flights of this Block 2 configuration of Starship, ended in failures of this stage: It exploded in the upper atmosphere on the seventh and eighth Starship launches, then tumbled out of control on the ninth mission and disintegrated on re-entry.Â
On Monday’s flight, however, the upper stage’s coast in space featured a successful deployment of simulated Starlink satellites. SpaceX is banking on Starship’s ability to deliver larger, more capable versions of those low-Earth-orbit broadband satellites.Â
While above Earth, Starship’s upper stage also relit one engine in space, a test of its ability to maneuver in orbit, and then began a fiery fall through ...
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