By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, July 24 (Reuters) – SpaceX’s Starship rocket lifted off from Texas on Friday in the company’s 13th flight test to demonstrate an array of onboard capabilities, including the rocket’s first suborbital deployments of new Starlink satellites.
The roughly 400-foot-tall (122 m) Starship rocket system blasted off around 6:50 p.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase company town, with the Super Heavy first stage booster sending its Starship upper stage on a suborbital trajectory. The roughly hour-long mission will conclude with Starship’s reentry through Earth’s atmosphere and a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
As Starship approached 16,400 miles per hour (26,400 kph) in space some 10 minutes into its flight, the Super Heavy booster returned to Earth and impacted the Gulf of Mexico harder than expected, SpaceX said, though it had reignited more engines than its botched return in May during a previous test flight.
The Starship test flight is SpaceX’s 13th since 2023, featuring a new version of the rocket crucial to the company’s plans to expand Starlink, land humans on the moon for NASA and eventually deploy thousands of artificial intelligence-processing satellites in orbit.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Chris Reese)
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