SpaceX’s showpiece Starship rocket reaches orbit for first time

Founder Elon Musk’s rocket, the largest ever built, is meant to carry NASA mission to moon and beyond.The largest rocket developed by SpaceX has successfully reached orbit, marking an important milestone for the private aerospace company.“Starship is orbital,” mission control announced to cheers on a livestream on Monday that showed the spacecraft’s launch from a base in Texas in the United States.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3Piece of SpaceX rocket the size of a school bus crashes into the moonlist 2 of 3SpaceX rocket segment to crash into the moon: What happened?list 3 of 3SpaceX shares slide on the heels of first quarterly reportend of listThe uncrewed spacecraft almost didn’t achieve the long-desired goal after one of its engines shut down too soon. But with everything else working well and the bad engine no longer needed, flight controllers decided after several tense minutes to proceed as planned.Founder Elon Musk’s showpiece rocket – the biggest and most powerful ever built – carried 26 of the latest and most advanced Starlink satellites to join the 11,000 older models already providing internet service. It was Starship’s 14th full-scale launch from Texas’s southern tip in three years. The earlier test flights ventured no farther than the Indian Ocean halfway around the world, often crashing in flames and briefly skimming space.This time, SpaceX was intent on circling the globe from an altitude of 275km (170 miles) – not just once but six times over almost 10 hours, ending with a Pacific splashdown near Chile. The first-stage booster wasn’t meant to return to the Starbase launch site, either, instead dropping into the Gulf of Mexico within minutes of the morning liftoff.SpaceX wants to ensure that everything works before flying Starship back to Starbase. If the spacecraft breaks apart over land and rains debris onto people, “our popularity would diminish very rapidly”, Musk said at a business summit earlier this month. “That’s why we’re being extremely cautious here.”