SpaceX has completed a successful test flight of Starship V3, the largest and most powerful rocket in history.
The uncrewed rocket blasted off from SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas at around 17:30 local time (22:30 GMT) on Friday (22 May), just days after the company announced plans for a record-breaking $1.75 trillion Wall Street listing.
After reaching space, Starship deployed 20 mock satellites before splashing down in the Indian Ocean around an hour later in a planned end to the test.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk celebrated the launch in a post on X.
“Congratulations @SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & landing! You scored a goal for humanity,” he wrote.
Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, also congratulated employees.
“Congrats and a huge thank you to the SpaceX team that always delivers,” she wrote on X.
“This was an incredible first flight of a brand new vehicle. Our collective future flying amongst the stars has become so much closer,” Shotwell added.
The first attempt to launch the rocket on Thursday (21 May) was postponed due to a problem with the launch tower.
While Friday’s launch met most of its objectives, there were a few issues with the test flight.
Starship lost one of its six engines early in the flight, and the Super Heavy booster failed to complete a planned boost-back burn after separating from Starship.
SpaceX intends to complete its first Moon landing in 2028 as part of NASA’s $3 billion Artemis programme, which aims to return American astronauts to the Moon.
The U.S. is locked in a space race with China, which intends to complete a crewed lunar landing of its own in 2030.
Beijing intends to launch its Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship on Sunday, an important milestone towards its lunar ambitions.
Peace is Armenia’s only reliable guarantee of security, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said in comments in Dublin, where he also...
Hungarian authorities have recovered nearly $20 million in cash hidden in buildings and buried in forests as part of a bribery investigation into M...
U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to hold a historic trilateral meeting in She...
Iran’s Assembly of Experts has backed withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and overhauling the country’s defence doctrine, calling both steps essential to national security and deterrence.
President Vladimir Putin agreed on Thursday to let European representatives join the next round of Ukraine peace talks while the United States continues to work towards what could become the largest prisoner exchange of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Microsoft struggled to restore its services on Friday after a major outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot across the United States and Asia-Pacific region.
Here's your AnewZ Technology Daily Brief for the 13th of November. This week, a Microsoft outage hit Australian agencies, Google restricted mapping data in South Korea, a lawsuit targeted advanced AI development, and Nvidia faced a leadership crisis after Jensen Huang's resignation.
Kazakhstan-linked hackers stole thousands of national security documents from Tajikistan, a cybersecurity company has said.
Hungarian authorities have recovered nearly $20 million in cash hidden in buildings and buried in forests as part of a bribery investigation into Miklós Seszták, a former minister under ex-Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to hold a historic trilateral meeting in Shenzhen on 19 November. The White House says the talks will focus on nuclear arms reductions, with Iran also on the agenda.
U.S. negotiators floated the idea of Ukraine withdrawing from the eastern Donbas region in exchange for NATO membership, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
China is taking its space technology ambitions beyond its borders, with a major deal to build a network of 20 artificial intelligence-powered satellites for Oman.
Europe will send a team of diplomats to Ukraine peace talks rather than a single envoy, EU leaders agreed on Friday at the end of a summit in Dublin.
You can download the AnewZ application from Play Store and the App Store.
What is your opinion on this topic?
Leave the first comment