SpaceX Starship Launch: Highlights From SpaceX’s Explosive Starship Rocket Test Launch (2024)

Here’s what a perfect launch would have looked like.

The roughly four minutes that Starship spent airborne wasn’t close to the approximately 90 minutes that would have been ideal.

What would the perfect flight have looked like for Thursday’s planned test? A trip partway around the Earth, from liftoff at the launch site in South Texas to splashdown in the waters off Hawaii.

By lasting four minutes, Starship did survive past the period of maximum atmospheric stress, which happened less than a minute into flight as it arced over the Gulf of Mexico. The next major stage for the nearly 400-foot rocket would have been its Super Heavy booster engines powering down about 40 miles above the Earth, before the Starship vehicle itself separated and lit up its own engines.

As Starship continued its journey, the massive booster would have performed a series of maneuvers before descending into the Gulf, where it would likely sink to the bottom. (If not, SpaceX crews would scuttle it.)

As Super Heavy descended, Starship would have continued to gain altitude until its engines switched off about nine minutes into its flight and it began coasting around the Earth.

About an hour later, Starship — by then over the Pacific Ocean — would have pivoted to begin a belly flop into the atmosphere, where it would have encountered extreme temperatures before splashing down about 62 nautical miles north of the island of Kauai.

But even a fully successful test probably would have ended just as Thursday’s did: in an explosion.

James Dobbins contributed reporting from South Padre Island, Texas.

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Even a completely successful launch would have only set up more test flights.

SpaceX eventually hopes to be able to land the booster right back where it starts, on the launchpad, nestled between the “chopsticks” arms attached to the launch tower, while Starship, after its journey to space, is supposed to re-enter the atmosphere, belly-flopping through the air to help slow its fall before pivoting to a vertical orientation and firing its engines for a soft landing.

Even that achievement will be only the end of the beginning of the journey — a reminder of the iterative nature that SpaceX takes to develop its rockets.

Once Starship is able to return safely to the ground, it will still not be ready to go to the moon, let alone Mars — the ultimate goal SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk, has set for it — or the moon, NASA’s more immediate need for Starship to serve as the lunar lander to take astronauts to the lunar mission during its Artemis III mission.

That is because Starship uses up most of its propellants just to get to orbit.

To leave orbit, it must have its propellant tanks refilled with methane and liquid oxygen. For that, SpaceX is planning two other Starship variants.

One will essentially be an orbital gas station in space. The other will be a tanker version to carry methane and liquid oxygen to the gas station. A series of tanker flights will be needed to fill the gas station. Then a Starship headed to the moon or Mars will launch and dock at the gas station and refill its tanks. But no one has yet tried large-scale pumping of propellants in a zero-gravity environment.

And SpaceX will have to launch again and again to gain confidence in the reliability of the system, especially for flights with astronauts aboard. After all, if airline flights were just 99 percent safe, no one would fly — a 1 percent crash rate would mean that tens of jets would fall out of the sky every day.

The rocket exploded. So why did SpaceX pop champagne?

Casual space watchers were further amused by the company describing the result of the mission on Twitter with cosmic levels of euphemism. SpaceX called it “a rapid unscheduled disassembly” — or, put another way, an explosion.

But SpaceX wasn’t necessarily expecting the rocket — the most powerful and one of the most complex to ever fly — to actually emerge unscathed. Though it fell short of its most ambitious goal of gathering enough speed to reach orbit and then re-enter the atmosphere, it did claim other successes by flying for four minutes and getting well clear of the launchpad.

That was enough for employees at SpaceX headquarters to cheer the performance — one employee sprayed a bottle of champagne on colleagues — and for Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, to congratulate the company.

Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said that SpaceX is accustomed to airing both its successes and failures, like it did when it first tried to land Falcon 9, the rocket that is its current workhorse. Many of those attempts ended unsuccessfully.

“They put them out there for everybody to see,” Mr. Dumbacher said. “And that’s great. In fact, I applaud them for that because it demonstrated how hard some of this stuff is.”

Big NASA programs like the Space Launch System that the government agency used for a launch to the moon in November are generally not afforded the same luxury of explode-as-you-learn. There tends to be much more testing and analysis on the ground — which slows development and increases costs — to avoid embarrassing public failures.

“Government programs are not allowed to operate that way because of that, because of the way we have all the stakeholders being able to watch over and tell you no,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Even as SpaceX cheekily acknowledged the explosive end to the flight, it embraced it as a useful result.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,” the company wrote on Twitter.

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Jaqy Dooley, 80, from Michigan, came for the launch with her niece. It was the first launch either had witnessed, and Dooley — whose brother and cousin worked at NASA — said it was about time she'd seen one, even if it didn't go how she'd hoped. “I would drive here to see it again,” she said. “It didn’t last long enough. We’re stretching the limits of our capabilities, and that's great.”

Starship wasn’t the only rocket lost in its first flight this year.

Japan also experienced a failure during the first mission of its new workhorse rocket, H3. The rocket is about 200 feet long and was built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for Japan’s space program. About 15 minutes into its first flight in early March, the rocket’s second stage failed to ignite. It was lost, along with the expensive Earth monitoring satellite it was carrying. Because the engine on the rocket’s second stage is similar to that used on older Japanese rockets, missions using that older vehicle have been postponed while engineers investigate the problem.

Another company, Relativity Space, experienced mixed results during its first launch. Its Terran 1 rocket was the first made primarily on a 3-D printer to launch, and the first in the United States using a mixture of liquid methane and oxygen propellants to reach space. Like the Japanese rocket, Relativity’s vehicle made it off the launchpad in Florida before its second stage failed to reach full thrust. Unlike the Japanese rocket, Terran 1 was purely a test flight and it was not carrying a satellite. The company said it would use what it learned from the launch to shift its focus to another rocket, Terran R, which is to be partly reusable like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

One additional established rocket failed this year during its sixth mission. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket failed during its second stage, this time from Cornwall, England. Earlier this month, the company filed for bankruptcy.

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A ‘learning experience’ that concluded with a blast.

Despite the mission’s fiery outcome, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, offered congratulations to the company. “Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward,” Mr. Nelson wrote on Twitter.

The space agency is relying on SpaceX to build a version of Starship that will carry two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon during its Artemis III mission. There was great anticipation from the flight, which had been delayed from Monday as the gargantuan rocket could one day carry massive amounts of cargo and many people into space.

Before the launch, which had no people aboard and aimed to validate whether the design of the rocket system is sound, Elon Musk, the company’s founder, had tamped down expectations. He said it might take several tries before Starship succeeds at this test flight.

But the launch achieved a number of important milestones, with the rocket flying for four minutes and getting well clear of the launchpad. The brief flight produced reams of data for engineers to understand how the vehicle performed.

“It may look that way to some people, but it’s not a failure,” said Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former high-level NASA official. “It’s a learning experience.”

Still, the flight fell short of complete success. The flight plan called for the Starship spacecraft to reach a higher altitude of about 150 miles before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes later. And it remains to be seen how Thursday’s flight outcome might affect NASA’s schedule, which optimistically calls for the first moon landing by astronauts aboard Starship to occur in late 2025.

When SpaceX began building Starship, it was motivated by Mr. Musk’s dream of sending people to live on Mars someday, an endeavor that would require the transport of enormous amounts of supplies to succeed.

But entrepreneurs and futurists are thinking closer to home. A gargantuan, fully reusable vehicle would slash the cost of sending things to space, leading some to imagine how Starship could carry mammoth space telescopes to peer at the cosmos, or squadrons of robots to explore other worlds. Others are designing larger satellites that will be cheaper because they will not have to use expensive components currently needed to fit into the size and weight constraints imposed by present-day rockets.

“Flying rockets and reusing them has massive potential to change the game and transportation to orbit,” said Phil Larson, who served as a White House space adviser during the Obama administration and later worked on communication efforts at SpaceX. “And it could enable whole new classes of missions.”

Despite the setback, SpaceX remains the dominant company in global spaceflight. Its rockets have already traveled to space 25 times in 2023, with the most recent launch concluding successfully on Wednesday.

The countdown on Thursday at the launch site in South Texas, near the city of Brownsville, proceeded smoothly through the morning until the last half a minute, when it was paused for a few minutes while SpaceX engineers resolved technical issues. Employees at SpaceX headquarters in California started cheering loudly when the countdown resumed.

Then as a cloud of exhaust rose around the rocket, it took flight.

“It looked really good coming off the pad, and it looked really good for a while,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

In an update, SpaceX said the rocket got as high as about 24 miles over the Gulf of Mexico. Video of the rocket captured flashes as several of the 33 engines failed on the lower portion of the spacecraft, the Super Heavy booster. That turned out to be too much for the guidance system to compensate, and the vehicle started tumbling in a corkscrew path.

“This does not appear to be a nominal situation,” John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer, reported during the company’s livestream of the launch.

The upper-stage Starship vehicle apparently did not separate from the booster, and four minutes after liftoff, the automated flight termination system destroyed the rocket, ending the flight in a fireball.

The launch lived up to SpaceX’s promise of “excitement guaranteed.” And it avoided a worst-case outcome of exploding on the launchpad, which would have required extensive repairs.

Mr. Musk offered congratulations to the SpaceX team on Twitter. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” he said.

Karl Kriegh, 69, and his wife traveled from Colorado for the launch, and lingered afterward on the beach at South Padre Island, where viewers were taking in the flight from a safe distance.

“I’m so glad I’ve lived to see this,” he said. “It was incredibly dramatic, one of those things on the bucket list.”

Carlos Huertas, 42, a stage tech who lives in Los Angeles, was on the beach wearing a T-shirt sold by SpaceX that said “Occupy Mars.”

“I thought it turned out well until I learned it exploded,” he said. He added that he felt “a little disappointed even though we knew it was a big possibility” and said he hoped to see another launch soon.

Heavy-lift rockets like Starship are inherently more complex and more difficult to develop than smaller rockets, just as building an aircraft carrier takes much more work than a modest yacht. In addition, by aiming to make all pieces of the spacecraft reusable and capable of launching again a few hours after landing, SpaceX is attempting an engineering challenge that goes beyond what was accomplished in the previous 60 years of the space age.

It is not a surprise to experts that SpaceX did not fully succeed on the first try.

“They might have a couple of questions to go look at in terms of why some of the engines may not have been running,” Mr. Dumbacher said. “They’ll look into it, they’ll figure it out, and they’ll come back the next time and they’ll fix those problems and they’ll move on to the next one end eventually they’ll get this flying all the way in orbit. I’m fully confident of that.”

However, SpaceX has a history of learning from mistakes. The company’s mantra is essentially, “Fail fast, but learn faster.”

Traditional aerospace companies have tried to anticipate and prevent as many failures as possible ahead of time. But that approach takes money and time and can lead to vehicles that are overdesigned. SpaceX instead is more like a Silicon Valley software company — starting with an imperfect product that can be improved quickly.

When it tried to start landing Falcon 9 boosters, the first few hit too hard and exploded. With each attempt, SpaceX engineers tweaked the systems. After its first successful landing, more soon followed. Today, it is a rare surprise if a booster landing fails.

A couple of years ago, the company took a similar approach to fine-tuning the landing procedure for Starship. In a series of tests, prototypes of Starship lifted off to an altitude of about six miles before shutting off its engines. It then belly flopped through the atmosphere to slow its rate of fall before tilting back to vertical and firing its engines again for landing. The first few ended explosively before one attempt finally succeeded.

SpaceX, as one of the most valuable privately held companies, possesses a large financial cushion to absorb setbacks, unlike its early days when the first three launches of its original rocket, the small Falcon 1, failed to reach orbit. Mr. Musk scraped together just enough money and parts for a fourth launch attempt. Had it failed, SpaceX would have gone out of business. The fourth Falcon 1 launch succeeded, and SpaceX has succeeded in almost all of its endeavors since, even when it sometimes fails at first.

Big NASA programs like the Space Launch System, which NASA used on an uncrewed mission to the moon in November, are generally not afforded the same luxury of explode-as-you-learn.

“Government programs are not allowed to operate that way because of that, because of the way we have all the stakeholders being able to watch over and tell you no,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Back on the beach, people who turned up for the launch took the day’s outcome in stride.

“Would it have been awesome if it didn’t explode?” said Lauren Posey, 34. “Yeah. But it was still awesome.”

James Dobbins contributed reporting from South Padre Island, Texas.

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Starship is a mixed blessing for a corner of Texas.

Boca Chica, which translates roughly to “small mouth” in Spanish, is a tiny village with a single road that ends at the shoreline and a handful of residents, most of them retirees from the Midwest and other places to the north who live in the village during the winter months.

Area elected officials have backed SpaceX ever since Mr. Musk made his plans clear in 2014. They say that the communities around Brownsville have benefited from the arrival of the high-tech giant. The city of some 185,000 people is a majority-Hispanic area where, according to the U.S. census, about 26 percent of the population lives in poverty.

Eddie Treviño, the county judge for Cameron County, which includes Boca Chica and Brownsville, credits SpaceX for creating at least 1,900 jobs directly, and thousands more if you count the contractors and subcontractors required to run an ever-expanding launch site and related businesses.

“There’s no doubt that it’s been good for the economy,” Mr. Treviño said. “Brownsville and the county as a whole has been waiting for this type of a generational economic impact.”

But not everyone has extended the welcome mat to Mr. Musk and his engineers.

Some residents argue that SpaceX’s presence is raising home prices in an area where few can afford to buy a home as it is. In addition, they say, the rocket tests often spread fiery debris along neighborhoods, sand dunes and tidal flats. The testing often leads to road closures that block residents’ access to public beaches, local and environmental activists say.

Rebekah Hinojosa, 32, a Brownsville resident who has expressed her discontent at public meetings, said she had heard from people in her community who live in fear.

“I’m tired, we are tired of living with a constant threat of flammable rocket explosions,” Ms. Hinojosa said. “The politicians here cannot ignore the community. They need to listen to the concern of their constituents, not to a private space corporation or a billionaire.”

Others argue on behalf of the animals who live in the region’s lush wetlands, wildlife refuges and sandy beaches. Many shorebirds have stopped nesting or have been chased away by the piercing sounds of rockets roaring above their habitat. Heavy machinery often damages the road to the beach, according to area activists.

Representatives with SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Treviño, the county judge, said area officials wanted to work with SpaceX to minimize the damage. “We have the same concerns and we all want to make sure that the environment is not impacted,” he said.

Mr. Musk’s company has also been buying the homes of Boca Chica’s residents. The handful who have stayed contend with constant disruptions to their daily lives. SpaceX personnel tend to warn those who live steps away before a rocket is to be launched, residents have told The Times. But other times they are startled by loud sirens, a warning that residents have a few minutes to put on heavy headphones to block the earsplitting noise caused by some tests, and to step away from their windows for the fear that they may shatter.

Christian Escobedo, 42, who lives near Boca Chica, said that while he appreciated the economic boost to his community, he was concerned with the constant activity.

“It was a lot more quiet before they came here; there wasn’t a lot of construction going on,” he said. “We have to take the good with the bad.”

Others like Fred Tamez, 55, are excited to be part of a launch that is, literally, out of this world.

“Everybody’s talking about it, to be part of this historical event,” he said.

Asked whether he was concerned that this latest test could result in another explosion and ensuing fiery debrisfamiliar to many here, he answered with a nervous laugh.

“This one has a lot of engines,” he said. “So I hope not.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

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How Elon Musk’s Starship design and timeline has changed over seven years.

By the time he unveiled the design at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, the name had changed to a blander one: Interplanetary Transport System. It was gargantuan.

The booster, 40 feet in diameter and 254 feet tall, would be powered by 42 Raptor engines. The spaceship part was even wider, nearly 56 feet, as part of its design for gliding through atmospheres during re-entry.

Mr. Musk highlighted high-tech carbon composite fibers that would be used for much of the structure.

Inside, it would be roomy enough for 100 settlers heading to Mars for a new life on a new planet.

“What you saw there is very close to what we’ll actually build,” Mr. Musk said then, referring to the rockets and spacecraft he had just described.

Actually not.

A year later, the design had slimmed down by 25 percent, to 30 feet. The name changed, too, to B.F.R. (The “B” stood for “big,” the “R” for “rocket,” and Mr. Musk never publicly stated what the “F” stood for. Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, gamely and unconvincingly asserted that “F” stood for “Falcon,” a nod to SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rockets.)

The smaller size would make it more practical for launching satellites, collecting debris from low-Earth orbit and making quick suborbital hops around the world for wealthy travelers in a hurry.

Details of the design shifted again and again. Landing legs were replaced by fins that doubled as landing legs. Then separate landing legs returned.

Mr. Musk jettisoned the carbon fiber composites and decided to make the spacecraft out of stainless steel instead. Steel is much cheaper and easier to work with, he said.

The name changed again, from B.F.R. to Starship.

By the time SpaceX started conducting high-altitude hops of Starship prototypes in 2020, the shape of the spacecraft had largely settled to what is now on the launchpad.

While the original Interplanetary Transport System looked sleekly futuristic — something that would have fit well with the aesthetic of “2001: A Space Odyssey” — Starship has evolved into a simpler, shinier shape that is almost retro, harking back to Buck Rogers and other mid-20th century sci-fi visions of the upcoming space age.

As the name and design have changed, so have Mr. Musk’s overly optimistic predictions for when his spaceship would get to Mars. At Guadalajara, he said the first flight of the Interplanetary Transport System to Mars, carrying cargo but not people, would take off in 2022 and that the first flight with people could launch in 2024.

Needless to say, no one is packing bags for a trip to Mars next year.

At an event in Boca Chica, Texas, in September 2019, Mr. Musk, standing in front of a shiny, stainless steel Starship prototype, proclaimed that an orbital test flight could occur within six months and that it was conceivable that a flight carrying people could take off sometime later in 2020.

That test flight of Starship and the Super Heavy booster originally promised for early 2020 might finally take off.

A Starship flight with people aboard remains further in the future.

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What Starship means to Elon Musk.

Even before Starship broke apart roughly four minutes into a test launch on Thursday, it was a tall order for the new rocket, which is more powerful than anything that has made it to space. Although it made it off the launchpad on Thursday, Starship still has not made it to orbit years after Mr. Musk predicted it would.

In September 2019, he told people at a SpaceX event that the rocket would get to orbit “in less than six months.” Last year, for instance, he said that Starship would reach orbit in 2022 and called it one of his “2 main goals.”

SpaceX has blown through those self-imposed deadlines, but a successful test would have brought a win for Mr. Musk as his other companies have experienced difficulties. Tesla, his electric carmaker, has been hampered by rising interest rates and heightened competition, leading it to slash prices on its vehicles. Twitter, the social media company Mr. Musk bought last October for $44 billion, has been affected by extensive staff cuts, service outages and revenue shortfalls, leading the billionaire to more than halve its valuation to $20 billion.

A successful Starship test might have helped Mr. Musk forget some of those pains.

“This absorbs more of my mental energy than probably the other single thing,” Mr. Musk said of Starship on a 2021 Wall Street Journal podcast. “But it is so preposterously difficult that there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this.”

On Sunday, Mr. Musk tempered expectations. In an audio stream on Twitter, he said there were “a million ways this rocket could fail.”

“I would just like to set expectations low,” he said. “If we get far enough away from the launchpad before something goes wrong, I would consider that to be a success. Just don’t blow up the launchpad.”

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People traveled from far and near to catch a view of the rocket.

“The fact that we are living in tomorrow, that vibe, the positivity of the world, is what you see here,” he said, watching tankers deliver propellants for Thursday’s launch. “You can feel it in the air. That sense of mission.”

The overall mood on the ground a day before the Starship launch was upbeat and optimistic, with Elon Musk and SpaceX enthusiasts descending again on the southernmost section of Texas after the scrubbed launch on Monday.

Along the dunes, people wandered and took selfies with the nearly 400-foot-tall heavy-lift launch vehicle only a few hundred yards away. The day before the flight, the SpaceX launch site was a remarkably open area, allowing the sight seekers an up-close look at the spacecraft.

On the salt flat just south of the launch site, Charlie Probasco, 71, a retired engineer from Indiana, lamented Monday’s postponed flight.

“My patience is about running out,” he said. He arrived about eight days ago expecting to be home already. Still, he is hopeful the rocket will fly Thursday morning.

“This is a moment in history,” he said. “I got to witness Sputnik when I was 5 years old. This is the start of something. The nature of our civilization is exploration.”

Not all of the visitors were from faraway places.

Yuri Ruiz is an elementary schoolteacher in Brownsville, which, like Boca Chica, is in Cameron County, Texas. Her students will watch a livestream of the launch at school.

“I teach 4-year-olds. We’ve been talking about the solar system,” she said. “The kiddos are intrigued and want to know more in general. They know it’s not a cartoon. It’s real.”

Joe Lerma, 43, brought his daughter, 11, and son, 9, from their home about 30 minutes away. The family posed for photos in front of the imposing rocket.

“Once you get close to this stuff, you hardly believe it. It’s live,” he said. “It’s great for the kids growing up here. To go to Mars, that would be awesome.”

On Thursday, however, Mr. Lerma will miss the launch in person. He’ll be at his job working at a port of entry at the international border. “I hope everything goes OK,” he said.

What to expect during SpaceX’s second attempt to launch.

When is the launch, and how can I watch it?

SpaceX has scheduled the flight for as early as 9:28 a.m. Eastern time, and it could launch any time between then and 10:30 a.m. from the company’s launch site in South Texas.

SpaceX said it would begin a livestream on its YouTube channel approximately 45 minutes before the rocket is ready to liftoff.

During a livestream for a different SpaceX launch on Wednesday, the company noted that another Starship postponement was possible.

“If we do make an attempt tomorrow, the chances of scrubs are high,” said Jessie Anderson, a SpaceX engineer who also hosts some of the company’s webcasts.

Is the launch attempt really on April 20?

Yes, yes it is.

Maybe it is just a coincidence that SpaceX, the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk, is lighting up a rocket on the 20th day of the fourth month of this year.

Maybe. Then again, numerous observers have noted Mr. Musk’s penchant for inserting references to “420,” a number associated with cannabis, into his public dealings. Examples include the purchase price per share he proposed for Twitter ($54.20) and the share price at which he said he would take his electric car manufacturing company, Tesla, private ($420).

Who can say?

Why didn’t Starship launch on Monday?

There was a problem with a valve in the pressurization system of Super Heavy, the booster that helps Starship get to orbit — it appeared to be frozen. After examining the stuck valve and refreshing the liquid methane and oxygen propellants needed to fuel Starship, SpaceX determined it was ready to launch again on Thursday.

“It looked like kind of a scene out of science fiction,” said Phil Larson, the chief government affairs officer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who was standing on the beach on South Padre Island, just north of the launch site. “Kids playing in the water and a massive rocket in the distance.”

Mr. Larson, who worked at SpaceX when Mr. Musk first announced plans for a Mars ship in 2016, said he was not disappointed when the launch was called off.

“I did not expect it to go,” Mr. Larson said.

What is Starship?

It is the tallest rocket ever built — 394 feet tall, or nearly 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty with the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy, the lower section that will propel the Starship vehicle to orbit, has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. They are able to generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, far more than the Saturn V that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Starship is designed to be entirely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is expected to land much like SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space belly-flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting to a vertical position for landing.

Why is SpaceX building Starship?

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is the most frequently launched rocket in the world. Starship is the next step. It would be able to carry far more cargo and many more people than Falcon 9. And because it is fully reusable, Starship could greatly reduce the cost of launching payloads to orbit.

NASA is paying SpaceX to build a version of the vehicle to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface for the Artemis III and IV missions later in the decade. The spacecraft is also central to Mr. Musk’s vision of sending people to Mars.

What will happen during the flight?

For the test flight on Thursday, Starship will fly almost completely around the Earth, starting from Texas and splashing down in waters off Hawaii.

About eight minutes after the launch on Thursday, the Super Heavy booster will splash into the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship vehicle will fly higher into space, reaching an altitude of about 150 miles and traveling around the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere. If it survives re-entry, about 90 minutes after launching, it will splash into the Pacific Ocean some 62 miles north of the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

But with all the new systems in Starship, the SpaceX founder acknowledged the difficulties of achieving all of the flight’s goals.

“There’s a million ways this rocket could fail,” Mr. Musk said. “I could go on for hours.”