Elon Musk's Starship finally reaches orbit and delivers its first paying cargo

American billionaire Elon Musk's Starship reached orbit for the first time on Monday and delivered its first working cargo, 26 next-generation Starlink satellites, on a flight that came within an engine failure of ending the way its 13 predecessors did.

The largest rocket ever built lifted off at 7:48 a.m. Central time after a 30-minute hold and two days after the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the flight. The Super Heavy booster lost one of its 33 engines on the way up, performed its job regardless, and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf, a recovery it had botched on the previous two missions.

The scare came higher up. One of the ship's three Raptor vacuum engines shut down early during ascent, prompting SpaceX commentator Dan Huot to say on the live stream that the craft might not reach orbit. Flight controllers pressed ahead. About 26 minutes after liftoff, with the orbital burn completed, mission control announced: "Starship is orbital."

Then the cargo went out one by one at about 269 kilometres up. "All 26 Starlink V3 operational satellites deployed and operating nominally," Musk wrote on X. SpaceX confirmed Starlink had made contact with every one. Each V3 carries roughly 10 times the downlink and 22 times the uplink capacity of the current generation, and they are due to begin serving customers within weeks. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen had described the flight as Starship's first revenue-generating mission.

SpaceX did not push its luck. The plan had been six orbits over about 10 hours. "Out of an abundance of caution given the engine issue experienced during ascent," the company said, controllers deorbited the ship after two orbits and about three hours, steering it to a pre-cleared zone in the northern Pacific, north of Hawaii, where it executed a landing burn and splashed down around noon.

For a program that has now lost vehicles to explosions, fires and tumbling reentries across 13 test flights, an orbit, a payload delivery and two intact splashdowns is the best day it has had. It also arrives with a clock running. SpaceX went public in June and trades at roughly $2 trillion on the promise that Starship will carry the bulk of Starlink's growth; Musk has said Falcon 9 will stop flying Starlink missions from Florida. NASA needs a Starship lunar lander for a crewed test next year.

The engine problem is the caveat. Raptor reliability has troubled the program since Flight 7, and Monday's mission needed two of three vacuum engines to finish a burn designed for three. SpaceX will have to show it can fly clean before Starship can carry the 50-plus launches a year its business model assumes.

Still, the first orbital flight of Musk's rocket ended with its satellites in space, its booster in the water and its ship recovered. That has never happened before.