SpaceX Starship reaches orbit for first time during test flight

SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time Monday during a test flight that ended with the spacecraft splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

(CNN)- SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time Monday during a test flight that ended with the spacecraft splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Starship launched from Starbase, Texas, atop SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket booster. The booster separated from the spacecraft, returned to Earth and made a splashdown landing in the Gulf.

Starship then reached a major milestone by making it into orbit for the first time. During the flight, it also deployed 26 operational Starlink satellites.

The mission was originally planned to last about 10 hours, but Starship’s control team shortened the flight to roughly three hours because of trouble with one of the spacecraft’s engines.

“Huge success. Don’t worry about that,” aerospace analyst Miles O’Brien said. “Splashdown, they weren’t trying to recover this vehicle at all.”

Starship’s splashdown was not as soft as its return during a previous flight in July. A massive fireball appeared over the water following Monday’s splashdown, but experts said it did not diminish the mission’s success.

“Anything that’s even sort of a soft splashdown, which was what we saw with a subsequent fire, to be sure, was not anything of great concern,” O’Brien said.

The primary goal of the mission was getting Starship into orbit.

“In the previous 13 missions, they were unable to achieve orbit,” O’Brien said. “Once you’re in orbit, you’ve got the whole universe as your oyster. That was the milestone that happened today, and it’s one for the books.”