Keith’s note: SpaceX Launched the 11th flight of Starship this evening. The first stage came back exactly as planned. Ship made it to orbit and worked smoothly. Payload doors opened and all Starlink simulators were deployed. When operational, each Starship launch will deploy an additional 60Tb of coverage to the orbital Starlink constellation – 20 times the amount of satellites that a Falcon 9 workhorse currently does. The upper stage then landed precisely on target in the Indian Ocean after doing some wild banking maneuvers on the way down. I did launch coverage on Bloomberg Radio (audio) and I was on Deutsche Welle TV to do landing coverage. (audio)
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
The flight didn’t “make it to orbit”, nor was it intended to. This was a planned suborbital mission, just like all the others.