TORONTO – With a thunderous roar, SpaceX’s Starship lifted off from a launchpad in Texas on another uncrewed test flight. This time, it went where no Starship had gone before. SpaceX employees erupted in cheers as flight controllers declared the vehicle “go for orbit,” minutes after an engine problem nearly scrubbed the attempt. It was a milestone THAT years in the making for Elon Musk’s company. Once in orbit, Starship released 26 Starlink satellites, one after another. They join the more than 11,000 the company already has circling the planet. The engine trouble still took a toll. Starship was supposed to orbit Earth six times over 10 hours, but SpaceX cut the flight to about three hours. The rocket then splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and exploded, an ending SpaceX had expected. “This Starship technology is supposed to be the one that gets us to the moon, and that’s why there are a lot of eyeballs on it,” said Dan Riskin, CTV News science and technology analyst. The race back to the moon Reaching orbit matters because NASA is counting on Starship to be one of two possible lunar landers, with the other being built by Blue Origin, the company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. The goal is to return astronauts to the moon’s surface in less than two years. Starship is expected to take part in NASA’s Artemis 3 mission next year, when astronauts in Earth’s low orbit will test docking their Orion capsule with prototype lunar landers. Former NASA astronaut Terry Hart told CTV News that landing on the moon in a Starship would be “very challenging.” “The Starship’s quite large,” Hart said. “I think it’s going to blow a lot of moon rocks around when it comes down, because it really has a lot of power.” Hart sees Starship as the backbone of a new transportation network in space, one that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes will eventually carry humans to Mars. “There’s a lot of potential for this to service very well in getting to the moon and beyond,” Hart said. Starship still needs NASA certification before it can carry people. Hart says SpaceX is “certainly demonstrating all the safety issues they need to demonstrate,” and he believes astronauts could be flying on it “in another year or two.” Musk’s next big bet Musk believes a fully reusable Starship will dramatically cut the cost of getting to space, and in a SpaceX video earlier this year, he made a bold prediction about how often it will eventually fly. “We expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour,” Musk said. He envisions hundreds and eventually thousands of launches every year. That scale is central to another ambition: building an artificial intelligence data centre in space. In January, SpaceX asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch up to a million satellites. They would act as solar-powered computing hubs in orbit, avoiding the huge electricity and water demands of data centres on Earth. Riskin notes that many Canadians, especially in rural areas, now rely on Starlink for internet, and he says Canadians should pay attention to who controls it. “Canada and the U.S. are having a little bit of a time right now,” he said. “For the on-off switch of that technology to be controlled by the United States is something worth thinking very carefully about.” Next up: a Canadian on a SpaceX rocket It is a busy week for SpaceX. For the first time, one of its rockets is set to carry a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut into orbit. Joshua Kutryk is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a Falcon 9 no earlier than 11:10 a.m. ET on Thursday. He’ll fly with two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut for a six-month stay on the International Space Station. He could be the last Canadian to live aboard the station, which is expected to be deorbited sometime after 2030. “We’ve dreamt of going to space since we were kids,” Kutryk said at a media event in Florida on Saturday. “I’m excited to do the science. I’m excited to look at the Earth. I’m also excited to do it as a Canadian.” Among his experiments is AstroFit, a CSA study on how astronauts can build strength in space. He’ll also help study mental well-being in orbit and why astronauts develop anemia. Kutryk will be the second Canadian in space this year, after Jeremy Hansen flew around the moon on Artemis 2 in April.
