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SpaceX makes significant progress with third Starship orbital test flight

The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket went farther than ever before Thursday morning.

All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster performed as designed, and the two stages separated around 2 minutes 45 seconds into the mission. Starship continued on its coasting phase, but after around a half hour the company said it wouldn’t attempt to relight the engines to proceed with the test. Ultimately, mission controllers failed to reestablish communications with Starship, leading SpaceX’s Dan Huot to announce that they had lost the ship: “No splashdown today, but again just it’s incredible to see how much further we got this time around,” he said.

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