SpaceX, the American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and satellite communications corporation founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, had a Starship Flight Test live stream that ended a few moments back. The company ran the broadcast — which aired its first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas — for around 53 and a half minutes.
Normally a quiet channel, this stream exploded in numbers, doing 1.67M Peak Viewers. It ended up becoming the fourth-most popular broadcast of the year, behind only the OnePlus Nord launch event in India on April 4 and two football match streams from the legendary CazeTV from February 25 and March 19.
The broadcast also did 986K Hour Watched and 381K Average Viewers, becoming the channel’s most-viewed stream in all three metrics by overtaking the previous Starship Flight Test video from April 17. Only the top four streams on this channel have hit 100K-plus watch hours, while today’s broadcast is the sole one with over a million peak concurrent viewers.
Today's Starship Flight Test stream reached its peak viewership towards the end of its run, when the rocket first launched and exploded midair, signaling a failed trial run. Also, although the entire broadcast ran for over two and a half hours, the main bit related to the launch of the Starship only came in the final 60 minutes of its airtime.
It has to be remembered that Musk, also the CEO of Twitter, established this firm, headquartered in Hawthorne, California, more than 20 years ago with the aim of ‘reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars.’
SpaceX said the Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built, designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. With NASA picking this spacecraft to transport astronauts to the Moon — for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972 — in late 2025 for a mission known as Artemis III, fans can expect more such streams from the organization in the near future.
