Having watched space launches since the Mercury missions, I can honestly say that I've never seen one where the successful orbital flight was an anti-climax to the launch ?" until now. At 7:25 am CT at SpaceX's Boca Chica, Texas Starbase, the company's giant Starship rocket lifted off on its fifth test flight. The fact that it didn't blow up, crash, or suffer some other mishap was a good start, but that's when history kicked in. About two minutes and 41 seconds into the flight, Starship conducted a hot staging separation where the second stage fired its six engines while still attached to the Super Heavy first stage. Instead of shutting down its 33 Raptor engines, the Super Heavy only cut down to three engines before separation.