They say it took steps forward toward the goal to one day take people to the Moon and Mars.
It went beyond the Starship craft's past two performances, which were both cut short by explosions minutes after launch.
In comparison, the second launch saw some of its 33 Raptor engines malfunction on ascent.
Laura Forczyk is the founder of Astraytical Space Consulting:
"It was able to launch with all 33 Raptor engines. It was able to do a complete separation of the booster from Starship. It was able to relight some of those engines and do a test of the payload bay doors, opening and closing them."
Forcyzk says SpaceX still needs several more test flights before attempting to launch the rocket with a human crew.
"SpaceX needs to prove that Starship is 100% safe before it takes astronauts on board. And in order to do that, it needs to make sure it understands how the vehicle reenters the atmosphere, both parts of the vehicle, the booster, and then the vehicle that's on top of the actual Starship. It needs to safely be able to reenter the Earth's atmosphere and then land. So that's that last step that it did not accomplish today, but will hopefully accomplish in the near future."
Losing the spacecraft is costly - but within SpaceX's calculations.
Commentators say the company's engineering culture is more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry's more established players.
Their flight-testing strategy pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.
"SpaceX's philosophy is more that, you know, they don't expect everything to go right."
Matt Schindell is curator of planetary science and exploration at the National Air and Space Museum.
"They don't expect everything to go right, but they expect things to improve over time. And that's worked well for them with their Falcon nine rockets, which are now very profitable for the company."
Company founder Elon Musk sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company's commercial launch business in low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX officials have said they plan to conduct at least six more test flights of Starship this year, subject to regulatory approval.
Meanwhile, Musk is counting on Starship to fulfill his goal of producing a large, multipurpose next-generation spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the moon and beyond this decade.
"Something that Elon Musk has promoted, ever since he introduced the idea of the Starship rocket was that this would be a vehicle that would eventually give us the capabilities to send humans to Mars and to have a sort of ongoing, transport between Earth and Mars. I would say that with this technology, if you can manage to make, lunar exploration and lunar habitation sustainable, then yeah, Mars might be a logical next step."
NASA also has a lot riding on the success of Starship.
The agency is giving it a central role in its Artemis program, successor to the Apollo missions that put astronauts on the moon for the first time more than 50 years ago.
While NASA executives have embraced Musk's frequent flight-testing approach, agency officials in recent months say they want to see greater progress with Starship's development as the United States races with China to the lunar surface.
