SpaceX executed the most successful flight test of its super-powerful Starship launch system to date, featuring Starship’s first-ever payload deployment and a thrilling Indian Ocean splashdown. Today’s 10th test flight followed three earlier missions that fell short of full success.
Starship’s Super Heavy booster rose from SpaceX’s Starbase launch pad in South Texas at 6:30 p.m. CT (2330 GMT Aug. 26) after a trouble-free countdown. The first launch attempt had to be called off on Aug. 24 due to a leaky hose in the ground support system, and a second attempt was scrubbed on Aug. 25 because of unacceptable weather.
During today’s liftoff, all 33 of the booster’s methane-fueled Raptor engines lit up to send the upper stage, known as Ship 37, to a height of more than 110 miles (180 kilometers). After stage separation, Ship’s six Raptor engines took over, and Super Heavy conducted a series of test maneuvers before sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.
“Incredible flight for booster today,” SpaceX engineer Amanda Lee said during today’s webcast.
Halfway through its not-quite-orbital trip, Ship 37 opened a slot to deploy eight thin Starlink satellite simulators, in a manner reminiscent of cranking out candies from a Pez dispenser. Hundreds of SpaceX employees cheered as they watched space-to-ground video feeds at Starbase and at the company’s HQ in California. The dummy satellites were designed to burn up during atmospheric re-entry.
Today’s successful deployment buoyed SpaceX’s confidence that in the future, each Starship mission will be able to deploy scores of next-generation satellites for the Starlink broadband data constellation.
The end of today’s test mission came when Ship made a blazing descent through the atmosphere. At one point, a webcam picked up a view of debris flying off from the skirt around the engines at the bottom of the rocket ship. Yet another shot showed red-hot material being blasted away from Ship 37’s control flaps.
“We’re kind of being mean to this Starship,” SpaceX mission commentator Dan Huot said. “We’re really trying to see what are its limits. … We are pushing it beyond essentially what we think we’ll have to fly at.”
Despite the damage, Ship 37 was able to relight its rocket engines, flip around and splash down into the Indian Ocean. Then it exploded into flames. The whole test flight took just a little more than an hour.
“We promised maximum excitement. Starship delivered,” Huot said.
Starship is considered the world’s most powerful rocket, with liftoff thrust of 16.7 million pounds. That’s more than twice the oomph achieved by the Saturn V rocket during the Apollo era’s heyday.
A version of Starship is slated for use as the landing system for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which is currently due to take place in 2027 and would mark the first crewed moon landing since Apollo. SpaceX also aims to use Starship for missions to Mars. In May, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk laid out a goal of sending multiple uncrewed cargo Starships to the Red Planet during next year’s advantageous launch opportunity.
In order to meet that ambitious schedule, SpaceX has to demonstrate that Super Heavy and Ship can execute all the complex maneuvers that will be necessary — including controlled landings of both stages, and the ability to deploy payloads and refuel in space.
A lot was riding on this 10th test flight, figuratively speaking. The Starship test program has faced a string of setbacks over the past year. During the seventh and eighth flight tests, SpaceX successfully recovered the first stage at its launch pad, using an ingenious system that captured the autonomously controlled Super Heavy booster with a pair of giant mechanical arms known as “chopsticks.” But in both those cases, the second stage was lost during its flight in space.
The ninth flight test, conducted in May, ended prematurely when the upper stage spun out of control and broke up during descent. Then, in June, another Starship upper stage dubbed Ship 36 was destroyed in a catastrophic explosion as it was being readied for a static-fire test, most likely due to the failure of a pressurized tank in the payload bay section.
SpaceX conducted investigations into each mishap under supervision from the Federal Aviation Administration. In each case, SpaceX said it upgraded its hardware and operating procedures to address the failures. The FAA gave the go-ahead for today’s test last week.
The objectives for today’s flight included a set of challenging maneuvers that were conducted by Super Heavy after stage separation — including a directional flip-over that’s meant to make future missions more fuel-efficient.
Super Heavy also tested different configurations for executing a landing burn even if it experienced an engine failure during descent. Because of the experimental nature of Super Heavy’s flight plan, SpaceX made no attempt to recover the booster this time around.
As for Ship 37, the deployment of the dummy Starlink satellites was only one of the test objectives. Other experiments involved an in-space relight of one of the upper stage’s six Raptor engines, and stress tests of potentially vulnerable areas of the surface during descent.
Ship 37 was equipped with multiple types of metallic tiles to protect against the blazing heat of atmospheric re-entry. Some of the tiles were designed to make use of active cooling. SpaceX said its engineers would use the data from today’s tests to design future Ships that will be capable of returning safely to Starship’s launch site.
The next-generation Starship, known as Block 3, will use upgraded Raptor 3 rocket engines with the aim of adding 40 tons to the vehicle’s payload capacity. Block 3’s design will also include a docking system for on-orbit refueling — and will address the vulnerabilities that came to light during this year’s string of setbacks.
“There are thousands of engineering challenges that remain for both the Ship and the booster, but maybe the single biggest one is the reusable orbital heat shield,” Musk said during a pre-launch chat on SpaceX’s webcast. “We are confident in making a fully reusable orbital heat shield, but it will require many flights, many iterations, to figure out where the weak points are.”
