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SpaceX’s Starship rocket looked less star-crossed in its tenth test flight Tuesday: The giant launch vehicle appeared to accomplish every key objective in the mission, breaking a streak of Starships exploding in space, in the upper atmosphere, and even on the ground.
Tuesday’s liftoff at 6:30 p.m. Central from SpaceX’s facility at Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas, followed two earlier scrubs, one Sunday to troubleshoot a liquid-oxygen supply line and another on Monday forced by weather.
The 404-foot-tall rocket eased off its pad, powered by its Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor engines, and arced over the Gulf of Mexico. One of those methane-fueled engines shut down about 1.5 minutes into flight, but the booster powered through to its cutoff.
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Super Heavy then performed engine burns to descend back to the Gulf and splash down, a less challenging return that SpaceX chose instead of having the booster fly back to be caught by the launch tower’s “chopsticks” metal arms as it had on three earlier launches. The video cut off right as the booster was tipping into the water.
The second stage—which SpaceX also calls just “Starship”—continued ascending atop its six Raptor engines to a suborbital trajectory heading around the world. Starship did not get that far on its seventh and eighth test launches, both ending with the upper stage exploding and scattering fiery shrapnel across Caribbean skies.
SpaceX timed Starship’s launch for late afternoon to allow for it to land in daylight on the other side of the world. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
The ninth launch in late May did see a successful second-stage engine cutoff, but then a fuel leak caused the stage to begin spinning. SpaceX scrubbed the remaining tests and watched the vehicle burn up in an uncontrolled reentry.
Tuesday’s test flight followed a different script, with the suborbital Starship opening its payload door to eject eight simulated Starship satellites. SpaceX had first planned that test for Starship’s seventh flight as a preview of how this rocket can advance its buildout of the Starlink broadband constellation.
In a second test, Starship briefly lit one of its Raptor engines, a preview of SpaceX’s plan to have one Starship meet another in orbit to transfer propellant for missions farther out.
Starship’s reentry had some intentionally suspenseful moments imposed by the company’s ambition for upper-stage reuse with minimal refurbishment. On recent flights, the company has experimented with removing some heat shielding to see if the stage’s bare metal survives unscathed.
This time, SpaceX’s livestream, relayed by Starlink satellites, treated viewers to fireworks beyond the bright glow of superheated plasma building up around it as it dropped into the upper atmosphere at some 16,000mph.
Junk in Starship’s trunk after something blew up and left damaged metal bits dangling. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
First, something in the skirt around the engines blew up, leaving bits of bent metal dangling afterwards (SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot’s reaction: “That’s not what we want to see”). Then one of Starship’s aerodynamic fins began to burn through at its aft end, but held together through that fiery ride into blue skies above the Indian Ocean.
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Just past an hour and six minutes after launch, a buoy stationed by SpaceX provided video of the Starship landing engines first in the water. Much of its hull somehow turned orange from the original silver of its stainless steel body and the black of its heat-shielding tiles.
The stage tipped over and exploded. “Farewell, ship 37,” Huot said, referring to the stage’s status as the 37th built by SpaceX.
He and his fellow commentator Amanda Lee, a build reliability engineer with SpaceX, sounded relieved to see the mission cross off its to-do items. They should have.
While Starship’s first six launches saw this rocket perform increasingly well, the Block 2 design used on subsequent ones suffered the in-flight failures of the seventh, eighth, and ninth flights and an on-the-ground explosion in June during fueling for a test fire of its engines.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sees Starship as critical to his ambitions to build a city of human colonists on Mars. He made a guest appearance during Monday’s launch webcast, wearing a “Nuke Mars” t-shirt, to discuss plans that include sending the first Starships to the Red Planet next year.
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This was not a reassuring sight during Starship’s reentry. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
He did not, however, mention another party with considerable interest in Starship’s progress: NASA. In 2021, the space agency awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to build a version of Starship’s upper stage to serve as a human lunar landing vehicle for its Artemis missions to the Moon.
That outsized bet—since revised to $4 billion, with $2.7 billion already paid out—banks on SpaceX not only flying Starship to orbit, something it has yet to accomplish, but refueling the lunar-lander version of Starship by a series of other Starships before its journey to the Moon.
NASA still projects its first crewed landing to happen by the middle of 2027. But SpaceX’s Starship delays and setbacks make that timetable look exceedingly doubtful even if NASA’s own Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, designed to send astronauts to lunar orbit to meet Starship, encounter no further schedule slips of their own.
Meanwhile, China continues to advance its own plans for crewed lunar landings involving simpler rockets and spacecraft.
NASA has since arranged a plan B, a $3.4 billion contract awarded to Blue Origin in 2023 to develop a second lunar lander to fly on that firm’s New Glenn rocket. That large launch vehicle, however, has only flown once so far; it looks a little more likely to help the US return astronauts to the Moon before China can send its own there for the first time.
But acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy—who gained that title in addition to serving as Secretary of Transportation after President Trump withdrew the Musk-endorsed nomination of private astronaut and payments billionaire Jared Isaacman—stayed optimistic in an X post congratulating SpaceX.
“Flight 10’s success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III,” Duffy wrote. “This is a great day for @NASA and our commercial space partners.”
About Rob Pegoraro
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