SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket successfully completed its tenth test flight on Tuesday evening. The mission achieved several long-sought milestones and ended a previous string of failures. The 403-foot vehicle lifted off from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch facility, at 7:30 p.m. ET following two scrubbed attempts earlier in the week.
The rocket ascended on the power of 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines. The booster stage separated approximately three minutes after liftoff. On its descent, the Super Heavy booster executed a new maneuver by intentionally shutting down the engines used for landing and transitioning to backup engines. This test provided valuable data for engineers on how the booster might perform in the event of a failure. The 232-foot-tall booster successfully completed a targeted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, the upper stage, also called Starship, reached space. For the first time on a Starship flight, it opened its Pez-style payload door and released eight Starlink mass-simulator satellites. This demonstrated a key capability that SpaceX had planned but failed to achieve on earlier missions. The company also successfully relit one of the Raptor engines in space before guiding the vehicle toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. During this landing attempt, the vehicle tipped over and exploded.
The descent provided an excellent test environment for the upgraded thermal protection system as the ship’s exterior was exposed to incredible heat during atmospheric reentry. SpaceX used this opportunity to conduct several experiments. These included removing tiles from sections of the ship to see how its skin operates on reentry, as well as testing a new metallic tile and an actively cooled tile.
Most importantly, the upper stage completed the entire test and splashed down in the Indian Ocean without losing communication with SpaceX engineers. This was a significant improvement over the last flight, where the ship lost attitude control during the coast phase, which had prevented the payload doors from opening. Engineers appear to have overcome those issues.
This flight is a major win for SpaceX, which had repeatedly lost the Starship upper stage due to a series of technical failures. The persistent issues had raised questions about whether the rocket would be ready to land humans on the moon by mid-2027 for NASA, or when it would be capable of deploying next-generation Starlink satellites.
This test marks a material advancement for the Starship program, which the company ultimately wants to use to send humans and cargo to Mars. While SpaceX still must complete a series of tough technical milestones, it got one step closer with this flight.