SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket successfully lifted off on its tenth test flight Tuesday evening. The mission achieved two long-sought milestones and ended a recent string of failures.
The 403-foot vehicle launched from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch facility and recently incorporated city, at 7:30 PM ET. This followed two scrubbed attempts earlier in the week. The rocket ascended on the power of 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines before separating approximately three minutes after liftoff.
During its descent, the Super Heavy booster executed a new maneuver. It intentionally shut down the engines typically used for landing and transitioned to its backup engines. This test will help engineers understand how the booster might perform in the event of an engine failure. The 232-foot-tall booster successfully completed a targeted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned.
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 for but failed to achieve on earlier missions. The company also successfully re-lit one of the Raptor engines in space before guiding the vehicle toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The vehicle tipped over and exploded upon impact.
During its descent, the exterior of the ship was exposed to incredible heat during atmospheric reentry. This provided an excellent test environment for the upgraded thermal protection system. SpaceX used this test to try out a series of experiments, including removing tiles from sections of the ship to see how its skin operates on reentry. They also tested 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. During the last flight, the ship had reached space but then lost attitude control during the coast phase, which prevented the payload doors from opening. Engineers appear to have overcome those issues.
This flight is a significant 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 will be ready to land humans on the moon by mid-2027 for NASA, or when it will 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.