SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian Ocean.
The rocket's 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines roared to life at 6:23 pm CDT (7:23 pm EDT; 23:23 UTC), throttling up to generate some 16.7 million pounds of thrust, by large measure more powerful than any rocket before Starship. Moments later, the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket began a vertical climb away from SpaceX's test site in Starbase, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.
From then on, the rocket executed its flight plan like clockwork. This was arguably SpaceX's most successful Starship test flight to date. The only flight with a similar claim occurred one year ago Monday, when the company caught the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch pad after soaring to the uppermost fringes of the atmosphere. But that flight didn't accomplish as much in space.
"Starship's eleventh flight test reached every objective, providing valuable data as we prepare the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy," SpaceX posted on X.
SpaceX didn't try to recover the Super Heavy booster on this flight, but the goals the company set before the launch included an attempt to guide the enormous rocket stage to a precise splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of South Texas. The booster, reused from a previous flight in March, also validated a new engine configuration for its landing burn, first reigniting 13 of its engines, then downshifting to five, then to three for the final hover.
That all worked, along with pretty much everything else apart from an indication on SpaceX's livestream that Starship's Super Heavy booster stage lost an engine early in its descent. The malfunctioning engine had no impact on the rest of the flight.
Flight 11 recap
This was the fifth and final flight of Starship's second-generation configuration, known as Version 2 or V2. It was the 11th full-scale Starship test flight overall.
It took a while for Starship V2 to meet SpaceX's expectations. The first three Starship V2 launches in January, March, and May ended prematurely due to problems in the rocket's propulsion and a fuel leak, breaking a string of increasingly successful Starship flights since 2023. Another Starship V2 exploded on a test stand in Texas in June, further marring the second-gen rocket's track record.
But SpaceX teams righted the program with a good test flight in August, the first time Starship V2 made it all the way to splashdown. Engineers learned a few lessons on that flight, including the inadequacy of a new metallic heat shield tile design that left a patch of orange oxidation down the side of the ship. They also found that another experiment with part of the ship's heat shield showed promising results. This method involved using a soft "crunch wrap" material to seal the gaps between the ship's ceramic tiles and prevent super-heated plasma from reaching the rocket's stainless steel skin.
Technicians installed the crunch wrap material in more places for Flight 11, and a first look at the performance of the ship during reentry and splashdown suggested the heat shield change worked well.
After reaching space, Starship shut down its six Raptor engines and coasted across the Atlantic Ocean and Africa before emerging over the Indian Ocean just before reentry. During its time in space, Starship released eight Starlink satellite mockups mimicking the larger size of the company's next-generation Starlink spacecraft. These new Starlink satellites will only be able to launch on Starship.
Starship also reignited one of its six engines for a brief maneuver to set up the ship's trajectory for reentry. With that, the stage was set for the final act of the test flight. How would the latest version of SpaceX's ever-changing heat shield design hold up against temperatures of 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius)?
The answer: Apparently quite good. While SpaceX has brought Starships back to Earth in one piece several times, this was the first time the ship made it through reentry relatively unscathed. Live video streaming from cameras onboard Starship showed a blanket of orange and purple plasma enveloping the rocket during reentry. This is now a familiar sight, thanks to connectivity with Starship through SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.
What was different Monday was the lack of any obvious damage to the heat shield or flaps throughout Starship's descent, a promising sign for SpaceX's chances of reusing the vehicle and its heat shield over and over again, without requiring any refurbishment. This, according to SpaceX's Elon Musk, is the acid test for determining Starship's overall success.
In the closing moments of Monday's flight, Starship flexed its flaps to perform a "dynamic banking maneuver" over the Indian Ocean, then flipped upright and fired its engines to slow for splashdown, simulating maneuvers the rocket will execute on future missions returning to the launch site. That will be one of the chief goals for the next phase of Starship's test campaign beginning next year.
Patience for V3
It will likely be at least a few months before SpaceX is ready to launch the next Starship flight. Technicians at Starbase are assembling the next Super Heavy booster and the first Starship V3 vehicle. Once integrated, the booster and ship are expected to undergo cryogenic testing and static fire testing before SpaceX moves forward with launch.
"Focus now turns to the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy, with multiple vehicles currently in active build and preparing for tests," SpaceX wrote on its website. "This next iteration will be used for the first Starship orbital flights, operational payload missions, propellant transfer, and more as we iterate to a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle with service to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond."
Starship V3 will have larger propellant tanks to increase the rocket's lifting capacity, upgraded Raptor 3 engines, and an improved payload compartment to support launches of real Starlink satellites. SpaceX will also use this version of the rocket for orbital refueling experiments, a long-awaited milestone for the Starship program now planned for some time next year. Orbital refueling is a crucial enabler for future Starship flights beyond low-Earth orbit, and is necessary for SpaceX to fulfill Musk's ambition to send ships to Mars, the founder's long-held goal for the company.
It's also required for Starship flights to the Moon. NASA has signed contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a human-rated derivative of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon as part of the agency's Artemis program. The orbital refueling demonstration is a key milestone on the NASA lunar lander contract. Getting this done as soon as possible is vitally important to NASA, which is seeing its Artemis Moon landing schedule slip, in part due to Starship delays.
None of it can really get started until Starship V3 is flying reliably and flying often. If the first Starship V3 flight goes well, SpaceX may attempt to put the next vehicle—Flight 13—into orbit to verify the ship's endurance in space. At some point, SpaceX will make the first attempt to bring a ship home from orbit for a catch by the launch tower, similar to the way SpaceX has caught Super Heavy boosters returning from the edge of space.
But first, ground crews are wrapping up work on a second Starship launch pad designed to accommodate the upgraded, taller Starship V3 rocket. Monday's flight marked the final launch from Pad 1 in its existing form. The differences with the second launch pad include its flame trench, a common fixture at many launch pads around the world. Pad 1 was not built with a flame trench, but instead features an elevated launch mount where the rocket sits prior to liftoff.
SpaceX is expected to overhaul Pad 1 in the coming months to reactivate it as a second launch pad option for Starship V3. All of this work is occurring in Texas as SpaceX prepares to bring online more Starship launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX says it will need a lot of pads to ramp up Starship to monthly, weekly, and eventually daily flights.
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