SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket successfully launched on its 10th test flight Tuesday evening, marking a turning point for the program after multiple failures in past attempts. The 403-foot rocket lifted off from Starbase at 7:30 p.m. ET, riding 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines. About three minutes into flight, the booster and upper stage separated as planned.
On descent, the Super Heavy booster trialed a new approach by shutting down its primary landing engines and switching to backup engines, simulating a failure scenario. The test ended in success, with the 232-foot booster making a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship Upper Stage Success
The upper stage achieved a long-awaited milestone by opening its payload door in space and releasing eight Starlink mass-simulator satellites. SpaceX also managed to relight a Raptor engine in orbit before guiding the vehicle to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, where it tipped and exploded on impact — but only after completing its test objectives.
During reentry, Starship’s upgraded heat shield endured extreme atmospheric conditions. Engineers deliberately left some tiles off sections to study how exposed areas behave, while also testing new metallic and actively cooled tiles. This experiment will inform future iterations of the spacecraft.
Maintaining Communications
Crucially, Starship maintained communications with SpaceX throughout the mission, unlike its previous flight where attitude control issues prevented payload operations. Engineers appear to have resolved those problems, giving the program a much-needed technical win.
The successful demonstration marks meaningful progress toward SpaceX’s ambitious goals, including future moon missions for NASA and eventually sending humans and cargo to Mars. However, many technical milestones still remain before those objectives can be realized.
What The Author Thinks
Starship’s latest flight shows why persistence in engineering matters. After repeated public failures, SpaceX could have scaled back or delayed, but instead kept testing aggressively. That willingness to fail fast and improve may frustrate critics, yet it is exactly why the company keeps inching closer to reshaping space travel. It’s messy, explosive, and imperfect — but undeniably effective.
Featured image credit: SpaceX via Unsplash
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