Starship’s successful payload deployment by SpaceX

SpaceX’s more than 400-foot-tall Starship rocket returned to form Tuesday, deploying its first payload and completing critical heat shield tests following a string of in-flight and preflight failures.

The spacecraft experienced different issues on each of its previous three test flights, with explosions in January and March disrupting air travel. In June, a Starship exploded on the test stand as it was preparing for Flight 10, pushing the vehicle’s 10th sojourn to Tuesday.

But the mission was a roaring success, completing all major test objectives and marking Starship’s first successful splashdown since November.

SpaceX is betting on Starship to deploy larger batches of Starlink satellites than its workhorse Falcon 9 can handle, as well as fulfill CEO Elon Musk’s ambitions of colonizing Mars. NASA, meanwhile, is wagering that SpaceX will develop a human landing system (HLS) variant of Starship in time for the Artemis 3 lunar landing, scheduled for mid-2027.

The company will need to demonstrate a bevy of capabilities before NASA entrusts it to land astronauts on the moon. But after recent hiccups, Tuesday’s bounce back could begin to right the ship.

“Flight 10’s success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the moon on Artemis 3,” Sean Duffy, interim NASA administrator and secretary of transportation, wrote on X. “This is a great day for NASA and our commercial space partners.”

Starship bounces back

Flight 10 launched from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas. The two-stage vehicle’s Super Heavy booster lit its 33 Raptor engines, lifting off with 10.8 million pounds of propellant and generating more power than 64 Boeing 747 airliners.

The Starship upper stage then lit its six Raptor engines and jettisoned the booster, which splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. During the landing burn, a backup engine stood in for one of Super Heavy’s three center engines, which was intentionally disabled.

Starship, meanwhile, completed its ascent burn and reached a suborbital trajectory, where it deployed its first payload—eight dummy Starlink satellites. The rocket used a Pez-dispenser-like mechanism to release the satellites from a cargo bay, unlike many rockets that store cargo in the nosecone. The Starlink deployment had been a planned objective for the three previous test flights.

After completing its second-ever Raptor engine relight—a critical capability for missions beyond Earth orbit—Starship descended toward a designated location in the Indian Ocean. The reentry phase gave SpaceX valuable data that will be used to design future versions of the ship that could be caught back at the launch pad, a feat the company achieved for the first time with Super Heavy last year.

Musk has called reusability of both Starship stages the “holy grail” of rocketry. The elusive capability would greatly lower the time and cost to launch, allowing SpaceX to ramp up Starlink deployments. It could also enable the transfer of propellant between Starships on orbit, which will be required for missions to the moon and Mars. The maneuver calls for a pair of ships to launch in rapid succession.

But there’s a reason full reusability has never been achieved. During reentry, Starship is exposed to temperatures in the neighborhood of 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, placing immense strain on its heat shield. Typically, atmospheric forces are great enough to render the heat shield unusable beyond a handful of missions, as was the case for NASA’s space shuttle.

During a SpaceX livestream of Monday’s scrubbed Flight 10 launch attempt, Musk said “many flights, many iterations” will be required to identify “weak points” in the company’s design.

“There are thousands of engineering challenges that remain for both the ship and the booster, but maybe the single biggest one is the reusable orbital heat shield,” Musk said.

Starship test flights in 2025 have aimed to test multiple ceramic and metal heat shield tile options, including one with “active cooling” technology. It has flown both the rocket and booster at higher angles of attack to push them to their structural limits. Earlier this year, it removed a significant number of tiles to avoid shucking them off as the rocket scrapes against the catch apparatus.

Failures before the reentry phase prevented SpaceX from completing those experiments—until Tuesday.

On the Flight 10 livestream, SpaceX communications manager Dann Huot noted that portions of the ship’s four flaps were partially burned through. But there were no “gouges” on the structure, which appeared on previous flights in locations where the heat shield was uneven.

After smoothing out the tile line ahead of Tuesday’s mission, Huot said the ship experienced only a “little bit of hot spot, a little bit of warping.”

“We’re kind of being mean to this Starship a little bit,” Huot said. “We’re really trying to put it through the paces and kind of poke [at] what some of its weak points are…We’re really trying to find the edges that we can operate at.”

Starship approached for landing on its side, as if about to perform a belly flop. But moments before splashdown, it ignited its engines for a final burn and flipped itself upright. Both the rocket and booster exploded after landing, as engineers had anticipated. Their thunderous applause could be heard on the livestream as the smoke cleared.

“There are 100 different variables that we could tweak with the heat shield tiles,” Musk said Monday, “but the only way to know exactly what we should be adjusting is to fly repeatedly and to be able to examine the ship upon landing.”

More work ahead

The SpaceX CEO predicted Tuesday that Starship would be ready for an orbital propellant transfer demonstration by next year. NASA’s Starship HLS program manager in November said the agency hoped for that work to begin in the first half of 2025.

With that timeline slipping, NASA’s mid-2027 target for Artemis 3 could be in jeopardy. Per a December 2023 review of the Starship HLS project, the space agency predicted with 70 percent confidence that the lander would not be ready by February 2028.

Artemis 3 has already slipped twice due to a variety of factors, opening the door for China to reach the moon before NASA astronauts return. The country’s space agency is targeting a crewed landing in 2030 and earlier this month completed an important test of its lander.

SpaceX will need to ramp up Starship’s launch cadence to meet NASA’s timeline. Following Flight 9 in May, Musk said cadence for the next three missions will be “faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks.” However, the SpaceX boss has also called the moon a “distraction” and said the company is “going straight to Mars.”

The sooner SpaceX launches its next test flight, the sooner it can introduce a taller, more powerful version of Starship called Block 3. The upgraded vehicle is intended to fly to low-Earth orbit, where orbital refueling would take place—all flights so far have been suborbital. It is projected to carry up to 150 metric tons of payload, surpassing NASA’s Apollo-era Saturn V.

SpaceX earlier this year received FAA approval to increase the number of Starship launches and landings at Starbase. By the end of next year, it hopes to open Gigabay, a planned complement to its Starfactory manufacturing facility. Ultimately, it aims to churn out hundreds of Starships annually.

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Editor’s note: This story first appeared on FLYING.