Spectacular new footage gives us great looks at the final moments of the latest test flight of Starship, the huge rocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle Mars.
That mission, the 10th-ever for the 397-foot-tall (121-meter-tall) megarocket, lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas on Tuesday evening (Aug. 26).
Everything went well on Flight 10. Starship’s Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage both achieved their chief mission objectives, ultimately steering their way to controlled splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian Ocean, respectively. But the journey took a toll on Ship, as newly released imagery shows.
On Thursday afternoon (Aug. 28), SpaceX posted on two photos and two videos on X of Ship descending toward the waves beneath a cloudy blue sky.
The vehicle’s belly appears to have been toasted golden-brown by the heat of reentry. Ship sports other battle scars as well; several chunks are missing near its base, which looks a bit like the ear of a dog that lost a fight.
But SpaceX expected such blemishes, for it had stacked the deck against Ship to give it an even tougher test on Flight 10. And the vehicle powered through to finish its mission in style.
“Starship made it through reentry with intentionally missing tiles, completed maneuvers to intentionally stress its flaps, had visible damage to its aft skirt and flaps, and still executed a flip and landing burn that placed it approximately 3 meters from its targeted splashdown point,” SpaceX wrote in Thursday’s X post.
It was the first successful splashdown of 2025 for Ship, which broke apart prematurely on all three of its previous test flights this year.
The upper stage also notched other big milestones on Flight 10. For example, it successfully re-ignited one of its Raptor engines in space, something that had happened on just one previous Starship flight. It also deployed a payload (eight dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites) in space, which no Ship had ever managed to do before.
If flight testing continues to go well, Starship could go far afield relatively soon: SpaceX hopes to launch its first trial missions to Mars with the megarocket as early as next year, according to company founder and CEO Elon Musk.
