After Explosions and Failures, SpaceX Finally Lands Starship Test Success

SpaceX's Starship program experienced a significant triumph on Tuesday night, following a string of high-profile failures. It completed its 10th test flight, which included deploying a payload, relighting the engines, and safely landing the spacecraft.

At 7:30 p.m. ET, the world's most powerful rocket system, which includes the stainless-steel Starship spacecraft and its Super Heavy booster, took off from SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas. The 400-foot rocket took off with 3.3 million pounds of thrust from 33 Raptor engines and then went on a suborbital path.

Starship used several Starlink simulators for the first time. These simulators are around the same size as the company's next-generation satellites. It then successfully restarted one of its six engines, which SpaceX had previously tried and failed to do twice. About an hour after it took off, Starship came back to Earth, burned up during landing, and landed in the Indian Ocean, west of Australia. A buoy camera captured the moment, which appears to be an explosion following the impact. SpaceX said that the vehicle's final design does not include sea landings. Instead, the plan is to bring Starship directly back to the launchpad.

The booster also made a planned splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, despite losing one of its engines. SpaceX did not use the tower's robotic "chopsticks" to try to snag the rocket this time, unlike in previous testing.

The successful splashdown occurred after months of technical issues. SpaceX said that in June, a Starship blew up during a pre-flight engine test because "a sudden energetic event resulted in the complete loss of the ship." That happened weeks after flight nine terminated with what the firm called a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." Earlier this year, other tests ended in explosions, debris fields all across Florida, and booster failures.

SpaceX claims it has made "hardware and operational changes" to improve dependability since then.

Elon Musk, the CEO, said on X that it was hard: "There is a reason no fully reusable rocket has been built—it is an insanely hard problem." Furthermore, it needs to be able to be used again and again quickly (like an airplane). This approach is the only way to enable human life on more than one planet.

NASA has not yet approved Starship for human flight. To do so, the agency's human-rating process will require the ship to complete several successful missions, demonstrating that it is safe, reliable, and capable of aborting in the event of an emergency. 

Musk says the basic goal is still clear: "Reliable rockets that can be used again and again quickly are essential... Every launch teaches us more and more about what it takes to make life on other planets possible.”