SpaceX's massive Starship rocket racked up some much-needed successes on its 10th test flight, hitting key test objectives and breaking a streak of failures that bedeviled the spaceship this year.
The silver and black two-stage rocket, which stands about 400 feet tall, blasted off from the SpaceX facility in south Texas near Boca Chica Beach right when the launch window opened at 7:30 pm ET on Tuesday evening.
The largest and most powerful rocket ever built, Starship is an essential part of NASA's effort to return astronauts to the moon, and of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's goal of colonizing Mars.
SpaceX also wants to use Starship to deploy a huge number of its Starlink satellites. But on the last test flight the ship's payload bay door failed to open.
This time, the door opened and SpaceX workers on the ground could be heard cheering on a live webcast as video beamed back the view from inside of Starship's upper stage. The video showed a metal device, similar to a huge PEZ dispenser, ratcheting up and ejecting eight dummy satellites out the door and into space.
"The last one has been deployed," said SpaceX webcast commentator Dan Huot. "Heck yeah, everybody!"
As planned, the rocket's lower stage returned to Earth and briefly hovered over the waters of the Gulf before splashing down. After deploying the satellite simulators, the upper stage re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, allowing SpaceX to study the performance of its heat shield and flaps, which Huot noted looked a little "toasty."
Video from a buoy showed the spacecraft slowly coming down on target into the Indian Ocean, as SpaceX workers cheered and clapped some more.
"Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting tenth flight test of Starship!" SpaceX wrote on X.
This smooth flight was very different from three tests earlier this year, which saw the upper stage of the rocket explode or disintegrate for various reasons, much to the dismay of many in the space community. "I think there have been more problems than the community and maybe even SpaceX have expected there," said Carissa Christensen, a satellite expert who is CEO and founder of BryceTech.
The multiple upper-stage losses, plus a rocket spectacularly exploding on the launch pad in June, resulted in the space community watching this Starship test with even more than the usual high level of interest.
"Starship is in many ways the flagship SpaceX program right now," Christensen said.
Still, she points out that no matter what happens during a single test flight of Starship, SpaceX's place as the leading American launch company is secure.
"SpaceX conducts more than half the world's launches," noted Christensen. "It deploys 80% of the world's satellites."
Even as SpaceX worked to launch Starship this week, dealing with delays due to weather and a glitch in a ground system that loaded oxygen into the rocket, its other launch activities continued without incident.
On Sunday, a robotic SpaceX capsule carrying food and other supplies for NASA astronauts on the International Space Station successfully lifted off on one of the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rockets. And earlier on Tuesday, a Falcon 9 launched and deployed a defense satellite for Luxembourg.
Copyright 2025 NPR
