SpaceX conducted its tenth Starship flight after two scrubs, achieving suborbital flight and both stages returning to landing targets. The mission deployed eight dummy Starlink satellites using a new Pez-like deployer and demonstrated an in-space engine relight. Engineers deliberately removed some heat-shield tiles to stress reentry performance; the vehicle withstood reentry temperatures around 2,600°F but experienced an apparent aft explosion on descent. The success will calm some critics yet leaves schedule pressure for a 2027 NASA lunar crewed role and an ambitious, CEO-announced uncrewed Mars flight targeted for 2026, despite developmental delays.
Coming off a string of explosive failures, o n Tuesday night SpaceX once again launched its gigantic Starship rocket into space, with both its stages successfully returning to their separate landing targets on Earth. This time, the only huge explosions were planned one: final blasts as the two spacecraft touched down. After the launch had been scrubbed twice over the two prior days, the company's engineers could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
The flight demonstrated several key objectives, including completing a suborbital flight - something the previous three tests of the world's largest rocket couldn't achieve - and deploying a payload in space. Impressively, Starship even persevered despite being deliberately stripped of some of its experimental heat shield tiles to stress-test some of its weak points during reentry. The success of this 10th flight will be enough, for the time being, to quiet some of SpaceX's critics.
But with development still way behind schedule, the company is under enormous pressure to quickly deliver a finished product, since NASA planning to use Starship to bring astronauts to the surface of the Moon sometime in 2027. Needlessly inviting additional scrutiny and setting even more unrealistic expectations, CEO Elon Musk has bragged that the flagship rocket will complete an uncrewed flight to Mars by 2026, which is now just months away.
After launching from the company's Starbase facility in south Texas, the rocket's upper stage, the Starship proper, continued into space, where it demonstrated a new Pez-like mechanism for deploying the next generation of Starlink satellites by releasing eight dummy satellites into orbit. It also showed it could relight one of its six engines in space, an essential step towards making the vehicle reusable. But as the spacecraft re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, facing temperatures around 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, part of its aft appeared to explode, the
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