There is a reason no fully reusable rocket has been built it’s an insanely hard problem, Elon Musk said earlier this year. SpaceX’s Starship moved one step closer to cracking it on August 26. In its tenth flight test, the 404-foot-tall Starship-Super Heavy vehicle not only SpaceX’s Starship Test Achieves Key Firsts in Payload Deployment and Engine Relight: a payload deployment and an in-space engine relight.
The Starbase, Texas launch started with all 33 methane-burning Raptor 2 engines on the Super Heavy booster firing, producing about 16.5 million pounds of thrust almost twice as much as NASA’s Saturn V. Following a hot-staging maneuver, during which the six Raptors on the upper stage burned before separating from the booster, Starship propulsed onto a suborbital path. The booster, on the other hand, performed a precision flip and boostback burn for a scheduled splashdown in the Gulf of America and purposefully shut down one of its three center engines to test redundancy. A spare engine in the middle ring took over the edge, enabling the stage to hover momentarily over the water before it shut down.
Starship in orbit, meanwhile, opened its side-mounted payload bay and ejected eight Starlink satellite simulators through a Pez-dispenser-like device. It was the system’s inaugural deployment of a payload in flight, a function necessary for its role in launching 60 next-generation Starlink satellites per mission, each flight carrying approximately 20 times the capacity of a Falcon 9. Shortly thereafter, one of the upper stage’s Raptor engines was reignited a process critical to future deorbit burns and interplanetary missions.
The reentry process was intended to be harsh. Engineers had cut large segments of ceramic heat shield tiles to reveal exposed areas, placed metallic tiles such as one with active cooling, and deburred tile edges to fix hot spots seen in previous flights. The spacecraft also carried operational catch fittings to test their thermal and structural integrity for future mid-air tower captures. As Starship plunged back into the atmosphere at over 26,000 km/h, plasma temperatures exceeded 2,500°F, partially burning through flap surfaces and leading to wear on protective structures around the engine bay. Yet the flaps remained operational, and the ship maintained control throughout.
Dan Huot, SpaceX’s communications manager, described the approach candidly: “We’re kind of being mean to this Starship a little bit. We’re really trying to put it through the paces and kind of poke on what some of its weak points are.” The ship’s final moments saw it flip from a belly-down orientation to vertical, fire its engines for a landing burn, and splash down in the Indian Ocean. Both stages broke apart after water impact, as expected, but the data gathered will inform the next generation of vehicles.
These milestones are stepping stones to an entirely reusable launch system the “holy grail” of rocketry for Musk. In contrast to Falcon 9, which jettisons its second stage, Starship plans to recover and reuse both stages quickly, reducing the cost of launch and making high-frequency missions possible. That capability is at the core of NASA’s Artemis program, which depends on a lunar lander version of Starship to transport astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2027.
Before SpaceX can achieve that, it needs to become proficient at orbital refueling. SpaceX is set to test as early as March 2025 by launching two Starships into low Earth orbit to dock and offload cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen. Such a move, as NASA’s Kent Chojnacki wrote, would crack open the opportunity to move massive amounts of payload and cargo outside of the Earth’s sphere. For Artemis III, the Human Landing System Starship will require 12 to 15 tanker flights to load its 1,200-ton propellant tanks prior to leaving for the Moon.
Heat protection is still one of the most difficult engineering problems. The reusable heat shield needs to survive repeated flights through searing heat without losing its integrity something no orbital-class rocket has yet done. SpaceX’s experimental strategy, flying often and incrementally tweaking the design between flights, is aimed at stumbling upon a solution. As Musk described it, “Many flights, many iterations” are necessary to discover and remediate weaknesses.
As production increases at Texas’s Starfactory and new facilities come up in Florida, SpaceX is building towards a quicker launch schedule perhaps one Starship flight every three to four weeks. The next upgrade, Block 3, will have larger fuel tanks, improved flaps, and a better heat shield, targeting full-orbit missions and ultimately Mars readiness. For the time being, Flight 10’s performance provides a significant milestone that highlights steady progress toward achieving reusability as a standard in spaceflight.
