SpaceX has finally pulled off its most successful launch of its Starship rocket on Tuesday, marking its tenth flight after a number of failed attempts. However, re-entry made its mark with its rear flaps becoming scorched during splashdown.
A video posted by The Daily Mail shows the moment a fiery yellow-orange blaze lit up the vast stretches of the dark blue Indian Ocean. The SpaceX starship endured engine blasts with the rear flaps burned while the spacecraft settled into the ocean.
Aside from this incident, the launch has been successful. “Great work by the SpaceX team!!,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on X. This launch comes after three launches ended in failure, and one rocket exploded on its test stand in June.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket built to date. The company has designed the rocket to one day be a fully reusable system, capable of carrying people to the Moon and Mars.
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Tuesday’s flight began as planned, with all 33 of the booster’s engines firing up, and the booster separating and falling into the Gulf of Mexico in about seven minutes. Starship continued to ascend, reaching a maximum height of almost 200 kilometers above Earth before coasting around the planet.
The latest launch was originally planned for Sunday, but it was called off when a ground systems’ glitch forced the company to halt the countdown plan. Soon after that, Musk clarified the cause was a liquid oxygen on the ground side, forcing the postponement.
It was then scheduled for Monday, but that was also called off because of the presence of anvil clouds over the launch area. These clouds posed a threat to the launch due to lightning risk.
Starship consists of two stainless-steel elements: a huge booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or Ship for short. Both stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX’s next-gen Raptor engine. The current Starship variant known as Version 2, stands 397 feet (121 meters) tall and features a total of 39 Raptors.
READ: SpaceX aborts 10th test flight under Musk’s watch (
Musk said in a livestreamed update during May that the next iteration, V3, will be 408 feet (124.4 m) tall. One of his slides also depicted a variant described as “Future Starship,” which will tower at a whopping 466 feet (142 m). This latter vehicle is presumably Starship V4, which Musk discussed in an X post on Monday evening the day before Starship Flight 10 lifted off.
“Starship V4 will have 42 engines when 3 more Raptors are added to a significantly longer ship. That will fly in 2027. Starship V3 is a massive upgrade from the current V2 and should be through production and testing by end of year with heavy flight activity next year,” Musk wrote in the post.
If things go according to plan, some of these V3 flights will head to Mars. SpaceX is targeting 2026 for its first-ever Starship Red Planet missions, which will be uncrewed, stripped-down test flights.