SpaceX’s Starship rocket on Tuesday deployed its first batch of mock Starlink satellites in space and tested new heat shield tiles on its plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, clinching development milestones that had been held up by a streak of previous testing failures.
The giant 403-foot-tall Starship system in its tenth test flight lifted off around 7:30 p.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase facilities in south Texas, followed by its towering Super Heavy booster releasing the Starship upper stage into space three minutes later, dozens of miles above ground.
Cruising in space some 30 minutes into the flight, Starship’s “Pez”-like satellite deployment system dispensed eight dummy Starlink satellites for the first time, a key demonstration for a rocket that represents the future of SpaceX’s dominant launch business.
Much is riding on the rocket’s success. NASA picked Starship to put its first astronauts on the moon’s surface since the Apollo program. And Musk sees Starship, designed to be fully reusable, as core to fulfilling his goal of routinely ferrying humans to Mars.
Starship’s blazing-hot supersonic reentry through Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean roughly an hour into the mission put a variety of hexagonal heat shield tiles to the test as billionaire Elon Musk’s space company tries to create an exterior shield that requires little to no refurbishment after each use.
Spacecraft that return to Earth have historically required new heat shields or repairs after each mission given the destructive and brutal erosion that occurs from high-speed atmospheric friction. The heat shield tiles on NASA’s retired Space Shuttle were fit for dozens of missions, though some had to be replaced.
“There are thousands of engineering challenges that remain, for both the ship and the booster, but maybe the single biggest one is the reusable orbital heat shield,” Musk said on Monday on a SpaceX live stream.
The mission concluded with a steady, engine-guided vertical landing on the ocean’s surface west of Australia.
The 171-foot-tall Starship then toppled over before exploding into a giant fireball, an expected demise likely triggered by its flight termination system.
The test flight showed long-sought progress in SpaceX’s test-to-failure development campaign after three previous failures occurred much earlier in flight and on a test stand in Texas.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy congratulated SpaceX on X and said: “Flight 10’s success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III.”
Artemis 3, the first crewed moon landing under NASA’s Artemis program that will use Starship, is scheduled to occur in 2027, though space analysts expect that date to slip.
A lengthy development to-do list remains for SpaceX’s next-generation rocket before it can fly humans into deep space, including novel in-space refueling demonstrations and sticking a safe landing on the rugged lunar terrain.
SpaceX, which Musk expects to record around $15.5 billion in revenue this year, has swiftly churned out new Starship prototypes at Starbase, a sprawling and rapidly growing rocket industrial complex. The area was made a municipality in May by local voters, many of them SpaceX workers.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet business, a major source of company revenue, is tied to Starship’s success. Musk aims to use Starship to launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, which have so far been deployed by SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, into space.
On Tuesday’s flight, Starship’s 232-foot-tall Super Heavy booster, which normally returns to land in its launch tower’s giant chopstick-like catch-arms, instead targeted the Gulf of Mexico waters after lofting Starship to space. The water landing was meant to demonstrate an alternate landing engine configuration.
