SpaceX’s Super Heavy–Starship logged its strongest outing to date Tuesday night, notching controlled splashdowns for both stages and completing the program’s first in-flight payload deployment. The one-hour, six-minute mission lifted off from Starbase, Texas, at 7:30 p.m. ET after two days of weather and ground-system delays, marking a sharp turnaround from three consecutive failures earlier this year.
The 40-story rocket roared away on 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines, generating roughly 16 million pounds of thrust—more than twice NASA’s SLS and the Saturn V—and cleanly separated. On the return, controllers deliberately shut down one of the three landing engines on the Super Heavy booster to simulate a failure. The vehicle remained stable during its tail-first descent and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on target.
Starship, the upper stage, flew a suborbital trajectory and executed two major demos critical for future operations: it deployed eight Starlink satellite simulators using a Pez-style dispenser and successfully restarted a Raptor engine in space. Both are prerequisites for routine payload delivery and complex mission profiles.
Reentry provided an aggressive thermal-protection trial. Cameras showed a protective skirt around the engine bay breaking apart under heating and partial melting near the hinge of a control flap. Despite the damage, Starship held attitude authority throughout, descended tail-first, and performed a targeted, rocket-powered splashdown in the Indian Ocean. As expected for a water landing at this stage of testing, the vehicle subsequently broke apart; the objective was controlled descent, not recovery.
The performance is a psychological and technical boost for SpaceX as it pushes toward rapid reuse and tower “catch” attempts at the launch site. It also matters for NASA: a modified Starship is slated to serve as the Human Landing System for the first crewed lunar touchdown of the Artemis program. To reach the Moon, the lander must be refueled in low-Earth orbit via a rapid campaign of roughly a dozen or more Super Heavy tanker launches, followed by autonomous transfer of cryogenic methane and oxygen while minimizing boil-off. None of this has been demonstrated at scale, and sustaining that cadence without failure remains one of the architecture’s highest-risk elements.
Beyond refueling, the campaign must validate long-duration cryo management, expand engine relight margins, and prove repeatable turnaround times between launches. On the lunar surface, a 16-story lander introduces its own hazards: plume effects, regolith erosion, slope stability, and tip-over risk, with astronauts descending via an external elevator from the upper crew section. Any incident—on the pad, in ascent, during on-orbit refueling, or on approach to the Moon—could trigger lengthy stand-downs and reviews.
Even with Tuesday’s successes, multiple current and former program insiders remain skeptical that a 2027 crewed landing is achievable without changes to the schedule or architecture. Still, this flight closes several gaps at once: ascent reliability, controlled booster recovery to water, a demonstrated on-orbit engine relight, and a first end-to-end payload deployment sequence. It shifts the conversation from “can Starship survive the profile?” to “can SpaceX industrialize it”—moving quickly to tower catches, tougher reentries with more resilient thermal protection, and the first orbital propellant-transfer demos.
For readers asking what comes next, watch for signs SpaceX is ready to attempt a tower catch, announcements of large-scale cryogenic transfer tests, and evidence of faster turnarounds between flights. Those milestones—not just more splashdowns—will determine whether Starship can transition from spectacular tests to a repeatable transportation system capable of launching heavy payloads, expanding Starlink, and, eventually, landing crews on the Moon.
