SpaceX Starship soars in orbit, still aiming for ship catch in unprecedented test flight

A crowd gathers to watch Starship 40 as it enters the SpaceX launch complex in Starbase, Texas, on July 22.

For Starship to be truly successful and deliver on CEO Elon Musk’s promises, both pieces of the vehicle — the Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper Starship spacecraft — will have to routinely survive trips back home so they can be flown again.

SpaceX calls it “the holy grail of rocketry.”

On top of that? SpaceX wants it to be rapidly reusable — going from landing back on dry ground to blasting off again in quick succession. That would set it apart from a vehicle like NASA’s Space Shuttle, which required weeks of refurbishment between flights.

Musk has called achieving these goals “preposterously difficult.”

But there’s good reason to chase the dream: “If full and rapid reusability can be achieved, it reduces the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 100 or more,” he added.

In a November statement, SpaceX also laid out the company’s vision for a fully reusable Starship that “will enable future missions to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, expand the worldwide Starlink network, launch our Starmind supercompute constellation, extend the light of consciousness to the stars, and make life multiplanetary.”

SpaceX wasn’t able to attempt a recovery of the Super Heavy rocket booster on Friday. But there’s still hope it can make history by returning the Starship spacecraft to a landing at its Mechazilla launch tower in South Texas on Saturday afternoon.

One goal for Starship was to send 26 Starlink satellites into orbit, and it did so without a hitch earlier in the mission.

But a few of those Starlink satellites had an extra mission beyond just beaming internet connectivity to SpaceX customers on the ground: Three of the satellites were equipped with cameras.

They were designed to peer back at Starship as they slid out of the cargo bay and capture images of the heat shield — a vital component. The shield is a layer of hexagonal, ceramic tiles that will protect the upper Starship spacecraft as it experiences the immense stress of reentering Earth’s thick inner atmosphere at speeds that may top 17,600 miles per hour (28,324 kilometers per hour).

SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said engineers spent a few hours examining that satellite imagery. “Our heat shield team reviewed all the data we got from our ground tracking cameras and from those satellite cameras and confirmed the heat shield is in a good posture for a reentry and return to launch site.”

That’s a positive sign that Starship is still on track to attempt to land back in Starbase, Texas Saturday afternoon.

SpaceX launched the first full-scale Starship rocket in April 2023, and the vast majority of the 14 test flights that have occurred since have lasted about an hour or less and stuck to a low-slung, suborbital trajectory.

Only the last test mission, Flight 14, in September — the first Starship mission to reach Earth orbit — stretched longer, clocking in at a little over three hours.

Though SpaceX had originally hoped Flight 14 would span more than nine hours, it opted to cut the journey short in part because of an unexpected engine outage that cropped up early into the flight.

So, already, Starship is currently in its longest trip to space ever. Spending more time in orbit is ideal because it allows SpaceX to gather new data about how the vehicle performs in the vacuum of space, including microgravity and extreme temperature swings.

If all goes to plan, this trip will span a whopping 22 hours and 33 minutes.

A SpaceX Starship spacecraft rolls out toward the launchpad in Starbase, Texas, in August 2025.

Typically, vehicles designed to safely return home from space are designed as small, gumdrop-shaped capsules, such as SpaceX’s Dragon vehicles or the Apollo command modules. Those spacecraft ride to orbit atop a rocket.

But Starship is both a spacecraft and a rocket, and it’s far larger than other vehicles built to survive plummeting back through Earth’s atmosphere from space — a trip that can drum up blistering temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,090 degrees Celsius).

For context, the Starship spacecraft is so massive that more than 100 Apollo command modules could fit inside its completely hollowed-out interior, by volume.

SpaceX’s team confirmed Starship will pass its second of three “checkpoints” of its coasting phase.

“We are one step closer to an eventual return to launch site,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said during the broadcast.

These milestones mark a point at which mission controllers can opt to bring the Starship spacecraft home early — in a safe way — if any issues with the vehicle are detected.

Starship soared through the first of these milestones about an hour and a half after takeoff.

Now, it’s made it through the second. Flight controllers determined Starship is still in great working order and able to proceed with the mission as planned — but if there had been issues, SpaceX had the option to deorbit the vehicle and leave it to splash down off the coast of Chile.

“These precleared areas, which were also used during Flight 14, provide a safe place to land Starship if any conditions arise that may preclude the ability to perform a safe reentry,” SpaceX said.

“Precleared” indicates that air traffic is preemptively banned from the area just in case Starship needs to pass through on its way to a splashdown landing.

That caused some confusion during the first checkpoint on Friday afternoon, as the Hawaii Department of Transportation posted on Facebook that air traffic had been grounded because of SpaceX “debris.”

Air traffic at the time was grounded anyway because of a nationwide ground stop issued by the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday. But a spokesperson for Hawaii DOT, reached by phone on Friday afternoon, told CNN that the Facebook post was meant to pass along that there was a NOTAM — or a routine Notice to Airmen — in place for the area.

CNN has not found any reports of debris related to the Starship spacecraft, and at the time, SpaceX was showing live views of the vehicle flying through orbit fully intact.

All eyes are on Starship as SpaceX considers whether to allow the vehicle to continue on its flight path — aiming to make an unprecedented landing back at its launch tower tomorrow — or whether the company will be forced to bring the vehicle home early.

On each of the three health checks SpaceX had planned for Starship’s journey in orbit, it will be carefully analyzing a suite of data: “They include Raptor engine health, loss of power or communications, the health of the flight computers and navigation sensors, the structural integrity of the propellant tanks and feedlines, the ability to hold tank pressure, and Starship’s ability to control its attitude,” SpaceX said in a post on its website.

SpaceX Starship's raptor engines are seend during the test launch on September 28.

The Starship spacecraft made it all the way to orbit insertion today without any major issues.

It was a stark departure from Flight 14 in September. SpaceX pushed forward with that mission, giving the green light for the vehicle to reach orbit even with one rocket engine on the spacecraft malfunctioning.

Starship didn’t need that engine for any future burns — but it was a surprising decision given how conservative the company’s criteria had been.

CEO Elon Musk said at an October conference that the engine outage was caused by a “failure in the engine computer software.”

We asked a former SpaceX employee about that moment.

“Sometimes in that software, the tolerances can be like a little too tight,” said Austin Spiegel, a former lead software engineer at SpaceX and now co-founder and CEO of the software startup Sift.

That’s why previous flight data is so important, he emphasized. Flight controllers “can reference that test data to understand the performance characteristics of the engine, so that when it comes time to launch the vehicle, they actually have a much deeper understanding of how the engine is going to perform.”

That can give engineers the confidence to proceed — even in less-than-ideal scenarios, Spiegel said.

The only engine issue during Flight 15 that SpaceX divulged on the broadcast Friday was related to the Super Heavy rocket booster, which saw one of its 33 engines flame out prematurely. It’s not clear if additional issues cropped up when SpaceX decided to dispose of the booster in the ocean rather than attempt to recover the vehicle by steering it back to the launch tower on dry land.

In this screenshot from video, SpaceX Starship travels in space during the 14th test flight on September 28.

During SpaceX’s last Starship test flight in September, the company sought to fly Starship on an orbital — rather than a “passively safe” suborbital trajectory — for the first time.

It was a nail-biter.

SpaceX had made clear that it needed to ensure the Starship spacecraft, or ship, was working as intended before allowing the vehicle to relight its engines and head for orbit. But minutes into flight, one of the ship’s engines shut down prematurely and was deemed out of service.

Initially, mission controllers — and even the broadcaster on SpaceX’s own livestream — said the company would forgo the second engine burn, opting not to risk sending the vehicle to orbit.

But Musk prompted mission controllers to reconsider, according to a SpaceX- produced video released November 6.

“The moment we lost the engine, we all kind of knew this was the end of the mission for the ship. We had thought, ‘Hey, let’s not proceed if anything goes wrong,” said Jeremy Pedro, SpaceX’s director of Starship propulsion systems.

But Musk pushed back.

In a statement, the FAA said SpaceX’s decisions were “within approved flight criteria.”

“FAA monitored all activities associated with the conduct of the licensed launch and reentry,” the agency said.

Starship is the biggest rocket ever created — by far.

The towering megarocket stands at nearly 400 feet (121 meters) tall and, with the debut of Version 3, packs around 18 million pounds of force at liftoff.

Here’s how it stacks up to some of the largest rockets ever constructed, past and present.

One of the most consequential milestones of this mission happened when SpaceX decided whether to give Starship the green light to burn its engines for a second time — propelling it fast enough to enter orbit around Earth.

SpaceX did just that about 25 minutes after liftoff on Friday.

Getting through that step — and watching over Starship now as it flies through orbit — means grappling with numerous, often incalculable risks.

Any time SpaceX sends a Starship spacecraft to orbit, mission teams must take extreme care to ensure the vehicle can also make a controlled return to Earth. Otherwise, the ship could make an unpredictable plunge back home that could threaten people or property.

Reaching orbit is still a novel milestone for Starship. It attempted to do so for the first time on the last test flight in September — and was able to under less-than-ideal conditions.

Before that, SpaceX had only flown Starship on “passively safe” suborbital test flights. That meant that “even if control over the spacecraft was completely lost, it was already on a path to reenter the atmosphere and splash down in a pre-determined location,” the company said.

Once going orbital, however, that “pre-determined location” aspect is lost.

If SpaceX were to lose contact and control of Starship once it’s traveling more than 20 times the speed of sound through orbit, the vehicle would be subject to the whims of atmospheric drag.

That means that predicting when and how the vehicle returns to Earth is far more difficult and dangerous — potentially putting Starship on a collision course with people or property.

That’s why SpaceX has set up several check-ins with options to intentionally bring Starship home early if any signs of issues arise — but the company hasn’t needed to do that yet.