SpaceX’s Starship has profitable tenth flight take a look at : NPR

SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship makes a take a look at flight from Starbase, Texas, Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.

Eric Gay/AP

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Eric Gay/AP

SpaceX’s large Starship rocket racked up some much-needed successes on its tenth take a look at flight, hitting key take a look at targets and breaking a streak of failures that bedeviled the spaceship this 12 months.

The silver and black two-stage rocket, which stands about 400 ft tall, blasted off from the SpaceX facility in south Texas close to Boca Chica Beach proper when the launch window opened at 7:30 pm ET on Tuesday night.

The largest and strongest rocket ever constructed, Starship is a vital a part of NASA’s effort to return astronauts to the moon, and of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s purpose of colonizing Mars.

SpaceX additionally needs to make use of Starship to deploy an enormous variety of its Starlink satellites. But on the final take a look at flight the ship’s payload bay door didn’t open.

This time, the door opened and SpaceX staff on the bottom may very well be heard cheering on a dwell webcast as video beamed again the view from inside Starship’s higher stage. The video confirmed a metallic system, much like an enormous PEZ dispenser, ratcheting up and ejecting eight dummy satellites out the door and into area.

“The last one has been deployed,” stated SpaceX webcast commentator Dan Huot. “Heck yeah, everybody!”

As deliberate, the rocket’s decrease stage returned to Earth and briefly hovered over the waters of the Gulf earlier than splashing down. After deploying the satellite tv for pc simulators, the higher stage re-entered the Earth’s environment, permitting SpaceX to check the efficiency of its warmth defend and flaps, which Huot famous appeared slightly “toasty.”

Video from a buoy confirmed the spacecraft slowly coming down heading in the right direction into the Indian Ocean, as SpaceX staff cheered and clapped some extra.

“Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting tenth flight test of Starship!” SpaceX wrote on X.

This clean flight was very completely different from three exams earlier this 12 months, which noticed the higher stage of the rocket explode or disintegrate for varied causes, a lot to the dismay of many within the area group. “I think there have been more problems than the community and maybe even SpaceX have expected there,” stated Carissa Christensen, a satellite tv for pc professional who’s CEO and founding father of BryceTech.

The a number of upper-stage losses, plus a rocket spectacularly exploding on the launch pad in June, resulted within the area group watching this Starship take a look at with much more than the same old excessive stage of curiosity.

“Starship is in many ways the flagship SpaceX program right now,” Christensen stated.

Still, she factors out that it doesn’t matter what occurs throughout a single take a look at flight of Starship, SpaceX’s place because the main American launch firm is safe.

“SpaceX conducts more than half the world’s launches,” famous Christensen. “It deploys 80% of the world’s satellites.”

Even as SpaceX labored to launch Starship this week, coping with delays attributable to climate and a glitch in a floor system that loaded oxygen into the rocket, its different launch actions continued with out incident.

On Sunday, a robotic SpaceX capsule carrying meals and different provides for NASA astronauts on the International Space Station efficiently lifted off on one of many firm’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets. And earlier on Tuesday, a Falcon 9 launched and deployed a protection satellite tv for pc for Luxembourg.