Successful SpaceX Starship launch knocks out goals of last 3 troubled flights

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Aug 26, 2025

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SpaceX managed to get its massive Starship and Super Heavy rocket off the ground for its 10th suborbital test flight, completing some goals its attempts had not yet achieved in 2025.

The 400-foot-tall rocket powered by 33 Raptor engines lifted off from SpaceX’s Texas site Starbase at 7:30 p.m. EDT after two days of scrubs.

The booster sent the upper stage on its way for a suborbital trip more than halfway around the Earth, and then made a return back for a controlled landing over the Gulf waters to the east of the launch site.

This marked Starship’s fourth launch in 2025, with some disappointments on the first three after some remarkable feats in 2024.

The first two launch attempts this year had explosive ends to its upper stage that painted the skies with destructive debris seen from Florida, the Bahamas and the Caribbean. A third launch had the upper stage lost over the Indian Ocean.

The booster at least had seen some success this year, including the second-ever catch at the launch site, and then a reflight of that booster.

The10th flight, though, was testing out some extreme emergency landing profiles for the booster, so no return to the launch site was in the cards.

The upper stage, meanwhile, will try again to complete tasks attempted without success on the three previous launches.

That includes the first payload deployment by sending out a side hatch eight mass simulators that mirror the size of the company’s Starlink satellites.

“OK, one more time. Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” joked SpaceX commentator Dan Huot referencing “2001: A Space Odyssey” ahead of what ended up being a successful hatch opening the first deployment of a payload from the spacecraft ever. “Now it’s empty. Looking a little lonely. Really cool to see them all out there.”

The simulators are following the upper stage on its suborbital trajectory and will follow it and burn up on reentry.

“Now with payload, deploy, complete — pew, pew, pew — Starship is now going to close its payload bay door and continue to coast around Earth toward the Indian Ocean,” Huot said.

The flight path aims once again to send the upper stage aim for a landing off the western coast of Australia.

The flight also looks to relight one of the upper stage’s six Raptor engines during its suborbital flight.

“The flight test includes several experiments focused on enabling Starship’s upper stage to return to the launch site,” reads a post on the SpaceX website. “A significant number of tiles have been removed from Starship to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle during reentry.”

That includes multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, in the company’s effort to try out alternative materials for heat protection during reentry.

Despite some explosive endings this year, the company could still see some sort of demise.

“Starship’s reentry profile is designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the upper stage’s rear flaps while at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure,” the company stated. “Flight tests continue to provide valuable learnings to inform the design of the next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles.”

While all test flights so far have been from Texas, SpaceX is pursuing two Starship launch sites on the Space Coast.

At more than 400 feet tall and with the booster producing more than 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket that has made it to space, although it has yet to perform an orbital launch.

A tower is already under construction at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39-A, adjacent to where it currently flies Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

SpaceX has also been leading the removal of United Launch Alliance’s launch site infrastructure from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37, which ULA vacated after the final Delta IV Heavy launch in 2024. It aims to build a Starship launch site there while keeping its Canaveral site for Falcon 9 launches at Space Launch Complex 40.

SpaceX is awaiting the completion of a pair of environmental impact statements before it can move forward with its Florida plans. In the meantime, work continues at KSC on a new manufacturing site to fabricate the Starship upper stages and Super Heavy boosters that is part of a $1.8 billion infrastructure improvement project.

Texas will continue to be the testbed launch site, but SpaceX plans for operational Starship flights from the two Space Coast sites, with as many as 120 launches per year.

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