OK, not tomorrow, but next Sunday, for the next Starship attempt.
[Monday-morning update
Stephen Clark has the story on what went wrong on previous flights, and what they’ve done to prevent a recurrence.
But I have no idea what the phrase “human-rated lander” means.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
Less than two hours to go, weather permitting.
Starship 10 launching tonight https://t.co/EOgGbS3Om7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2025
[Bumped]
[Tuesday-morning update]
Third time’s the charm?
[Mid-morning update]
My assessment of the SpaceX flight test today: It was a spectacularly successful flight, with a huge wealth of data. It demonstrated the ability to deliver payloads to orbit, and to deorbit after doing so. While I'm not SpaceX, I personally consider it fully operational for the…
— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) August 27, 2025
I would add that the robustness of the design of Starship for entry was fully demonstrated as well. Obviously they will want to shed fewer parts, but it came back like a shot-up B-17.
— Rand Simberg (@Simberg_Space) August 27, 2025
"we removed over 2,100 tiles, we are flying an older generation heat shield, flaps are missing on the nosecone, we are flying a very steep profile to test the aft flaps, we do not expect the ship to survive"
— Maxarick (@Maxarick) November 19, 2024
S31: pic.twitter.com/SVmU9z9TxG
[Bumped]
[Afternoon update]
Here‘s the report from SpaceX itself.
[Thursday-morning update]
Plans for the near future:
This slide needs an update, but gives a rough idea of what we’re aiming for with V3 and V4.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2025
V3 should be built & tested (maybe flown) by end of this year.
V4 is 2027. Probably closer to 150m height and 7500 tons. pic.twitter.com/5WSUR8MORt
Versions 1 and 2 were proof of concept; versions 3 and 4 will be the operational ones.
[Update early afternoon]
This is the most badass spaceflight photo I have seen in a long, long time. pic.twitter.com/4E9BQKEuwG
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) August 28, 2025
[Update a few minutes later]
When Ship 37 blew up after its splashdown 🖤: pic.twitter.com/37AndaOZOf
— Renata Konkoly 🚘⚡🪡 (@RenataKonkoly) August 28, 2025
Don’t anthromorphize spaceships; they hate when you do that.
Interesting how quickly they are able to develop new failure modes…
Fun that they were able to generate enough force to collapse the internal transfer tube in the booster in the landing experiments!
Here’s hoping the new Block-3s are more refined. Reportedly there are at least 8 block-3 ships already in production (vs only 4 of the current block-2s built).
But I have no idea what the phrase “human-rated lander” means.
That the depth of the landing footprint does not exceed the height of the lander occupants?
Correction:
That the depth of the landing footprint does not exceed the height of the lander occupants at the instant when the lander reaches its minimum altitude.
However the rating would very depending upon the occupant(s). Mice or cockroaches would presumably have a different standard, but we are specifically discussing a human-rated lander…
Curious if NASA has other ratings?
Scrubbed
Splitters!
Looks like they are going to try again today. Same time of day.
Here is a live update.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-10
Nope…
No one wants a repeat of what happened on Apollo 12.
https://youtu.be/-rqL035klC4?feature=shared
Wow, what a great flight that was!
Absolutely. I was nervous, but that looked fantastic.
Nailed it!
Congratulations. I’d say parts of one flap looked well done…
Have to find out what the explosion was from but all in all a great flight.
Looked like COPV fiber fragments/shards floating around just after the event.
I saw a lot of “flakes” (for lack of a better term) floating all around the outside starting from engine shutdown (when I first noticed them) until the explosion. Too many to look right.
Commentators opined it might be a vent explosion as there’s a vent neat the location where you saw it explode.
Have to wait and see what the conclusion is.
FAE, methane vapors left in fuel tanks squeezed out when the hull buckled from impacting the water detonating is my guess. I am really impressed that they landed so close to the downrange camera.
They also had a drone flying nearby, at roughly 90 degrees to the line of sight from the buoy. They were able to figure that Starship landed within 3 meters of the aimpoint. Getting close enough to the target via aerodynamic controls to take out the residual error with giant rocket engines demonstrates mastery of control systems unlike anything that has ever existed. Particularly when the aerodynamic control surfaces are changing size and shape unpredictably, through a flight envelope extending from Mach 23 down to 0. I don’t think SpaceX’s sheer technical power is fully appreciated…
It certainly isn’t appreciated by the company’s many dim-witted detractors. The GNC crew at SpaceX are genuine magicians. But so is the entire engineering crew. Starship 37 certainly exemplified the old footballism of being able to “play hurt.” A bit more work on the helmet and pads and it won’t have to in future.
Looks like the inner trailing edge of both aft flaps burned away during re-entry but had no visible effect on re-entry flip and landing. Clearly those bits aren’t required. I’d expect them to be removed as the best part is no part.
Or they could be margin…
If you rewatch the stream, the aft fins appear damaged even before reentry. IIRC either just prior to or just after Starlink deployment there’s a clear view of the right side fin that shows a clear piece of dangling metal, and even prior to that both aft fins show apparently heat staining. Possible back-blast from hot staging?
I saw some speculation the aft skirt was hit by a dumblink. No idea. There’s one more Mk 2 ship left, and Musk said about 8 weeks to IFT-11 with it. I wonder how far forward they can move the aft flaps?
Hit by a what?
Dumblink, a dummy starlink satellite mass simulator.
Of course – thank you! Something surely hit it from outside.
I think it was Everyday Astronaut who stated that StarShip was oriented such that the pez dispenser door was pointed forward / aligned with the direction of travel. Which, if true, seems silly to me… that’s just asking for one of the “dumblinks” to slowdown when encountering atmospheric resistance and hit StarShip. Better to ejected to a side/behind.
I’d say that’s decent speculation. At the time of release, the dumblinks were traveling at the same speed as the ship. After the short firing of the single sea level Raptor, the ship picked up about 35 mph of speed so it would have pulled ahead of the dumblinks. But once everything started hitting atmosphere, the ship would slow down faster and the dumblinks could certainly overtake.
The sudden damage occurred on the engine bay skirt which was the rearmost part of the ship as it re-entered. The relative velocity of any crash between a dumblink and the ship would be roughly in traffic collision territory. If each dumblink actually weighed as much as a real V3 Starlink sat is going to, it would tip the scales at about a metric ton and a quarter. That’s certainly enough mass to do the amount of damage we could see if it impacted at traffic accident speed.
I don’t know. Even if the dummy satellites weighed that much, I think given their large surface area, they would have slowed faster than Ship.
Especially if they were tumbling.
Maybe. The dumblinks were lattices without a lot of surface area in any orientation. In any case, the prime suspect now seems to be a pair of ullage gas lines that run very near the hinge lines of one of the flaps. So I guess it’s now a race between SpaceX and CSI Starbase to finger the actual culprit.
I wonder if the “orange” color upon landing was the remaining red RTV used to “glue” the tiles to the vehicle. We might learn just how robust the stainless-steel design is to re-entry conditions.
On the fully operational part; I guess the qualifier for payload delivery is fine. My problem is that’s not the primary or even secondary purpose of Starship. It may help pay bills, but I like that SpaceX has an integrated test regime, in the actual environment, planned for SpaceX. NASA would essentially make things operational after one successful demonstration. They’d officially claim it wasn’t “operational”, yet then start flying the vehicle on a schedule that suggested it would be available again within months of the previous flight.
Falcon has set a standard that I think Starship needs to follow. When that happens, I think Musk will then be able to realize his dream for Mars.
The video of the battered starship limping back to Earth is certainly impressive. The sense I’m getting is that they’re trying to find the optimum balance between the bespoke hand-tailored refinement of traditional U.S. rocketry and the robust hardiness of traditional Russian rocketry.
Kudos to the SpaceX team!