(Bloomberg/Loren Grush) — SpaceX’s Starship successfully put satellites in space for the first time, a major milestone for the Elon Musk-led company after a year marked by explosive test flights and development setbacks.
Tuesday’s mission from its Texas launch site brings SpaceX closer to being able to use the vehicle to start lofting its Starlink internet satellites and, eventually, replace the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 altogether.
The relatively smooth test flight comes after the first two launches of 2025 blew up within minutes, and a third failed to deploy dummy satellites and spun out of control. Another Starship spacecraft exploded on a test stand in June during fueling.
The success affirms Musk’s fly-fail-fix approach to rocketry that has seen SpaceX become the world’s dominant space transportation company — and among its most valuable.
But there’s still a long road ahead before Starship will be ready to carry people to distant places like the moon and Mars, the ultimate destination envisioned by the founder and now world’s richest person.
Notably, the company needs to figure out how to refuel its Starship vehicles while they’re in space, something SpaceX aims to attempt for the first time next year.
SpaceX also needs to demonstrate that Starship can come back to Earth fully intact in order to fulfill the company’s promise that the vehicle will be fully reusable.
During Tuesday’s flight, chunks of Starship could be seen breaking away as the spacecraft plunged through Earth’s atmosphere. It appeared to explode after splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
However, SpaceX’s livestream hosts said the intent of the flight was to stress the vehicle on purpose.
“Seeing stuff like that is still valuable to us,” Dan Huot, a communications manager at SpaceX, said of the damage that could be seen on Starship during the livestream. “We are trying to kind of push this vehicle to the limits, to learn what its limits are as we design our next version of Starship.”
NASA has awarded SpaceX contracts worth roughly $4 billion to use Starship to shuttle astronauts to the lunar surface.
But the company is still trying to demonstrate that the rocket can achieve orbit, deploy satellites and return to Earth fully intact.
During Tuesday’s mission, Starship re-lit one of its Raptor engines briefly as part of another in-flight test. The vehicle will need to restart its engines in order to maneuver in space and take itself out of orbit.
SpaceX has so far shown on two flights that it can catch the Super Heavy booster midair using giant mechanical arms. For Tuesday’s mission, SpaceX opted not to return the booster to the landing site, instead maneuvering the craft into a controlled landing off the US coast.
SpaceX also once again performed a number of experiments with Starship’s heat shield tiles, which cover the side of the vehicle and are meant to keep the spacecraft from overheating when it reenters the atmosphere.
The vehicle’s flaps still appeared to have suffered damage, with pieces breaking away during the return trip to Earth.
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