Unlike most of Musk's other ventures, Starship keeps it together for Flight Test 10
- Reference: 1756289830
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/08/27/spacex_starship_flight_10/
- Source link:
Aside from some very minor issues, [1]Flight Test 10 was a complete success for the company. This will be a great relief to its engineers and NASA managers, who depend on Elon Musk's mighty rocket for their lunar ambitions.
The rocket launched on time, at 2330 UTC on August 26 (1830 CDT, local time in Texas). One of the Super Heavy Booster engines failed during the ascent, but as SpaceX's enthusiastic commentator noted, it did not affect the mission. After separation, the booster made a controlled splashdown into the Gulf of Mexico and demonstrated a hover above the water with only two engines running before eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected.
[2]
The second stage continued its climb to space with all engines running and no sign of the leaks and failures that have vexed previous test flights. During the suborbital flight, eight Starlink V3 simulators were deployed – it appeared that a number struck the payload door on the way out – before SpaceX performed a short relight of one of Starship's engines to prove it was possible ahead of a possible orbital mission that would require a controlled de-orbit.
[3]
[4]
The Starlink simulators were also on a suborbital trajectory and were expected to be destroyed during re-entry.
[5]Two scrubs, one Starship: Third time lucky for SpaceX?
[6]SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test
[7]Northrop Grumman shows SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on explosions
[8]SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground
Finally, Starship had to make it down to the Indian Ocean without tumbling out of control or coming apart under the forces of re-entry. Once again, SpaceX achieved another success. While there was clearly some burn-through at the base of one of the aft flaps, the vehicle itself remained under control even as SpaceX intentionally stressed its structure.
As the water neared, Starship flipped to a nose-up attitude and performed a landing burn above the ocean. As expected, it toppled over and exploded, completing the mission.
Some questions will need to be answered. Why did the aft flap suffer such damage? Why did one of the booster engines stop running? Why did the payload strike the door on the way out?
[9]
However, those are minor issues when compared to the overall success of the mission. One more launch of this version of SpaceX's Starship remains before the company moves on to the next generation of its monster rocket and, hopefully, orbital operations. ®
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[1] https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-10
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aK8rmdVLpITvPuNhV1AuAwAAAFc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aK8rmdVLpITvPuNhV1AuAwAAAFc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/starship_scrubs/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/spacex_starship_10_test/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/30/northrop_grumman_test_anomaly/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/19/spacexs_starship_explodes_again/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aK8rmdVLpITvPuNhV1AuAwAAAFc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"
But Shirley that was a "Rapid Scheduled Disassembly"?
OK, I'll get my coat, it is a bit singed around the cuffs, but otherwise perfectly serviceable.
I've been watching old episodes of Mythbusters
and can confirm that exploding as expected can be very satisfying.
Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"
What would be your expectations for a realistic but ambitious test programme of a novel, reusable rocket of this weight class?
Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"
/me grabs the popcorn and waits for the comments from the antivaxxers , flat earthers Musk haters! They must be frothing at the mouth with this. Expect an incoming barrage of denial coming this way.
Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"
I mean, Musk can fscking do one, but I am impressed by what SpaceX has achieved, despite him.
Re: I am impressed by what SpaceX has achieved, despite him
Exactly.
I don't know who is in charge, but that person is obviously capable of keeping His Muskiness at arm's length (maybe suggesting another problem with X to keep him away) while doing real, actual Science (and work).
Well done to that wizard.
Re: I am impressed by what SpaceX has achieved, despite him
Wizard...
Gwynne Shotwell
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
Re: I am impressed by what SpaceX has achieved, despite him
Talking of arms, did the Musk right arm get raised on schedule?
Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"
Lets take a look at the competition. The Long March family of rockets have launched 591 times with no successful landing. Not all of them smahed into the sea... Some performed energetic lithobraking manoeuvers instead. Soyuz 2 has launched 154 times with a similar success rate to the Long Marches. Ariane 5 launched 117 times and almost all their boosters reached the sea - at rapid velocity. Atlas V has launched 102 times and not a single booster survived. Vulcan and Ariane 6 have each launched three times with no successful landings but it took SpaceX 7 attempts to land a Starship booster so give them time. New Glenn has launched once. I could die of old age before they reach 7. SLS will probably not get that far.
RocketLab launched 66 times and have recovered 7 boosters. Their first success was on the 16th attempt - ahead of SpaceX Falcon 9 which first landed on flight 20. The Space Shuttle is a bit of a mixture. The orbiter mostly came back intact but without the main tank. Some of the SRBs were recovered but recycled would be more accurate than re-used.
Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"
I take your point, but your comment is a bit disingenuous - Up until relatively recently, boosters have been throwaway components rather than carrying extra fuel or parachutes to enable recovery.
So the fair comparison is "how many rockets exploded before they had finished their task?".
Now recovery is a goal too. I assume SpaceX has the real numbers for recoverable vs throwaway costs and has decided that recoverables will be cheaper in the long run.
OK, lets take it back to serious land
Different rockets had different goals so the only fair comparison is to judge each against its own goals. The most common was "How much can I screw the government for?". Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy were both really successful at achieving that goal. For Soyuz, the answer was "Bugger all", which made it a viable commercial launch vehicle. Ariane V's clever trick was to deliver two satellites at a time to GTO. Getting paid twice for the same launch made it a commercial success.
Falcon 9 was still intended to be a cash cow, but with the assumption: "If we focus on reducing price the market size will grow". This worked, and ate Ariane's and some of Soyuz's commercial lunch. Then SpaceX went for re-use. Before that started working ULA decided to retain their US government business by replacing Atlas & Delta with Vulcan. That business did not require re-use. Vulcan is very late and now that it is mostly here the market has changed. Ariane is in a similar position with Ariane 6: there were only about a dozen EU launches per year. That could be done with one re-usable booster per year. It was much easier to sell A6 as a jobs program by building 12 expendable boosters per year. SLS is by far the most successful rocket ever. The goal was to cost as much as possible. No-one has made a more expensive rocket.
Now the market has completely changed. Low prices have brought in new customers and all the big governments want their own Starlink (including the US military :-). Those low prices come from re-use and dividing fixed costs by a large number of launches. ULA and Ariane committed to designs that are not compatible with re-use. Roscosmos has no budget. RocketLab aimed for small launch. They are good at it but there is only a small number of small launches (to unusual orbits). Most of the small launch market takes a ride share on a medium rocket to the most popular destination: Sun Synchronous Orbit.
The real competitors for re-use are China's collection of new commercial space companies, RocketLab's Neutron, Stoke's Nova, Firefly's Eclipse, Rocket Factory Augsberg and Blue Origin. All of them have barely started. Too early to decide which are going to be successful.
The really different one is Starship. The goal for that is colonise Mars. That goal comes from the mouth of a very unreliable source. Independent evidence is required. 42000 Starlinks with a five year life span launched 60 at a time requires one Starship launching two or three times per week. Starfactory is massively oversized for Starlink. The factory is oversized for the entire launch industry. Even a dozen refueling launches for Artemis (every two years) is a small contract. The only thing that matches Starfactory's scale is hundreds of ships going to Mars fueled up by thousands of tanker flights.
The big thing going on is Starfactory and the Starship development launches are an entertaining side show created as a by-product. The current generation of ships and boosters have minimal value because SpaceX produce faster than they are licensed to launch. Most of the hardware is scrapped. Currently the only reason to land a booster is if it would be educational. There is a better one that will be ready to launch before a landed one can be re-furbished. One booster has launched twice - because finding out how to do refurbishment was educational. Finding the limits of what a Starship can do without exploding shows which parts of the design are weak and which are stronger than necessary. Such tests include a significant risk of crashing. This "landing" was aimed at the sea because that is cheaper to repair than rebuilding the launch infrastructure again.
Starship has not colonised Mars so it is currently a very long way away from being a success. Starfactory is ramping up to the cadence required for success.
"Did Not Affect the Mission"
Driving down the freeway at 55 MPH, the driver of the car you're riding in announces, "The left rear tyre just blew out, but the mission must continue apace. Everybody in the car needs to lean forward and to the right, to take the weight off the failed tyre."
And why would you design a mission where at the end, all your stuff explodes as it does in the end of the original Thunderbirds opening credits sequence?
Re: "Did Not Affect the Mission"
You'd seem to prefer that there was no redundancy and the failure of one engine caused the whole mission to fail? Plenty of vehicles can handle a tyre blowout, some of them can even continue with their "mission" after such event - it doesn't work that way on cars because "cost"
I think the eventual commercial and government clients (not to mention any future astronauts sat on top) will be well pleased that the mission continued despite such an occurrence, and it demonstrates that actually as well as all the fancy fireworks, they are actually getting many things right
Re: "Did Not Affect the Mission"
why would you design a mission where at the end, all your stuff explodes The craft's capabilities need to be proven before it's tested on land, where it would make a much bigger and more expensive mess if something went wrong. They previously went through all of this while proving Falcon 9's Return To Launch Site capability.
And... well... my car doesn't have 33 wheels but if it did and I lost one I wouldn't be too concerned.
Re: "Did Not Affect the Mission"
Concern is not really your main err.. concern. If your car had 33 wheels and you lose one, you would still make it to your destination. THAT is the goal - design for resilience, not perfection.
Re: "Did Not Affect the Mission"
And why would you design a mission where at the end, all your stuff explodes
The same reason you might crash a brand-new car: testing.
Re: "why would you design a mission where at the end, all your stuff explodes"
Some of the earlier boosters reached the sea without exploding. The booster from IFT4 was recovered and dismantled. I don't know if that provided useful data for SpaceX but in theory it could have provided useful data to others.
NASA is relying on this guy?
Yikes
"While there was clearly some burn-through at the base of one of the aft flaps"
The damage to the aft flap was apparent even before reentry began and I think it was caused by the explosion that occurred at T+46:59.
I think this just goes to prove that Elon Musk should stick to rocketry and keep out of punditry.
How about neither?
"eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"
They're really setting themselves a high bar after 10 launches.