[SpaceX] Starship completed a mostly successful test flight, its first since going public

[RayOfLight32]

SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket on Flight 13 on July 24, its first test since the company's record breaking IPO last month, and the mission hit several key milestones despite one notable failure. The Super Heavy booster separated from Starship about two and a half minutes into the flight and attempted a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, but its landing burn appeared to fail, resulting in the booster exploding on impact with the water. The Starship upper stage fared much better, deploying 20 next generation Starlink satellites before making a fully intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean, the first time SpaceX has managed to land an entire Starship in the water without it breaking apart

Elon Musk celebrated the outcome on X, writing that Starship was intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry, and specifically praising how well the ship's heat shield held up, calling it a significant improvement over prior tests. SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said on the livestream that this marked the first time the company had put an intact Starship in the water, calling it a dream scenario for the team gathering heat shield data. The flight also successfully relit its engines in space during a belly flop maneuver before swinging upright, a capability that failed during the previous test in May and is considered essential for Starship's ability to change orbital trajectory or perform reentry burns during future missions

The flight matters beyond the immediate test results too, NASA is counting on a lunar lander variant of Starship to return astronauts to the Moon's surface as part of Artemis III, and a watchdog report published in March found SpaceX is behind schedule on that effort, with the agency also funding a competing Blue Origin lunar lander as a backup. Reaching the Moon will require SpaceX to launch as many as 15 Super Heavy Starship tankers to refuel the lander in orbit before it can even depart for lunar orbit, meaning today's mostly successful test represents real but still early progress toward a genuinely demanding operational tempo the company has not yet come close to demonstrating

Super Heavy-Starship rocket chalks up mostly successful test flight - Spaceflight Nowspaceflightnow.com

[Zoe]

The first fully intact splashdown of the upper stage is honestly the bigger milestone here even with the booster explosion, that heat shield data is exactly what SpaceX needs to actually make Starship reusable

[SpinorWave]

Successfully relighting the engines in space after failing to do so back in May shows real, tangible progress being made between test flights rather than the program just spinning its wheels

[Glenn_44]

The booster explosion on landing is a reminder this program still has real, unresolved reliability problems, that's not a minor issue if it's meant to be landing back at the same pad repeatedly for reuse

[RealChristopher10]

15 refueling tanker launches needed just to get the lunar lander to the Moon is such an enormous operational requirement, genuinely hard to picture SpaceX hitting that cadence reliably on the current timeline

[Gary90]

Being the first test flight since the IPO adds real financial pressure to every single one of these launches now in a way that wasn't quite as intense before, public investors are watching this closely

[FreeKickKing73]

NASA hedging with a parallel Blue Origin lunar lander effort seems like exactly the right call given how far off SpaceX still is from proving out full reusability and orbital refueling in practice