Successful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
Double Sieg Heil at a US inauguration, buying twitter to boost nazis, sabotaging his US competitors by pulling up the subsidy ladder he just finished climbing, gleefully dumpstering the peanut butter rations for the starving African kids. "Favorite" isn't the word.
Snark aside, I’m curious: what about the comment you replied to is a “Reddit lie?” Pretty much everything act mentioned is well documented. Do you disagree with the assumptions made about motivations for the acts?
I don't think your comment adds value to the discussion. By now, you either know what's reprehensible about Musk or have decided to either ignore it or support it, and by extension be reprehensible yourself.
But in case any bystanders genuinely wonder, my personal "favorite" is him doing what is clearly meant to be, or at least unambiguously invoke, a nazi salute not just once but twice, and standing by it (plus, of course, his political activities in that direction).
If he meant it to be a nazi salute, why did he do it in conjunction with saying "I give my heart to you"?
Currently on TV is a WW2 documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It's pretty good, with significant coverage of nazis. I recommend watching it. I'm a bit of a history wonk, and have read extensively about WW2. I'm afraid I don't see any parallels between the nazis and Musk.
Using his billionaire megaphone and telling his millions of followers that a rescue worker was a pedophile, just because basic geometry foiled Musk's plan to look like a Tony Stark action hero <3
Truly top shelf reprehensibility
Would be fucking pathetic and disgusting even for a person with no platform. Downright despicable for a person with such a gigantic following.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
They juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are probably the single biggest upgrade.
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
Yup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
And I sit corrected as it was able to lay down without rupturing the tanks and 'sploding. So that's another win.
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
I am pretty unconvinced that any of the past explosions of starship used that feature. It’s very convenient to have an “explode” button so you can say all of your rocket detonations were intentional, but they are often leaking fuel or dropping chunks before they explode.
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
Sort of? Everything is weight. And since it isn't a design feature to lay down in water there isn't any weight budget for making that modality survivable? So typically when it falls (and this thing is really tall) the interior tanks detach from their mounts and hit the inside walls and rupture. The skin is still hot, oxygen and remaining fuel mix and it goes boom. This time we had fires but no boom. I look forward to hearing what was different.
No, that's exactly what happens. Most of the time.
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
The actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
Damn so this probably means another identical suborbital flight in 6-8 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that we will see either prop transfer or a ship catch this year.
i don't think so - the ascent looked good. i don't think they need to put the ship on another suborbital trajectory because the booster landing burn failed. also, i don't think this impacts prop transfer or ship catch - both are separate problems.
I think this is technically true but that they want a seamless suborbital flight (like the last two for the Block 2) before they move forward on those other goals.
Why wouldn’t they only care about seamless ship flights, to get some value out of the launches, while they’re still learning and figuring out how to light booster?
Yes, because it would have landed a few hundred meters out from the chopsticks. It swings in towards the catcher as part of its slowdown. If it doesn't slow down, that doesn't happen.
Its amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough).
The reason it’s very small is that almost all of the energy in hydrogen and oxygen is not stored in the chemical binding energy of these things going together.
The vast majority of it is stored in just the rest mass energy of the protons and the neutrons, which chemical burning doesn’t affect at all.
Successful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
Edit: Spashdown video https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619
They have a much biglier support vessel this time, almost 300ft long IIRC. So maybe they can recover it?
> That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites!
Mid-stream they said they were deploying 20 real V3 Starlink satellites.
At the end of the stream the said all 20 had checked out as well.
They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
They need to be in orbit to deploy the satellites into a useful orbit. These ones only lasted for 20 minutes before breaking up.
My brain refuses to resolve the effect of it as anything but CGI. Event though it isn't.
Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
The tiny part of SpaceX that is actually about space, yes. Unfortunate that it has been bolted onto the hulk of Musk's AI fever dreams.
It is still about space. AI and space computers are just the vehicle to fund it all.
Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
Cash: rockets fund AI
Equity: AI funds rockets
Of all the places that money parted from fools winds up, this is not the worst of them.
Even at $38/share it will still be number 20 on the fortune 500 by marketcap
Too bad for Elon gullibles its at $113/share
but its a great company at $38
You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
In "V2" page 179 Dornberger writes:
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
Good info Walter, but I wasn't trying to get too deep.
Point is to not judge a book by its cover.
You're conflating politics and ethics.
Von Braun used the Nazi war machine to make his rockets. Musk ran DOGE. They’re both political figures by their own choices.
> Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura
What's your favorite reprehensible thing about him?
Double Sieg Heil at a US inauguration, buying twitter to boost nazis, sabotaging his US competitors by pulling up the subsidy ladder he just finished climbing, gleefully dumpstering the peanut butter rations for the starving African kids. "Favorite" isn't the word.
Reddit been lying to you
… says a post from a 25min old bot account?
Snark aside, I’m curious: what about the comment you replied to is a “Reddit lie?” Pretty much everything act mentioned is well documented. Do you disagree with the assumptions made about motivations for the acts?
My eyes don't lie.
I don't think your comment adds value to the discussion. By now, you either know what's reprehensible about Musk or have decided to either ignore it or support it, and by extension be reprehensible yourself.
But in case any bystanders genuinely wonder, my personal "favorite" is him doing what is clearly meant to be, or at least unambiguously invoke, a nazi salute not just once but twice, and standing by it (plus, of course, his political activities in that direction).
If he meant it to be a nazi salute, why did he do it in conjunction with saying "I give my heart to you"?
Currently on TV is a WW2 documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It's pretty good, with significant coverage of nazis. I recommend watching it. I'm a bit of a history wonk, and have read extensively about WW2. I'm afraid I don't see any parallels between the nazis and Musk.
Using his billionaire megaphone and telling his millions of followers that a rescue worker was a pedophile, just because basic geometry foiled Musk's plan to look like a Tony Stark action hero <3
Truly top shelf reprehensibility
Would be fucking pathetic and disgusting even for a person with no platform. Downright despicable for a person with such a gigantic following.
> telling his millions of followers that a rescue worker was a pedophile
Only after the rescue worker, on live TV, said to millions that Musk could stick his submarine up his ass.
Not even on the same level, dude. Not even close.
Lmao imagine defending this hahahaha
How many people have you heard being told to "Fuck off" or "fuck you" or "Shove it up your ass?"
Hundreds? Thousands?
How many people have you heard being called a literal pedophile? Three?
Get a grip lmao
He has billions of dollars and still can’t help but stoop to pathetic immaturity.
It was an intemperate comment, sure. As was the rescue worker's insult when Musk was trying to help.
I apply this mindset to Trump/politics too.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
Not me! I'm rooting against SpaceX lol
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
which rockets have you worked on? are you in the aerospace industry?
>> Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large.
Honest question, but what do they usually use?
Your takes are hotter than a launch pad with all 33 raptors firing!
and costs taxpayers billions compared to our working models 60 years ago. Great innovation
I remember the Saturn V being caught by chopsticks in mid air too.
Starship is fantastic value for money compared to Artemis!
Starship landed in the ocean intact and only slightly on fire!
That just seemed to be standard venting, methane if I'm not mistaken.
Whoa the acceleration from the start surprised me. It’s huge and it just … zipped off the pad like a bullet (ok not real bullet but still).
They juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are probably the single biggest upgrade.
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
> they have plans to elongate the stack further
Elongate the stack.
Pun employed intentionally.
Seems like the booster landing burn did not light all the engines and so it crashed into the water.
Re-light seems to be one of their biggest remaining obstacles in a lot of these flight tests.
Yup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
And I sit corrected as it was able to lay down without rupturing the tanks and 'sploding. So that's another win.
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
Congrats to everyone who worked on this.
I guess they also failed to explode it
I am pretty unconvinced that any of the past explosions of starship used that feature. It’s very convenient to have an “explode” button so you can say all of your rocket detonations were intentional, but they are often leaking fuel or dropping chunks before they explode.
This was a great flight, though.
>it will explode after it does because of physics
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
Sort of? Everything is weight. And since it isn't a design feature to lay down in water there isn't any weight budget for making that modality survivable? So typically when it falls (and this thing is really tall) the interior tanks detach from their mounts and hit the inside walls and rupture. The skin is still hot, oxygen and remaining fuel mix and it goes boom. This time we had fires but no boom. I look forward to hearing what was different.
Starship is quite a bit sturdier thanks to the stainless steel used & very efficient engines that make it possible to have the structure heavier.
We had it demonstrated in the past with Starship surviving multiple burnthroughts and now in failing to explode. :-)
No, that's exactly what happens. Most of the time.
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
EDIT: Of fucking course.
How many times have they managed to catch it in the last 8 or so missions? There have been a few misses like this already with the boosters
It was going in the water anyway, but yeah, it touched visibly faster than it should have.
The actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
Damn so this probably means another identical suborbital flight in 6-8 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that we will see either prop transfer or a ship catch this year.
i don't think so - the ascent looked good. i don't think they need to put the ship on another suborbital trajectory because the booster landing burn failed. also, i don't think this impacts prop transfer or ship catch - both are separate problems.
I think this is technically true but that they want a seamless suborbital flight (like the last two for the Block 2) before they move forward on those other goals.
Why wouldn’t they only care about seamless ship flights, to get some value out of the launches, while they’re still learning and figuring out how to light booster?
They don’t have to catch the booster to test any of that.
The “chopstick” catcher arrangement seems awfully fragile. Would the ground equipment have survived this if it had been a real catch?
Yes, because it would have landed a few hundred meters out from the chopsticks. It swings in towards the catcher as part of its slowdown. If it doesn't slow down, that doesn't happen.
Rockets have a self destruct feature to avoid exactly this type of contingency
They generally initiate landing aiming just off shore and only adjust to the landing pad after everything is nominal. So yes.
Real time reentry plasma field will never get old. Amazing
Goosebumps.
And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.
You can also track the progress in text: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-star...
Its amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough).
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown-gr[Edit note: Starship and Booster are methalox, yes. The physicist is talking generically, not about this launch specifically)
earth is looking beautiful
spacex is a really cool company