SpaceX’s Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight

SpaceX has more to prove before flying Starship all the way to low-Earth orbit.

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[InvariantCapitalist]

still a huge success despite requiring at least one more suborbital test to demonstrate in space relights and booster soft landings. It was an entirely new ship design in many ways, and the first time Raptor 3s have been flown. Making it all the way to splash down on first try is better than I expected.

 

[karlthebrewer]

The clip of the satellite leaving starship whilst looking back is probably the best example of I've ever seen of Newton's 1st law in action. Hope they show this in schools and colleges.

 

[pixelatedindex]

Love the article! I did not know about methane fuel.

One typo, “an early” is repeated: “meaning they can recover from an early an early shutdown of an engine”

 

[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov]

The clip of the satellite leaving starship whilst looking back is probably the best example of I've ever seen of Newton's 1st law in action. Hope they show this in schools and colleges.

made this old SF reading nerd tear up a bit. The jackass's behavior makes me sick to my stomach, but I can't protest the human race returning to space.

 

[compgeek89]

The engine issues may be concerning. The engine out on starship seemed to be leaking heavily into the engine area through the whole flight, not just an engine not starting.

And, the flip maneuver definitely caused all.ost every engine on the booster to get completely knocked offline,so they may be back to the drawing board on some of that fluid showing again.

Good progress, given the immense number of changes, but worrisome. Hopefully they have another test unit ready to adjust and try again quickly.

 

[Uragan]

made this old SF reading nerd tear up a bit. The jackass's behavior makes me sick to my stomach, but I can't protest the human race returning to space.

“Return to space”?

We never left.

 

[brionl]

Looks like they are making good progress.

 

[kvuj]

NASA sends humans to space.

SpaceX sends trash to the bottom of the ocean, over and over and every time it's "wait for the next one!"

Huh?
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY96v0OIcK4


I guess you could argue NASA paid for it, but by that logic NASA has never sent anyone to space, US citizens have since they pay taxes which fill NASA's pockets.

I think we're being overly pedantic here. Access to space is all about capabilities. Next generation capabilities will clearly rely on a cheap way to access space and SpaceX seems to be tackling it head on.

 

[NotThatCDC]

The satellite view was very cool, but one thing I was a little confused about: they said on the broadcast that they were doing that to be able to inspect the heat shield. But the satellites are released from the top of the ship (the side without heat tiles). Was it supposed to do a flip maneuver after they released, or did they mean they wanted to inspect the few tiles they stuck on the top of the flaps?

 

[ArcaneTourist]

Was this sentence a typo (emphasis mine)?

As expected, the ship—wider than and nearly as long a Boeing 777 jetliner—tipped over and exploded in a fireball, putting an exclamation point on V3’s trip halfway around the world from the Texas Gulf Coast.

Honestly, was the RV exploding part of the checklist for a successful flight?

Imagine a very tall multi-story tin can that is "landing" without landing gear. It's going to tip over, right? Doing a "landing" on the ocean won't change that - it's going to tip over, not sink straight down.

Now add fuel - imagine a very tall, thin walled cylinder partially filled with explosive fuel slamming into something.

Yeah, a boom was expected.

 

[multimediavt]

Was this sentence a typo (emphasis mine)?


Honestly, was the RV exploding part of the checklist for a successful flight?

Yes. To maintain ITAR and make sure it is unrecoverable by an adversary company or nation, it was detonated on purpose. All of them that have made it to the ocean, controlled have been purposely destroyed with a kaboom for those reasons.

 

[Bongle]

Was this sentence a typo (emphasis mine)?


Honestly, was the RV exploding part of the checklist for a successful flight?

The expected result of tipping over a skyscraper filled exclusively with oxygen gas and methane fumes is an explosion.

The designed goal is to eventually catch it on the tower without an explosion. But the mission was basically over the moment it hit the sea at velocity=zero and altitude=(the altitude it needed to be for a catch). What happened next - an explosion - could be reasonably predicted.

 

[shawnce]

Was this sentence a typo (emphasis mine)?


Honestly, was the RV exploding part of the checklist for a successful flight?

No it was the mostly likely and expected out come of the craft toppling over post soft landing.

 

[compgeek89]

The satellite view was very cool, but one thing I was a little confused about: they said on the broadcast that they were doing that to be able to inspect the heat shield. But the satellites are released from the top of the ship (the side without heat tiles). Was it supposed to do a flip maneuver after they released, or did they mean they wanted to inspect the few tiles they stuck on the top of the flaps?

I think that they planned to roll the ship, but with everything else happening due to the engine out, they cancelled the roll. Can't be sure, but it seems they were trying to do whatever they could get done, even partly.

 

[fl4Ksh]

NASA sends humans to space.

SpaceX sends trash to the bottom of the ocean, over and over and every time it's "wait for the next one!"

During the past 6 years SpaceX has sent far more humans to space than NASA. SpaceX has sent 78 individuals to LEO in 20 Dragon spacecraft missions as of mid 2026. NASA has sent 4 of its astronauts to space during that time on the Artemis II flight last month using its SLS/Orion vehicle that costs $4.1B per flight of taxpayer money. The most recent time NASA astronauts flew on a NASA launch vehicle before Artemis II was on the final Space Shuttle flight (July 2011) 15 years ago. That's how long NASA's human spaceflight program has been grounded and has been reliant on other people's launch vehicles (the Russians and SpaceX).

Dragon is designed, built and operated by SpaceX, not by NASA. NASA is a SpaceX customer who happened to make an investment in Dragon during the time that spacecraft was being designed 10 years ago.

SpaceX disposes of Starship test vehicles into the ocean after learning how to fix problems and improve Starship to make it fully and rapidly reusable. NASA dumps the SLS launch vehicle into the ocean and learns nothing new from that since the SLS is the last super heavy launch vehicle that NASA will ever design, build and operate. The future belongs to SpaceX and Starship, not to NASA.

 

[ArcaneTourist]

From the article: "mega-rocket"

Seriously? Mega-rocket?

It has two or three times as much thrust at liftoff as the Saturn V had. It's taller than any other rocket - now flying or ever flown. Plenty of cities don't have buildings as tall as that thing.

What criteria does it have to meet before an author can describe the tallest, most powerful rocket as "mega" ?

Edit - and, a two stage rocket where the second stage can also do an unaided lift-off.

 

[ZenBeam]

Was this sentence a typo (emphasis mine)?


Honestly, was the RV exploding part of the checklist for a successful flight?

What did you expect to happen instead?

 

[jimmy.j.r]

Huh?
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY96v0OIcK4


I guess you could argue NASA paid for it, but by that logic NASA has never sent anyone to space, US citizens have since they pay taxes which fill NASA's pockets.

I think we're being overly pedantic here. Access to space is all about capabilities. Next generation capabilities will clearly rely on a cheap way to access space and SpaceX seems to be tackling it head on.

yeah but shuffles flash cards of internet outrage stuff elon bad!!!! /s

which yea is true but it's hysterical reading uninformed internet commenters not knowing how any of this works saying ignorant stuff to get internet points and slaps on the back by other recreationally outraged weirdos.

 

[Jedakiah]

You can actually watch an engine RUD on the booster during the flip maneuver. The booster had flipped around enough for the ship's camera to catch it. It took out a significant number of its neighbors.

Unfortunately this means their removal of engine shielding might not be wise. V2 with its engine shields may have been able to survive such an engine RUD.


View: https://x.com/DJSnM/status/2058030864379129921

 

[dragonzord]

I think that they planned to roll the ship, but with everything else happening due to the engine out, they cancelled the roll. Can't be sure, but it seems they were trying to do whatever they could get done, even partly.

Or maybe there's more footage they haven't shared?

 

[lukarak]

From the article: "mega-rocket"

Seriously? Mega-rocket?

It is clearly wrong. It is built in the Gigabay, it should be Giga-rocket

 

[almsorne]

The satellite view was very cool, but one thing I was a little confused about: they said on the broadcast that they were doing that to be able to inspect the heat shield. But the satellites are released from the top of the ship (the side without heat tiles). Was it supposed to do a flip maneuver after they released, or did they mean they wanted to inspect the few tiles they stuck on the top of the flaps?

It also looked like they had several test tiles on the top side of flaps and other locations, they would certainly be visible to the camera. And in the past they have done things like deliberately test tiles with missing pins or similar to see how they hold up through launch, the top side is the perfect place to test that since those aren't actually necessary tiles.

 

[countzero99]

I think that they planned to roll the ship, but with everything else happening due to the engine out, they cancelled the roll. Can't be sure, but it seems they were trying to do whatever they could get done, even partly.

I mentioned this in the comments on the older article about this flight, but to me it looked like the ship did roll. The lights reflected on the outer hull changing periodically during the coast phase are a pretty clear indicator for that. The just didn't release the footage so far. The only thing they showed was the camera view a few seconds after deployment during the stream.

 

[Aelix]

The clip of the satellite leaving starship whilst looking back is probably the best example of I've ever seen of Newton's 1st law in action. Hope they show this in schools and colleges.

Can you expand on this? I understand what you are saying, but I don't understand why this example is better than others?

 

[shawnce]

While we can all snark about whether this was a resounding success or a predictable failure, this doesn't seem like the result you'd want for a rocket that's aiming to eventually carry humans.

Starship will not carry humans into space or returning from space until 100 or more flights (many of suspect this), so the dynamics of earth accent and return at this point in time nor any time in the near future are of much concerns from a human flight perspective.

The only near term human involvement will be the HLS which will be a fairly bespoke purpose built craft for decent/accent from the lunar surface. It will have secondary thrusters and engine systems that they will test the hell out of under the close eye of NASA. It will be flying in a generally more forgiving atmospheric and gravitational profile (long term propellant management is the biggest issue).

Credit where it's due -- they've made clear and impressive improvements. But those improvements seem to largely have been some of the more straightforward engineering challenges.

The version 3 of the full stack is a good bit different than prior versions. It involves a number of non-trivial changes across a fairly wide spectrum of the engineering problem space.

The reliability issues with the engines seem much more existential. While SpaceX have admittedly done some impressive work to enable the vehicle to compensate for the loss of an engine, they're nevertheless playing with some very risky odds.

Having an amount of redundancy in propulsion generally lowers the risk, so having more engines available is a good thing (up to a point depending on the reality of the craft / engines).

I could see those odds eventually becoming acceptable for some payloads, but I'm not sure the humans sitting on top are going to be comfortable with "on average, at least one engine explodes per flight, hopefully not in the wrong place" particularly when we have safer options at our disposal.

Prior flights with earlier generation Raptors showed a good amount of reliability (much better then your "one engine per flight") and the root cause for the failures of an engine or engine relight came mostly from design deficiencies in the plumbing, propellant management of the craft, or propellant accumulation in voids that ignited.

I suspect they will have engine issues worked out over the next couple of flights between modifications to the craft, procedures / flight profile, and engines themselves. SpaceX is now one of the more experienced if not most experienced manufacturers of rocket engines in the industry (easily the one with the most experience in a short and continuously active timeframe).

The situation will be a good amount different by the time they get to putting humans on Starship for earth operations (note they may never do that with the current generation).