The world's most powerful rocket aced a critical test launch this week, and the images from liftoff are stunning.
Starship Flight 10 lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Tuesday evening (Aug. 26). The rocket met each of its objectives, ending a streak of subpar performance that had plagued the developing launch vehicle since the beginning of 2025.
Starship's three previous launches this year all resulted in the premature destruction of the vehicle's Ship upper stage. SpaceX suffered another setback in June, when Ship 36, which was being prepped to fly on Flight 10, exploded during propellant loading on a Starbase test stand. Ship 37 entered as 36's replacement, and, along with its Super Heavy booster, was able to cross out the mission's entire checklist.
Starship is SpaceX's next-generation rocket, built for the ultimate purpose of sending humans to Mars, which company founder and CEO Elon Musk hopes to accomplish before 2030.
But the launch vehicle has several key milestones it has to accomplish in order to meet that timeline, including landing astronauts on the moon as a part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission in 2027 or thereabouts. Flight 10's success served as a significant step toward reaching those goals.
Once in space on Tuesday, Ship successfully reignited one of its Raptor engines — a demonstration of an operational mission requirement and something SpaceX had accomplished on just one previous test flight.
Ship was also able to open its payload bay door on Flight 10 and deploy eight mass-simulator stand-ins of SpaceX's Starlink satellites — a Starship first. Finally, the Ship upper stage survived reentry through Earth's atmosphere (mostly unscathed), arrested its descent with a flip-and-burn maneuver, and pulled off an upright, soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean about 66.5 minutes after liftoff.
Super Heavy, too, gave a nearly flawless performance (one of the rocket's 33 engines shut off during ascent, but the booster is designed to compensate for such losses). Ship and Super Heavy executed a successful "hot-stage" separation just under three minutes after liftoff, sending Ship on to space and the Super Heavy booster on a trajectory for a deceleration burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
A few hours after launch, SpaceX shared some of its footage from liftoff, posting a slow-motion video on X shot from a drone showing the Starship stack clear the tower.
Another video, shared the next day (Aug. 27), shows the view from beneath Starship's launch mount, capturing the awesome power of Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines as they blast the vehicle off the pad.
With these successes under its belt, SpaceX is looking to advance Starship development further. In its current iteration, known as Version 2, the Super Heavy/Ship stack reaches nearly 400 feet (121 meters) tall. In an Aug. 27 post on X, Musk stated that Version 3 will be and tested, and possibly flown for the first time, by the end of the year.
Version 4, he added in the post, should be ready in 2027, and will stand at a towering height of about 492 feet (150 m). That's the same year NASA is targeting for Artemis 3, which will be the first mission to land astronauts on the moon since 1972. NASA has chosen Starship as Artemis 3's lunar lander, but has previously expressed concerns about the spacecraft's development progress potentially delaying the agency's return to the moon. Whether the success of Flight 10 can be replicated on upcoming missions is yet to be determined, but it is certainly a step toward righting that timeline.
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