On July 24, SpaceX’s Starship completed its most successful test flight, deploying its first batch of operational satellites and bringing both rocket stages to controlled splashdowns.
The vehicle lifted off from Starbase in South Texas at 5:51 p.m. CT with all 33 Raptor engines of the Super Heavy booster firing. The booster separated after about two minutes of flight and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf, though not all engines appeared to light during the landing burn.
Roughly 18 minutes after launch, the upper stage deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites, and SpaceX later confirmed contact with all 20. This is the flight’s real significance: previous missions carried only mass simulators, so Starship has now graduated from an experiment to a working launch vehicle. The V3 satellites are built to downlink at up to one terabit per second. About an hour after liftoff the upper stage came down in the Indian Ocean in what a SpaceX commentator called its softest splashdown yet.
Starship is the vehicle NASA has contracted as the lander for Artemis IV—the first crewed Moon landing since 1972, now set for 2028—so every step toward reliability is a step toward that mission, even as the vehicle must still demonstrate orbital maneuvers.
The same civilization that can place twenty satellites in orbit and bring both stages home intact is presently devoting its treasure to closing straits and destroying refineries.
The deeper limit to spaceflight will not be solved by reusability alone. Starship, like every rocket flying, burns chemical propellant, and that chemistry has little room for improvement. The leap that would actually open the solar system—nuclear thermal propulsion, ground-tested at nearly double the efficiency of the best chemical engines in the 1960s NERVA program, then canceled—remains unmade.
