Starship's Tenth Flight Test
72 comments
·August 26, 2025erulabs
Unbelievable! Watched with my 4 year old, he was full of questions about why the ocean was turning to nighttime, what satellites are, about going to another planet, about the earth being so blue and if we “ever even knew that before”.
Just wonderful stuff. So excited for the future.
dvt
So awesome, I hope to have kids one day precisely for this reason! One of my fondest memories is my dad quenching my curiosity (with a drawing, to boot!) of how satellite dishes work when I was 6 or 7.
bamboozled
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justahuman74
Its pretty common for 4 year olds to not yet know about planetary orbits, and to also find rocket launches fascinating
wyldfire
I'm not seeing cues of satire, it all seems sincere.
dcmatt
Don't be bamboozled! This is an amazing time to be alive!
Pedro_Ribeiro
What is sad about this?
NobodyNada
...Huh? Why would that be sad?
My parents have formative memories of watching the moon landings as kids, and I of watching the space shuttle. As someone who ended up where I am in large part due to my curiosity about the world growing up, reading of OP's kid watching a rocket launch, thinking critically about what they're seeing, and learning more about the world from it is a joyous thing.
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blendergeek
what is the sad part here?
mikewarot
I'm amazed the thing landed right next to the Buoy, and was seen from the BuoyCam.
chasd00
Just saw the splash down. I think this was 100% successful test.
kersplody
Not quite, but it's a major milestone. Still quite a bit of work to go on the rapid reusability part (burnt flaps, oxidized body, missing tiles, tile waterproofing). Starship might actually deliver payload to orbit on flight 11.
rlt
They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
ericcumbee
It accomplished all the goals for this flight. That’s 100% successful
Geee
Yes, although one booster engine failed at the start. Not a big deal. :)
rlt
The nice thing about SpaceX’s rapid iteration philosophy (and having Starlink as its first “customer”) is that they can account for engine unreliability by building extra margin into early launches, fly with reduced payloads, collect data on failures, and improve the reliability over time.
haberman
Landed on target in the Indian Ocean! Engines relit successfully and it touched down vertically (and then promptly exploded, which I guess was the plan :)
niteshpant
I thought it exploded after it landed?
decimalenough
Well, yes, it landed in the ocean by design and toppled over because that's what happens when you land a 50m tall spaceship vertically in water.
schoen
This sequence of events (even though expected!) reminds me a lot of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail speech:
> Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
(although I suppose this ship fell over, then burned down, and then sank into the ocean)
nsxwolf
That was expected. It’s not meant to land on water.
Polizeiposaune
That's the expected result for this test flight.
bombcar
There wa supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom. And there was.
pengaru
> I thought it exploded after it landed?
It landed on the sea, there was no barge afaik.
chasd00
Was cool to see the pez dispenser door start to open and all that vapor get sucked outside.
The booster ditch was super cool, hover then just cut the engines and let it drop.
JKCalhoun
Some kind of failure in the lower engine area.
Figure it's going to burn up on entry?
EDIT: made it. I suppose it was meant to blow up on landing in the ocean? It would have been nice to examine the burned components — but perhaps they had not intended to retrieve it that far away anyway.
dotnet00
The walls are 3mm thick steel, they're very likely to buckle and tear when it tips over, the residual methane vapor gets out and there are plenty of sources of heat to ignite it.
They don't claim to have any plans of recovering the wreckage, but they have previously fished up wreckage for study, so it's still possible they decide to do that.
BurningFrog
It's not meant to perform well after landing in water, is how I would phrase it.
m4rtink
Maybe just some part of the construction (possibly even just the strinngers or simply some nook or cranny that is fully eclosed) got presurized or was pressurized for the whole time by just air that could not escape.
That would be fine for the fligt so far - until it started to heat up from re-entry heating. The stainless steel would be still fine if heated to hundreads of degrees, but the expanding gass could maybe make the enclosed volume to rupture ?
Or a mix of methane and oxygen accumulating somwhere and exploding - but that seems less likely to me in a near vacuum environment during re-entry.
dotnet00
IIRC they have pressure vessels in the lower fins with some of the gasses they need. Maybe one of those was damaged and burst. To me it looked like something blew out the bottom of one of the fins (maybe got too hot) and hit the skirt.
pixl97
It made it, but there was some toastyness on the bottom of the lower flaps. This said, it is less bad than we've seen on the other 2 landings.
ls612
Sounds like they removed a few too many heat tiles before launch.
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pram
Are the tiles on Starship going to need replacing after flight like the Shuttle? There isn’t a permanent material that can handle all the heat yet? Serious question, my space expertise is only from KSP.
dotnet00
The intention is to need minimal to no replacement between flights. Part of the purpose of these tests is to figure out how to do that.
The tiles themselves work fine, but how to best mount them? where do you need them? Can you make them thinner? do you need anything underneath? what kind of gap do you need between tiles? Those are the things they're hoping to understand in these tests.
The Shuttle tiles were technically reusable AFAIK. The issue was that they were very fragile and the Shuttle for the most part could not tolerate any heat getting through the tiles (being aluminum), so every flight needed to have a perfect heat shield. Starship is a bit better on that end, as stainless steel is a lot more capable of tolerating heat and I think the tiles are a bit less fragile. Still, would be ideal to figure out how to not drop any tiles.
floating-io
Remains to be seen. That's what they want, but it's never been done before. (edit: clarity: they do NOT want to replace them after each flight.)
They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two).
I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before launching again.
ericcumbee
Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut down the time to replace a single tile down to minutes instead of the hours it took with the shuttle. The Tiles are also alot more standardized so they can be more mass produced than shuttle tiles.
decimalenough
Everything nominal so far and payload deployment was successful for the first time. Re-entry starts at around T+0:45.
decimalenough
Successful splashdown! Looks like they nailed all the objectives, and not a moment too soon.
jprd
They did it. Damn.
K0balt
Looks like they hit all the objectives!
Splashdown right next to the buoy!
Awesome to see it all go right.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpmTivdrQiQ