Third Time’s The Charm: SpaceX Starship Megarocket Blasts Off From Starbase

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Update (Tuesday):

After three attempts, finally liftoff! 

Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/d6d2hHgMa0

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2025

Starship’s Raptor engines ignite during hot-staging separation. Super Heavy is boosting back towards its splashdown site pic.twitter.com/9fRi4kvbmX

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2025

Super Heavy has splashed down in the Gulf pic.twitter.com/LGozUAmLt8

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2025

Starship’s ascent burn is complete and is now coasting through space

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2025

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Update (Monday): 

Scrubbed. 

Standing down from today’s flight test attempt due to weather. Starship team is determining the next best available opportunity to fly

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2025

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Update (Monday): 

Just one day after the tenth Starship flight was delayed due to a ground-systems troubleshooting issue, the countdown clock is now at T-minus 12 minutes and ticking down.

Weather conditions are currently 55% favorable.

Counting down to Starship’s tenth flight test. Weather is currently 55% favorable for launch at the start of the window → https://t.co/UIwbeGoVS9 pic.twitter.com/s4GiykTfdg

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 25, 2025

Watch Live:

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Update (0715ET): 

“Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” SpaceX wrote on X.

Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 24, 2025

No timeframe was given for when the test flight would be rescheduled.

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The tenth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Eastern at the company’s Starbase launch site in southern Texas, just outside Brownsville. The stakes are high for Elon Musk and the SpaceX team after investigations into the Flight 9 loss found a static fire anomaly that led engineers to push for hardware fixes and operational upgrades. That’s the entire point of these test flights, pushing reliability higher in preparation for future missions to the Moon and eventually Mars. 

Starship 10 launching tonight https://t.co/EOgGbS3Om7

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2025

Here are the goals of today’s flight test of Starship:

Super Heavy Booster Objectives:

• Conduct multiple landing burn experiments, including disabling one central engine to test backup performance.

• Transition to a two-engine hover before shutting down and dropping into the Gulf of America (no return attempt).

• Continue testing new flight profiles and off-nominal scenarios to refine reusability.

Starship Upper Stage Objectives:

• Attempt first payload deployment with eight Starlink simulators (expected to burn up on reentry).

• Perform a Raptor engine relight in space.

Conduct reentry stress tests, including:

• Removing heat shield tiles to probe vulnerable areas.

• Testing metallic tiles, including one with active cooling.

• Evaluating catch fittings and new tile edge designs.

• Forcing structural stress on rear flaps during peak reentry pressure. 

Roadmap of test flight:

Watch the 400-foot-tall megarocket with 33 engines, known as the Super Heavy, blast Starship into space and back: 

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