A successful test flight puts Musk’s Starship back on track

A successful test flight puts Musk’s Starship back on track

EVER SINCE its was founded in 2002 SpaceX has been a proponent of the “fail fast; learn fast” school of engineering. And the past few months have seen some particularly spectacular failures. Two test flights of its Starship mega-rocket, in January and March, ended in fireworks as their upper stages broke apart over the Caribbean. A third test, in May, lasted a little longer, until a fuel leak doomed the rocket to an uncontrolled re-entry. In June yet another upper stage blew up, this time during a ground test.

A SpaceX Super Heavy booster carrying the Starship spacecraft lifts off on its 10th test flight at the company's launch pad in Starbase, Texas, U.S., August 26, 2025. (REUTERS)

The test flight on August 26th—Starship’s tenth—brought some good news at last. The rocket’s booster stage flew back towards the launch site before splashing down, as planned, into the Gulf of Mexico. The troublesome upper stage made it into space, where it deployed eight dummy satellites and demonstrated that it could restart its engines—both important milestones. Despite trouble with its engine skirts and control flaps during its fiery re-entry, it managed to make a simulated landing in the Indian Ocean, hovering briefly just above the surface before falling gently into the drink.

That will cheer both SpaceX itself and NASA, America’s space agency. Both are heavily invested in Starship’s success. Its unprecedented combination of size and cheapness is vital to SpaceX’s goal of enabling crewed flights to Mars. It is likewise important for the long-term development of Starlink, the fast-growing satellite-internet service that provides most of the company’s income. NASA, meanwhile, wants to use a modified version of Starship as part of its plans to return American astronauts to the Moon.

All those goals are still a long way off. The recent run of problems coincided with the switch from Starship’s original upper stage to a newer “Block 2” variant. The firm will soon switch again to “Block 3”, which will sport new engines and a new mechanism for connecting it to its booster, among other changes. The experience with Block 2 suggests the transition may not be smooth. And although Starship has proved it can get into space, it does so without enough fuel in its tanks to carry on to either Mars or the Moon. SpaceX plans to solve that problem by refuelling in orbit from other rockets sent up with cargo bays full of extra propellant. Since nothing like that has ever been tried before, it will take several successful demonstrations before either NASA or SpaceX is confident enough to rely on it.

The long road ahead highlights another feature of SpaceX’s corporate culture: rosy timelines. Elon Musk, its boss, said earlier in the year that he hoped to send an uncrewed Starship to Mars in late 2026, when Earth and Mars are next favourably aligned in their respective orbits. The company is also meant to be landing an uncrewed Starship on the Moon in the same year.

Those were hair-raising deadlines even at the start of the year. Even if this latest successful test marks a return to rapid progress, pulling either of them off now looks impossible. If the timelines are slipping, though, SpaceX’s ambitions are not. The firm has built a gigantic rocket factory at its Starbase facility in Texas, whose eventual goal is to assemble one new Starship a day. It is adding new launch pads, one in Texas and another in Florida, with the goal of flying the rocket several times a day. The setbacks do not seem to have deterred SpaceX’s investors, either. A recent share sale reportedly valued the firm at $400bn, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

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