SpaceX's Starship has ended its 13th test flight with its upper stage intact. On 24 July the towering vehicle – as tall as a 40-storey building – lifted off from the company's Starbase site in south Texas at 6:51 p.m. Eastern, and just over an hour later the upper stage settled gently onto the Indian Ocean, where it tipped over and floated on the surface.
"That is the softest splashdown we have ever had," SpaceX commentator Dan Huot said as a drone filmed the ship bobbing in the waves. By several measures it was the cleanest return yet for the world's most powerful rocket.
The soft landing mattered for more than show. Because the vehicle stayed in one piece, engineers got their first clear views of a heat shield that had survived the searing heat of re-entry – data that is central to SpaceX's goal of flying the same ship again and again rather than discarding it after a single use.
This was only the second outing for the new Version 3 design, after a May attempt ended with the booster failing its water landing. This time the Super Heavy first stage separated cleanly, flipped and headed back toward the Gulf of Mexico, though its landing burn faltered – by SpaceX's account only five of the required engines fired – and it hit the water harder than planned. The upper stage, the part that would one day carry cargo or crew, still performed the flight's headline task, releasing a test batch of next-generation Starlink satellites before its descent.
Each flight is a step in a long test campaign rather than a finished product, and SpaceX has grown used to learning from hardware that does not survive. But an intact ship and a readable heat shield move the programme closer to full reusability – and toward NASA's plans to use a version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon later this decade, which would be the first crewed lunar landing in more than half a century.