The most powerful rocket in history just roared off its launch pad in a spectacular show of power and technology.
SpaceX launched the newest version of its giant Starship rocket Friday (May 22), from a recently completed second pad at its Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas. Liftoff occurred at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), sending the massive 408-foot-tall (124-meter) vehicle skyward on its 12th suborbital test flight.
It was the first Starship mission since October 2025, and the first-ever flight of Starship Version 3 (V3), a next-generation build of the rocket that features a complete design overhaul meant to evolve the vehicle toward operational missions. And today's suborbital Flight 12 was a significant step toward that ambitious goal, even if it was a day later than planned after a glitched thwarted a first launch try on Thursday.
"Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & landing!," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the launch. "You scored a goal for humanity."
There were some hiccups.
During liftoff, one of the 33 first-stage Raptor engines on Super Heavy shut down, and the booster missed a critical "boost back" manuever to control its return to Earth. Starship's Ship 39 upper stage also lost one of its six main engines during ascent, but managed to reach space on the remaining five.
"I wouldn't call it nominal orbital insertion, but we're in on a trajectory that we had analyzed, and it's within bounds," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said in live commentary. "So, teams continuing to work through it with that engine out there, working some through some steps on the engines."
Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper stage known as Starship, or simply Ship. The first notable event after the rocket cleared the tower this evening occurred about 2 minutes and 20 seconds into flight, when Super Heavy initiated "hot staging" and separation from Ship. (It's known as hot staging because Ship begins firing its engines before separating from Super Heavy.)
Unlike its V2 predecessor, which featured an interstage ring that fell away at separation, Starship V3 is built with similar hardware secured to the top of the booster, like a fence around the fuel tank's dome to give some breathing room to the upper stage engines' ignition and initial thrust away from the booster.
After stage separation, Super Heavy reoriented and attempted to perform a one-minute boostback burn toward Starbase. However, something went wrong and the burn didn't go as planned, Huot said.
SpaceX has performed booster recoveries at Starbase on previous Starship missions, catching the rocket's first stage using mechanical "chopstick" arms attached to the site's launch towers. On Flight 12, however, the company planed to return Super Heavy a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico rather than risk a recovery mishap that could damage the pad on the first flight of brand-new hardware.
Instead, the massive Super Heavy booster plummeted back to Earth and crashed into the Gulf, beaming live views of its fall from space until the screen went black.
"The booster didn't complete its full boost back," Huot said just after lifotff. "Its mission ended a little bit early, but landed in the clear area that we had set in advance."
SpaceX included 22 payloads for Ship to deploy during its suborbital jaunt today — 20 dummy versions of the company's Starlink broadband satellites and two actual Starlink spacecraft equipped with imaging sensors.
The payloads were deployed as planned over a 10-minute span, beginning roughly 17 minutes after launch, via Ship's "PEZ dispenser"-like door. The two modified Starlink satellites were tasked with scanning Starship's heat shield tiles, in a test meant to assess the ability to inspect them for possible damage prior to reentry.
Shortly after the final two Starlink simulators deployed (the ones with cameras that SpaceX nicknamed "Dodger Dogs" after the famed hotdogs at Dodger Stadium), SpaceX broadcast the spectactular video they captured as they flew away from Starship.
"That is a Starship in space," Huot said.
SpaceX initially planned for the Ship 39 upper stage to perform an in-space relight of one of its six Raptor engines in orbit— an important demonstration to prove the spacecraft can reliably execute maneuvers, as mixing and managing cryogenic fuels and reigniting an engine in zero-g is necessary to alter Ship's orbit, send it on to the moon or Mars, and bring it back to Earth for recovery and reuse. But because of the lost Raptor engine during launch, flight controllers skipped that test for Flight 12.
And so, the first Starship V3 spacecraft began its descent to Earth.
Ship began its reentry to Earth's atmosphere about 50 minutes into the flight, falling as its belly became engulfed in a bright plasma. During its descent, Ship 39 performed a series of exercises designed to stress parts of the vehicle to their structural limit. It also executed a novel banking maneuver for its landing burn meant to mimic the trajectory and orientation needed for a launch tower catch on a return to Starbase.
Huge cheers rang out at SpaceX's headquareters and Starbase facilities as the Ship 39 ignited two engines for a final landing burn. The manuever initially called for three engines, but that one shut down early at liftoff. After the landing, Starship toppled over into the ocean waters and exploded in a magnificent fireball (again, as planned) as SpaceX workers cheered.
Nothing Starship accomplished on Flight 12 was particularly groundbreaking for SpaceX; the mission goals and trajectories were broadly similar to those of the previous few test missions.
However, even successfully following a previously blazed trail was huge for Starship V3, given that it's a brand-new vehicle with a variety of modifications and upgrades over its predecessors. And V3's road to the launch pad was a bit rocky.
SpaceX ran into some issues during the testing of the new V3 build in November last year, resulting in the loss of the Super Heavy booster originally slated for the Flight 12 mission. Now, with more than half a year between Starship's last two launches, SpaceX has some catching up to do.
NASA is relying on Starship as one of the crewed lunar landers for its Artemis program, which aims to eventually establish a permanent human presence on the moon. The space agency has also contracted Blue Moon, a Blue Origin spacecraft, to land Artemis astronauts on the moon, and has indicated a willingness to fly with whichever private lander is ready when it's time for the missions to get off the ground.
The next of those missions is Artemis 3 — the follow-up to April's Artemis 2, which flew four astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft on a successful 10-day mission around the moon. NASA is targeting mid to late 2027 for Artemis 3, which will launch Orion to low Earth orbit (LEO) to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the private lunar landers, and late 2028 for the first lunar landing on Artemis 4.
As if to drive that fact home, NASA chief Jared Isaacman flew to Starbase to watch the launch personally.
"We're looking forward to seeing this thing fly, because hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we're gonna, we're gonna join up in an earth orbit," Isaacman said during the live comentary.
After the launch, Isaacman hailed the work of SpaceX's Starship team.
"Congrats SpaceX team and Elon Musk on a hell of a V3 Starship launch," Isaacman wrote on X. "One step closer to the Moon ... one step closer to Mars."
Starship has a number of boxes to check before NASA certifies the vehicle to fly astronauts, but V3 has been built with those goalposts in mind.
The new Starship V3 vehicle includes four passive connection ports on its back, or leeward, side (opposite the heat tiles on its belly), which are designed for docking and ship-to-ship fuel transfers.
In order to fly beyond LEO, Starship requires the assistance of additional Ships to meet up in orbit to top off its fuel tanks. This is especially important for its use as the Artemis moon lander; experts have estimated that each lunar Starship mission could require a dozen or more refueling launches to adequately supply enough propellant to get to the moon, land and launch back to lunar orbit.
Ship has yet to demonstrate in-space refueling, or even a launch that fully reaches Earth orbit. And there are other boxes it needs to tick as well.
For example, NASA is requiring both Starship and Blue Moon to demonstrate uncrewed lunar landings before they fly astronauts down to the lunar surface, putting SpaceX and Blue Origin on a short timeline to ready vehicles for the planned Artemis 4 landing in 2028.
Starship's launch today helps put it back on track toward meeting that goal, but SpaceX will have to pick up its launch cadence significantly. Just over a year ago, in March 2025, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that he expected to be launching V3 at a "rate of once a week in [about] 12 months."
While that cadence still seems a long way off at Starship's current state of development, the success of Flight 12 bodes well for the near future. And hopefully the near future features another Starship launch — a giant rocket getting off the ground in a matter of weeks, versus the seven months that separated today’s mission from the previous test flight.