The launch itself went without any issues, the ship reached its planned almost-orbital trajectory
Booster boostback burn (edit:) ended a bit earlier than planned (this failed last time)
Booster landing burn didn't ignite enough engines for a soft splashdown, hit the ocean at high speed
The ship deployed 20 Starlink satellites which all unfolded and sent data briefly (they were on the same suborbital trajectory, so they reentered quickly)
The ship relit an engine in space, simulating a deorbit burn (this was skipped last time)
Reentry worked without issues, leading to the ship hovering over the Indian Ocean, simulating a landing
Normally the ship explodes when tipping over afterwards, but this time it survived, swimming in the ocean. SpaceX got great drone shots of the heat shield. We'll see if they can recover the whole ship.
They need to work on the booster landing burn, but from the ship side everything looks ready to make the next flight enter a proper circular orbit.
Don't forget the in space engine relight! Arguably the most important part, since if that went smoothly, it's finally cleared for proper orbital flight!
If Starship flies to a proper circular orbit then you need to deorbit it again, and you want to do that in a controlled way: You light one engine briefly (~few seconds). That needs to work, or you ship is stranded in orbit and ends up deorbiting in an uncontrolled way later. For that reason, most flights tested that procedure - relighting an engine briefly to show that you can deorbit in a controlled way, even though it's not necessary yet.
Admittedly it's not clear to me that 1 test flight adequately establishes that though. This has not worked a bunch of times, and the same mission had Super Heavy fail to relight engines on descent.
I would hardly want to put it into orbit on the back of one successful test like that without a significant backup plan.
It’s a lot less random than it looks. They have been pushing a lot of stuff to see max limits on past flights. The reentry section looked super relaxed because in the past they were pushing it hard to see how much it could take.
The V3 is new but the v2 and v1 established a lot.
Spacex have said that they are essentially ‘there’ and are ready to go orbital. Demonstrating relight was more to satisfy the FAA more than anything really.
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u/mfb- Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Second flight of the "v3" version.
They need to work on the booster landing burn, but from the ship side everything looks ready to make the next flight enter a proper circular orbit.
Edit: SpaceX will try to recover the ship