Watch: Starship Megarocket Prepares For 10th Test Flight 

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: 

.   .   .