The race to radically reduce launch costs and pave the way to Mars and back to the moon — with the world’s most powerful and first fully reusable rocket — took one more small step forward today with Starship’s eighth flight test.
But only a small step, sad to say.
So the flight test plan was almost identical to January’s Flight Test 7. Super Heavy 15 (the booster first stage) would launch Ship 33 (Block 2) into near-orbital velocity before returning to Earth, conducting boost-back and landing burns, and being caught in the steel arms of the Mechazilla launch/catch tower. The Ship would hot-boost (fire its engines while Super Heavy’s engines were still burning) into orbital velocity, conduct a test deployment of mock-up Starlink satellites, and then perform a controlled water landing in the Indian Ocean before completing an orbit. There were some other things along the way, like a repeat of Flight Test’s 6 vacuum re-light of one of Ship 33’s engines.
The first part went seriously well.
And Another Thing: A quick word on SpaceX’s sometimes confusing nomenclature. “Starship” can refer to the entire stack (Super Heavy booster plus the upper stage deep-space vehicle, both fully reusable) or just the upper stage. For clarity, I’ll try to remember to refer to the upper stage as “Ship,” which SpaceX increasingly does, and use “Starship” only for the whole thing. But sometimes I might forget.
Watch that catch:
🚨BREAKING: The third ever successful Booster catch with the chopsticks. 🥢 pic.twitter.com/0hXofEBfik
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) March 6, 2025
It’s even more impressive when you remember that the booster has twice the power (!!!) of the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo missions to Luna and stands 230 feet tall. With all the ease of a practiced shortstop, SpaceX caught a flying 20-story building spewing burning rocket fuel from three of its 33 engines. That’s never gonna get old.
And Another Thing: Super Heavy didn’t come down precisely into Mechzilla’s chopsticks, but the computer-controlled arms automatically compensated to make their third flawless catch in the last four attempts. A previous attempt was waved off due to minor tower damage caused by Starship’s engines during launch. Lesson learned? Mechazilla performs expertly.
That’s two Super Heavy boosters in a row that launched nominally and returned to Earth in Mechazilla’s tender embrace. Whatever the team is doing with Super Heavy — by far the most powerful rocket to ever fly even without reusability — they’re doing it right.
But Ship Block 2 has flown twice now and both times it achieved Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD, aka Kablooey) instead of completing its flight test. Still, the video is impressive:
UPDATE: Starship failed during ascent, experiencing a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ & losing contact. SpaceX is reviewing data to improve reliability for future Mars missions @SpaceX #Starship #SpaceX
— Premchand (@premchands39) March 7, 2025
“Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses,” SpaceX posted to X. “We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.”
The real shame of Starship not completing its flight to the Indian Ocean might be the shielding tests that didn’t happen, the data that wasn’t collected. To achieve full and rapid reusability of the Ship, SpaceX needs to understand much more about the Ship’s heat tiles and reentry wear and tear.
No worries, though — failures are expected in SpaceX’s “hardware-rich” testing environment. SpaceX (and increasingly, Blue Origin) doesn’t share the “do it once, do it right” mindset of the older space firms. Rapid testing, rapid data collection, rapid iteration, followed rapidly by the next test is the name of the game now.
The Starship team is now in the “rapid data collection” phase and it won’t be long until Flight Test 9 gives them much more data to collect.
Still, I badly wanted to see Ship 33 complete its mission.
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