SpaceX didn’t try to recover the Super Heavy booster on this flight, but the goals the company set before the launch included an attempt to guide the enormous rocket stage to a precise splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of South Texas. The booster, reused from a previous flight in March, also validated a new engine configuration for its landing burn, first reigniting 13 of its engines, then downshifting to five, then to three for the final hover.
That all worked, along with pretty much everything else, apart from an indication on SpaceX’s livestream that Starship’s Super Heavy booster stage lost an engine early in its descent. The malfunctioning engine had no impact on the rest of the flight.
Flight 11 Recap
This was the fifth and final flight of Starship’s second-generation configuration, known as Version 2, or V2. It was the 11th full-scale Starship test flight overall.
It took a while for Starship V2 to meet SpaceX’s expectations. The first three Starship V2 launches in January, March, and May ended prematurely due to problems in the rocket’s propulsion and a fuel leak, breaking a string of increasingly successful Starship flights since 2023. Another Starship V2 exploded on a test stand in Texas in June, further marring the second-gen rocket’s track record.
But SpaceX teams righted the program with a good test flight in August, the first time Starship V2 made it all the way to splashdown. Engineers learned a few lessons on that flight, including the inadequacy of a new metallic heat shield tile design that left a patch of orange oxidation down the side of the ship. They also found that another experiment with part of the ship’s heat shield showed promising results. This method involved using a soft “crunch wrap” material to seal the gaps between the ship’s ceramic tiles and prevent super-heated plasma from reaching the rocket’s stainless steel skin.