STARBASE, TX — Engineers at SpaceX’s Starbase facility confirmed Saturday that the company’s latest Starship test flight had achieved one hundred percent of its mission objectives, a goals list which a spokesperson acknowledged was last revised at T+plus four minutes, twelve seconds.
The flight, which launched from the Gulf Coast facility shortly after dawn, completed what the company described as a ‘fully nominal trajectory’ until the moment the trajectory ceased being nominal, at which point the criteria for a nominal trajectory were updated to include whatever Starship was currently doing.
‘This is the most data-rich test we’ve ever flown,’ said Aaron Vesely, a propulsion lead at SpaceX, gesturing at a monitor that had gone dark. ‘Every single thing the vehicle did, including the parts where it stopped doing things, gave us tremendously valuable information about what the vehicle does.’
According to telemetry briefly available to the public livestream, the upper stage achieved orbital velocity, deployed a payload simulator, and then underwent what the company is now calling a ‘controlled energetic reentry,’ a phrase introduced to the press kit between 7:14 and 7:16 a.m. Central. The lower booster, originally slated to return to the launch tower, instead returned to the Gulf of Mexico, which engineers described as ‘an alternative recovery surface available year-round.’
The launch was the eleventh full-stack test of the program and, per a SpaceX press release, the eleventh consecutive complete success. A Beacon Strategy aerospace analyst noted that the company’s definition of success has now been revised so many times that the original 2019 mission criteria — ‘reach orbit, deploy satellites, return both stages intact’ — are no longer referenced in any current documentation, having been replaced by the broader objective of ‘fly.’
Federal Aviation Administration observers, who were present to monitor debris fields, reported that the debris field ‘fell within the expanded debris field,’ a designation the agency expanded in October to accommodate previous debris fields. Residents of South Padre Island reported a sonic event consistent with a vehicle that was, at one point, a vehicle.
Elon Musk, posting from his account during reentry, described the flight as ‘a huge step toward Mars,’ a step the company has been taking, by its own count, eleven times. He added that Starship would be carrying humans to the lunar surface ‘soon,’ using the same definition of soon that has applied since 2022.
NASA, which has tied roughly four billion dollars in Artemis program funding to a working version of the vehicle, issued a statement congratulating SpaceX on ‘continued progress’ and declined to specify toward what. A program manager, speaking on condition of not being named in any document a contractor might later cite, said the agency was ‘cautiously optimistic that the next flight will incorporate lessons from this flight, the previous flight, and the flight before that, which incorporated lessons from the flight before that.’
Asked whether the booster’s unplanned ocean landing represented a setback, Vesely shook his head. ‘Setback implies a goal we didn’t meet,’ he said. ‘We met the goal. The goal was updated to reflect the meeting of the goal. That’s how iteration works.’
The next Starship test is tentatively scheduled for January, pending FAA review and the drafting of a fresh mission objectives document, which a SpaceX engineer confirmed would be finalized ‘sometime during ascent.’