Highlights: SpaceX launches massive Starship on its sixth test flight

We’ve wrapped up our live coverage for the day. Read more about SpaceX’s sixth Starship test flight here, or scroll through the posts below to relive the event as it unfolded.

The last test flight in October saw SpaceX successfully land its Super Heavy booster back at the launch site. It was a history-making endeavor that few expected would happen.

A repeat of that spectacle didn’t happen today. But the Starship spacecraft did go on to reignite an engine in space for the first time, and execute a safe landing in the Indian Ocean.

And the fact that SpaceX cameras captured the landing of this Starship test flight likely means the company didn’t just have a rough idea of the landing place, they were pretty spot on.

High hopes for a breathtaking booster landing aside, SpaceX has been known to embrace fiery mishaps, explosions, and rockets crashing into watery ocean graves. That’s all fine — according to SpaceX — at least in the early stages of developing a new rocket.

A still from SpaceX's livestream shows Starship landing in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX has said its approach to rocket development is geared toward speed. The company makes use of an engineering method called “rapid spiral development.” That essentially boils down to a desire to quickly build prototypes and willingly blow them up in the name of learning how to construct a better one — faster than if the company solely relied on ground tests and simulations.

After the first Starship test flight’s explosion in April 2023, the company immediately sought to frame the mishap as a success, saying in a statement at the time, “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount.”

People take photos of the SpaceX Starship in Brownsville, Texas, on November 17.

While SpaceX has made considerable progress — drastically improving Starship’s performance across six different test flights carried out since April 2023— there’s still a lot to get done.

Tuesday’s test flight could cue up SpaceX to begin tackling more ambitious projects.

Demonstrating the ability to launch a Starship into orbit and then rendezvous the spacecraft with a tanker carrying fuel is considered essential to the success of NASA’s Artemis program.

For NASA’s human moon landing mission, called Artemis III — which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era — Starship may need to dock with more than a dozen fuel tankers before continuing its mission to the lunar surface.

SpaceX will also face a “critical design review” for the Artemis III mission next summer, according to the OIG.

SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell speaks at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in August 2018.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has famously taken to conservative politics in brand-new ways this year — broadcasting his overwhelmingly pro-business views on X — and he will play a role in Donald Trump’s incoming presidential administration. Trump has tapped Musk to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

But SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell — one of the company’s first employees who now runs its day-to-day operations — is also making clear her stance on the US regulatory environment and warning that oversight may be slowing down technological progress.

She added that, in her view, “the regulatory regime and the rules associated with that were built for 10-launch-a-year per company.” SpaceX, for reference, is on track to launch more than 130 Falcon rockets in 2024 alone, she said. And Shotwell said she expects Starship will launch 400 times within the next four years.

(Musk, meanwhile, has gone so far as to endorse social media posts that accuse the federal workforce as amounting to a “giant looting operation.”)

While Shotwell tends to approach political topics with a more reserved tone than Musk, she also sung the CEOs praises during the Friday event: “I love working for Elon,” she said. “Like I don’t have to work, and I love working for Elon.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the CRS-11 mission lands at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, in June 2017.

SpaceX has always made a big deal about steering rocket boosters back to a safe landing after launch so that the vehicles can be refurbished and flown again — driving down the cost of each rocket launch.

But while SpaceX has mastered the rocket booster landing maneuver with its smaller workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, the company cannot yet recover and re-fly the second stage boosters. So only the bottom roughly 60% of the rocket is flown more than once.

Starship aims to change that — making both the Super Heavy booster that gives the first burst of power at liftoff and the upper Starship rocket and spacecraft recoverable and reusable.

“This is the vehicle and the system that will make flying rockets much more like flying airplanes,” SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said during a conference on Friday. “Think about what life would be like if aircraft were one-time (use).”

SpaceX's Starhopper rocket sits at their facility near Brownsville, Texas, in July 2019.

SpaceX kicked off Starship development in earnest in 2019, when the company debuted a steel test vehicle nicknamed “Starhopper” that resembled a water tower more than a rocket. Starhopper tested out landing maneuvers by making brief flights up to a few dozen meters into the air.

From there, the company moved on to testing larger scale Starship spacecraft prototypes — each with a serial number or “SN” name.

Four of those flights ended in violent explosions after attempting to land upright from high altitudes. But the company finally nailed a soft landing after a 10-kilometer (33,000-foot) test flight in May of 2021.

Since then, SpaceX has tackled far more ambitious projects — slowly working its way to launching not only the Starship spacecraft but also its gargantuan rocket booster called Super Heavy, which is required to propel the Starship toward orbit.

No Starship rocket has been carried into a stable orbit around Earth — but that’s in part because that hasn’t been the goal of any of SpaceX’s six test flights so far.

The company has been more focused on safely launching the rocket, reigniting its engines and hashing out how the vehicle will execute safe landings after returning from space.

The first launch of a Starship and Super Heavy, carried out in April 2023, ended just minutes after takeoff as the rocket’s engines did not light as expected and SpaceX had to hit the self-destruct button to keep the vehicle from veering off course.

You may have heard Starship is the biggest rocket ever created. And it is — by a long shot.

Starship stands at nearly 400 feet (121 meters) tall and packs 16.7 million pounds (7,590 tons) of force at liftoff.

Let’s compare that to some of the other largest rockets ever constructed — past and present.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight Tuesday evening.

“Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight,” he wrote on X. “Starship’s success is #Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

Although SpaceX landed the Starship’s Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico rather than on land, Greg Autry — the Associate Provost for Space at the University of Central Florida — says operations Tuesday evening “looked really good.”

“I don’t think they had a big anomaly because it looked really good to me,” Autry told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

He said he thinks the company may have opted for a sea landing of the booster out of an “abundance of caution,” as President-elect Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were in attendance to view the test launch in Texas.

The booster that landed in the Gulf of Mexico cannot be used again, according to Autry, as it is not designed to “be soaked in saltwater.”

Autry is on the short list for a top space job in Trump’s administration, according to two sources familiar with the process.

In a statement to CNN on Tuesday, the Trump campaign said: “President-Elect Trump is making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration. Those decisions will continue to be announced by him when they are made.”

A still from SpaceX's livestream shows Starship splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX expected some sunlight at Starship’s landing site in the Indian Ocean, which helped engineers see its safe landing.

That paid off today, as SpaceX saw the Starship make a safe landing at its watery target, staying intact despite a rough landing trajectory.

“Turns out the vehicle had more capability than our calculations predicted, and that is why we test like we fly,” said SpaceX engineer Kate Tice.

The Starship spacecraft is heading in for its landing. Its wings are still intact.

That’s been hit or miss on prior test flights.

SpaceX really wants to stress those wings — or “flaps” — to better inform future missions.

Notably, Starship is now traveling less than the speed of sound or roughly 767 miles per hour.

SpaceX wants to eventually recover the Starship spacecraft.

That means it can’t be completely covered in octagon-shaped tiles that are meant to protect the vehicle from the heat, pressure and friction of reentry.

That’s why the company took some protective shielding off the Starship vehicle — to see whether it can survive without it. Perhaps, they can add hardware that will be necessary to recover the vehicle on the next flight — if all goes well.

Still, the company is “not expecting to recover the vehicle,” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said during the livestream.

A still from SpaceX's livestream shows the Starship spacecraft heading back down to Earth on Tuesday.

The Starship spacecraft is gearing up for a landing in the Indian Ocean. It’s done this a couple times before on prior test flights, leaving each vehicle to sink to a watery grave as SpaceX hashes out the maneuvers it will use to eventually recover them.

Starship landed in a spot-on position during the last test flight in October. But SpaceX won’t necessarily try to repeat success as it seeks to gather new data on this test flight.

“We’re going to fly the ship at an aggressive angle of attack once it’s moving slower than the speed of sound,” SpaceX engineer Jesse Anderson said on the livestream earlier. “This means we’ll be flying nose down instead of our usual belly flop orientation during final descent. This will — no doubt — stress the limits of the flaps’ ability to maintain control, but it will be a chance to get real flight data on what our limits actually are.”

The “flaps” Anderson mentioned are small wings attached to the side of the Starship vehicle. They’re meant to brace the winds of reentry and help slow the vehicle down. During a test flight over the summer, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said they had been reduced to “skeleton hands” as the jarring physics of reentry tore them apart.

Starship is also designed to make a “belly flop” maneuver as it undergoes reentry. The motion orients Starship parallel to Earth’s surface to slow the vehicle down — like a skydiver approaching Earth. SpaceX will try a steeper path this time. It’s all designed to test the limits.

SpaceX may have abandoned plans to recover its Super Heavy rocket booster after liftoff, but the Starship spacecraft is making some strides of its own.

The company instructed the vehicle to reignite an engine in space for the first time. That’s a big deal, explains Garret Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who now advises for SpaceX.

“They’re finicky little beasts — (the Starship rocket engines) — and it’s not so easy to light them up and shut them down and light them up again,” Reisman told CNN.

SpaceX had already warned that its Super Heavy booster might not land as it did during the last test flight in October. And it didn’t, although we’re still not sure why SpaceX opted to land the booster in the Gulf of Mexico instead.

Still, the Super Heavy tested out its landing maneuver, albeit over the water, anyway. That allows SpaceX engineers to collect data, adding to a rapidly growing trove of information that could help inform employees about how to improve for the next flight.

The upper Starship spacecraft, however, has now separated from the Super Heavy, lit its own engines, and is continuing to soar through space.

Unlike the October test flight, SpaceX will attempt to push the spacecraft to its limits. The goal is to use this real-case scenario to hash out exactly how and when Starship may fail in future situations when SpaceX must be more careful — i.e. in situations where humans or satellites are on board.

That means Starship may not make it to the ocean in one piece, or at least not as gracefully as it did during the last test launch.

A still from SpaceX's livestream shows the Super Heavy rocket booster heading back down to Earth on Tuesday.

The Super Heavy rocket booster was set to make another mind-blowing landing — as it was caught mid-air by SpaceX’s Mechazilla launch tower last month.

But SpaceX won’t try that again today.

The company shocked audiences when it was able to land the Super Heavy booster after flight during its first attempt in October. But that was not required today, and SpaceX has always said it would evaluate flight data and make a decision about a landing attempt based on real-time flight data.

SpaceX aims to land these boosters so that one day in the future it can start refurbishing and re-flying them. Starship, the upper spacecraft, is meanwhile continuing its journey through space.

SpaceX just announced “MECO.”

That’s rocket jargon for “main engine cutoff.” It means the Super Heavy just shut down its 33 engines.

The Starship spacecraft also fired up its own engines as Super Heavy shut down. While that happened, we witnessed a phenomenon called “hot staging.”

SpaceX’s other rockets separate by using gentle pneumatic pushers. Starship separates from its rocket booster by using its own engines — hence “hot staging.” It’s essentially separation by blunt force trauma.

A still from SpaceX's livestream shows Starship lifting off Tuesday.

The Super Heavy booster just lit its 33 engines. The Starship is riding to space on top of the booster.

The next big milestone to watch for will come up in just a couple minutes: The Super Heavy will shut down its engines and begin steering itself back toward the launch site, aiming to make a safe landing into the arms of SpaceX’s launch tower — called Mechazilla.

If successful, it would mark only the second time SpaceX has accomplished such a feat.

Starship will go on to finish its mission as it soars through space and attempts to re-light an engine.

The green light has been lit: It’s time for the Super Heavy rocket booster to fire up its 33 engines and haul the Starship spacecraft — sitting atop the Super Heavy — off the launchpad.

Super Heavy will fire for about two minutes and 30 seconds before shutting down. After that, Super Heavy will steer itself in for a landing while the upper Starship spacecraft ignites its own engines and attempts to reach nearly orbital speeds.

Super Heavy will try to land back on the ground. But Starship will continue on, flying for roughly an hour before splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

After the Starship spacecraft separates from the Super Heavy booster — just a couple minutes after liftoff — the Starship lights up its own six engines and continues firing itself closer to the speeds necessary to enter orbit around Earth.

Starship won’t actually go into orbit, as that’s not one of the goals of this test flight.

But the company will test out firing up one of the Starship’s own six Raptor engines for a second time after the initial burn that takes the spacecraft to aggressively faster speeds.

Being able to reignite an engine after it’s already fired once — and as it’s traveling through space — will be crucial to SpaceX figuring out the fuller picture of how Starship will eventually carry out more complex missions that reach Earth’s orbit, or even deeper into space.

“This is really important, something they haven’t done before,” said former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, who is now a SpaceX consultant and professor at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. “These Raptor engines, are what we call ‘stage combustion engines.’ They’re very similar to the engines that we had on (NASA’s) space shuttle, although they work with different propellants and they’re complicated engines.