SpaceX Starship: Seventh Flight Test Highlights

SpaceX Starship: Seventh Flight Test Highlights

SpaceX: "The first Starship flight test of 2025 flew with ambitious goals: seeking to repeat our previous success of launching and catching the world’s most powerful launch vehicle while putting a redesigned and upgraded Starship through a rigorous set of flight demonstrations."

It served as a reminder that development testing, by definition, can be unpredictable.

On its seventh flight test, Starship successfully lifted off from Starbase in Texas at 4:37 p.m. CT on Thursday, January 16, 2025. For the second time ever, the Super Heavy booster returned to the launch site and was caught by the tower. However, before Starship could reach space, a fire developed in the aft section leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly.

As always, success comes from what we learned, and this flight test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary. 

This flight test launched a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempting to accomplish Starship’s first payload deployment test, to fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and to launch and return the Super Heavy booster.

Watch Starship Test Flight 7:

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-7

SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket—collectively referred to as Starship—represent a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond. Starship is the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, capable of carrying up to 150 metric tonnes fully reusable and 250 metric tonnes expendable.

Key Starship Parameters:
Height: 123m/403ft
Diameter: 9m/29.5ft
Payload to LEO: 100–150t (fully reusable)

"Starship is essential to both SpaceX’s plans to deploy its next-generation Starship system as well as for NASA, which will use a lunar lander version of Starship for landing astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis III mission through the Human Landing System (HLS) program."

Learn more about Starship:

https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/

Download the Free Starship User Guide (PDF):

https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf

Video Credit: Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX)

Duration: 3 minutes

Capture Date: Feb. 24, 2025

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