SpaceX's Starship 4th flight test looks epic in these stunning photos (2024)

FAQs

Did Starship 4 land? ›

“Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean! Congratulations @SpaceX team on an epic achievement!!” posted SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk on X.

According to SpaceX, upon the project's completion, the Super Heavy will be fully reusable, and capable of re-entering Earth's atmosphere after a mission to land at the launch site. The Starship spacecraft, comprising six Raptor engines and four landing fins, is also fully reusable.

Unlike the preceding missions, Flight 4 saw a soft splashdown of the Super Heavy Booster (Booster 11) and of the Starship upper stage (Ship 29). Liftoff took place at 7:50 a.m. CDT (8:50 a.m. EDT, 1250 UTC), near the opening of a 120-minute window.

CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION — SpaceX is proposing 44 Starship-Super Heavy launches a year from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A and the FAA wants to hear from the public.

Updated 3:20 p.m. Eastern with additional comments. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX conducted the fourth test flight of its Starship launch system June 6, with both the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage making it back to the surface intact.

SpaceX's Starship rocket has returned to Earth on its fourth test flight, landing in the Indian Ocean. The rocket made it much further in its planned mission profile than on previous tests, with both the ship and booster making controlled landings over water.

Moon Missions

Developing a Moon base to support future space exploration requires the transport of large amounts of cargo to the surface of the Moon. Starship is designed to carry these building blocks, further enabling research and human spaceflight development.

Taking a look at Starship's costs.

However, Starship is still very much a development program, and Payload estimates it currently costs around $90 million for SpaceX to build a fully stacked Starship rocket. The vast majority of this cost goes toward the rocket's 39 Raptor engines and labor expenses.

'Splashdown confirmed!' SpaceX Starship successful in fourth test launch. SpaceX's jumbo 400-foot-long Starship rocket took off from the Texas Starbase site Thursday morning for its fourth test flight, resulting in its most successful run yet. All three previous tests ended in explosions.

Eleven test flights were of single-stage Starship spacecraft flying low-altitude tests (2019–2021), while four were orbital trajectory flights of the entire Starship launch vehicle (2023–2024), consisting of a Starship spacecraft second-stage prototype atop a Super Heavy first-stage booster prototype.

How many stages is the Starship? ›

Starship is a rocket made by the American company SpaceX. The rocket is made out of stainless steel. The rocket is made of two stages: Super Heavy and Starship.

Starbase is an industrial complex for Starship rockets, located near Brownsville, Texas, United States.

Highly reactive solid-state fuel, required to fuel Starship Launch Thrusters. Created from crystallized Di-hydrogen, found in blue deposits on all worlds.

Elon Musk's mammoth new rocket system has returned to Earth in a groundbreaking fourth test flight that culminated in a first-ever soft ocean landing for the Starship vehicle.

June 6 (Reuters) - SpaceX's Starship rocket survived a fiery, hypersonic return from space and achieved a breakthrough landing demonstration in the Indian Ocean on Thursday, completing a full test mission around the globe on the rocket's fourth try.

Starship Technologies is an Estonian company developing autonomous delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia, and Helsinki, Finland.