Starship

Starship is SpaceX's fully reusable, two-stage rocket, and at 124 meters it is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever flown. On its 14th test flight, on September 28, 2026, it reached orbit for the first time and released 26 Starlink V3 satellites, the first working satellites it has carried to orbit. SpaceX built it to carry people and cargo to the Moon and Mars.

What it is

SpaceX classes Starship as a super heavy-lift launch vehicle, which is a way of saying it is a rocket big enough to haul huge loads and built to be flown over and over. The lower stage, called Super Heavy, is a 72-meter booster in its current Version 3 form, powered by 33 methane-burning Raptor engines. The upper stage, confusingly also called Starship, carries the crew or cargo. Stacked together they are 9 meters wide, and the whole thing is designed to fly, land, refuel, and fly again. Nothing this large has ever been built to be reused.

Why it exists

The reason came before the hardware. In late 2012 Elon laid out a fully reusable interplanetary transport system, first called the Mars Colonial Transporter, with one purpose: get enough of humanity off Earth to survive a disaster here. He has said: "Becoming multiplanetary is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it." Mars, the way he sees it, is the backup drive for the species.

That is the big-picture case. There is also a nearer one. A self-sustaining city on Mars needs cheap, frequent, heavy transport, and so does the Starlink satellite business that pays for it, so the same machine serves both. That overlap is on purpose: the launch revenue that covers the bills today is meant to fund the harder, longer trip tomorrow. Starship is the biggest version of that bet yet.

How it works

The Version 3 Super Heavy booster makes about 80.8 meganewtons of thrust at liftoff by SpaceX's figures, more than twice what the Saturn V managed on the way to the Moon.

That power comes from methalox, a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, a fuel chosen partly because it can be made on Mars from what is already there. Each Raptor engine delivers about 350 seconds of specific impulse at sea level, which is a measure of how efficiently it turns fuel into speed.

Reusability is not free. Saving the booster and the ship means carrying landing hardware, heat shielding, and spare propellant, and all of that eats into what the rocket can lift. SpaceX's stated goal is 100 to 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit with both stages recovered, and in 2023 it said an expendable version could carry up to about 250 metric tons. The 2016 Interplanetary Transport System concept aimed higher still, before SpaceX scaled the design down.

Where it stands today

SpaceX has flown 14 full-stack Starship test flights since April 2023. The first flew for about four minutes and reached about 39 kilometers.

Across its first 11 flights, the launch tower's "chopstick" arms caught a returning Super Heavy booster three times (Flights 5, 7, and 8), and Flights 9 and 11 reflew boosters that had flown before. Flight 12, on May 22, 2026, debuted the larger Version 3 ship and booster and their Raptor 3 engines from a new pad at Starbase. The ship reached its splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean, and the booster, which lit fewer engines than planned for its return, came down in the Gulf. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) then ran a mishap review before Starship flew again in July.

Flight 13, on July 24, released 20 Starlink V3 satellites on a suborbital path, and its booster came down in the water after relighting fewer engines than planned for the landing burn. Flight 14 reached orbit and released 26 Starlink V3 satellites. One of the ship's vacuum engines shut down early on the climb, and SpaceX brought the ship down in the northern Pacific after a shortened orbital flight.

NASA is also a customer: its April 2021 contract, worth $2.89 billion, about $3.6 billion inflation adjusted, pays SpaceX to turn a version of Starship into the Human Landing System, the lander meant to carry Artemis astronauts to the surface of the Moon.

What comes next

In February 2026 Elon Musk said SpaceX would build a self-growing city on the Moon before one on Mars, and that the Moon city could take less than 10 years. NASA restructured Artemis the same month: Artemis III, targeted for 2027, will test docking the Orion capsule with a lander in Earth orbit, and the first crewed landing moved to Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028. Those dates build on Starship's next two milestones: catching and reflying boosters often, and moving propellant between ships in orbit.

The bottom line

Starship is a bet that the way to make space cheap is to stop throwing rockets away, and that cheap space is what makes a Moon base or a city on Mars possible.