The sun was dropping toward the Rio Grande on the evening of 26 August 2025 when Booster 16's thirty-three Raptor engines lit beneath the largest rocket ever flown. SpaceX needed this one badly. Three consecutive Starships had been lost in flight that year, and another ship had exploded on a test stand in June. At 6:30 p.m. Texas time, Flight 10 climbed away from Starbase carrying something no Starship had ever delivered: an actual payload, eight Starlink mass simulators stacked inside Ship 37 like candy in a dispenser.
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The booster did its job and then volunteered for an experiment. During the landing burn, SpaceX deliberately shut down one of its engines to prove the vehicle could compensate for a failure on the way down. It could. Booster 16 settled onto its target patch of the Gulf, hovering on its remaining engines before toppling into the sea, with no tower catch attempted by design. High above, Ship 37 coasted across the planet, opened its slender payload door, and ratcheted out the eight simulators one by one. A single Raptor then relit in space, rehearsing the deorbit burns that future missions will depend on.
03 / 04
Reentry tried hard to ruin the day. As Ship 37 plunged back at near-orbital speed, an explosion tore at the aft skirt around its engine bay, and plasma chewed into the trailing edge of a rear flap, partially melting it near the hinge. The ship flew on anyway. Sixty-six minutes after liftoff, a camera buoy in the Indian Ocean caught the blistered vehicle descending tail-first through the dark, executing its landing flip, and easing onto the water almost exactly where SpaceX had parked the buoy. When it tipped over and exploded, nobody minded. Every major objective had already been achieved.
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Flight 10 transformed the program's trajectory. The failure streak was over, the payload bay worked, and data from the damaged-but-flying ship fed directly into the next generation of hardware. For NASA, watching its Artemis lunar lander contractor closely, the flight was the strongest evidence yet that Starship's fundamentals were sound. For everyone else, it was the night the world's biggest rocket finally did everything it was asked to do.
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The last one has been deployed.
Dan Huot · SpaceX webcast host, announcing the final Starlink simulator deployment
By the numbers
Launch
26 Aug 2025, 23:30 UTC
Launch site
Starbase, Texas
Vehicle
Booster 16 + Ship 37 (Starship Block 2)
Payload
8 Starlink mass simulators
Engines
33 Raptors (booster) / 6 (ship)
Ship flight duration
1 hour 6 minutes
Why it mattered
Flight 10 was the moment Starship crossed from spectacular prototype to functioning launch system. Deploying payloads is the rocket's entire commercial purpose, and proving the dispenser, the in-space Raptor relight, and an engine-out booster landing in a single hour reset confidence after the worst year in the program's history. It kept the next-generation Starlink constellation on track, steadied NASA's Artemis lunar lander timeline, and demonstrated that the iterate-through-failure development model could still converge on success.
▸The eight Starlink mass simulators left Ship 37 through a slot-like bay door whose mechanism engineers liken to a PEZ candy dispenser, ratcheting each dummy satellite out one at a time.
▸SpaceX deliberately shut down one of Booster 16's engines during the landing burn to prove the giant stage could survive an engine failure on descent, then splashed it down on target in the Gulf.
▸Ship 37 survived an explosion in its aft engine skirt and a partially melted flap during reentry, yet still executed its landing flip and a pinpoint splashdown beside SpaceX's camera buoy.
▸The success ended a brutal 2025 streak: Flights 7, 8, and 9 had all been lost, and Ship 36 had exploded on a test stand that June.
▸Total flight time from the Texas pad to the Indian Ocean splashdown was one hour and six minutes.
