SpaceX ends action-packed Starship V2 era as program moves to V3

Farewell, V2: SpaceX sent Starship’s current configuration on its final test flight Monday night, a mission the company says accomplished all of its major goals and moved the program to the next stage.

The nearly 400-foot-tall rocket lifted off from Starbase, Texas, at 6:23 p.m. local time. The super heavy booster, reused from the March test, tried a new landing burn profile, reignited 13 engines before throttling down to five, reignited three for the final hover, and completed a scheduled soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff.

Meanwhile, on Starship’s upper stage, eight mock Starlink satellite simulators were deployed to trial a new “dynamic banking maneuver” profile that the company aims to use in future pad return attempts at Starbase. The upper stage then fell into the Indian Ocean.

This was the last release of the 2nd generation Starship and 1st generation Super Heavy variants. Similar to previous test flights, engineers also experimented with the upper tier’s thermal barrier tiles, including selective removal and new tile variations, to collect reentry data.

SpaceX also recreated other key milestones from Flight 10: the deployment of the simulator and the reignition of one of Starship’s six Raptor engines in orbit.

Monday’s test officially launched the next phase of the program. The flight was an upgraded prototype called V3, equipped to demonstrate orbital docking and propellant transfer, features essential for aircraft aiming to reach the Moon or Mars. SpaceX said the V3 also incorporates structural changes and upgrades to the Raptor engine aimed at increasing lift capacity, but the company did not provide specific numbers.

“This next iteration will be used for the first Starship orbital flight, operational payload missions, propellant transfer, and more in an iterative iteration of a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle providing service to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” the company said.

In parallel, SpaceX is upgrading Pad A of Starbase and moving launches to Pad B. The company is also simultaneously working on building two Starship launch pads at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Starship is the most powerful rocket ever developed. It’s also the basis for both NASA’s Artemis campaign and SpaceX’s plans to begin fielding higher-capacity Starlink satellites.

NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy praised the X mission, calling it “another major step toward landing Americans on the moon’s south pole.”

SpaceX has secured more than $4 billion to develop Starship’s human evaluation variant, called the Human Landing System, for the Artemis 3 crewed mission, currently scheduled for 2027. But to meet that date, SpaceX must first demonstrate increasingly complex milestones, particularly in-orbit docking and intraorbital propellant transfer.