SpaceX is working hard to get its gargantuan Starship rocket ready for crew and cargo flights to the moon and possibly even Mars, and slowly but surely the team is making progress.
Since the very first flight in April 2023 there have been dramatic midair explosions, vehicle breakups, and an explosive mishap on the ground involving the upper-stage Ship spacecraft.
The most recent flight, however, went pretty much according to plan, giving the SpaceX team a real boost as it set about preparing for the 11th flight, which is currently scheduled for Monday, October 13.
So, what do we know about the upcoming flight test?
Super Heavy water landing
While SpaceX has already proved that it can land the first-stage Super Heavy booster back at its Starbase site in southern Texas, the 11th flight will see it attempt a soft, controlled landing on water again, a feat that it achieved off the Texas coast in the 10th flight, among others.
The landing burn will use 13 of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines before transitioning to five engines in a divert phase, and finally three central engines. At this point, the booster will briefly hover just above the ocean before the engines shut down, sending it into the water. The maneuver will test a new landing burn engine configuration for the booster that’s currently considered too risky for a Starbase landing where critical systems could be damaged it if it went wrong. “The primary goal on the flight test is to measure the real-world vehicle dynamics as engines shut down while transitioning between the different phases,” SpaceX said.
Reuse of Super Heavy booster
The Super Heavy booster launching in the 11th test will be on its second flight after having flown in the eighth test in March 2025. However, it won’t be the first time that a Super Heavy has flown more than once, as the ninth test in May 2025 reused a booster that first flew in the seventh test at the start of this year. Reuse of the booster is key to the Starship’s success as it allows SpaceX to massively cut costs and increase the frequency of flights.
Reuse of Raptor engines
It’s not only the vehicle that’s being reused as 24 of the Super Heavy’s Raptor engines will also be firing up again, too. Ultimately, SpaceX wants to be able to reuse each Raptor engine as many as 1,000 times to drastically reduce spaceflight costs.
Satellite deployment
The upper-stage Ship spacecraft successfully deployed a number of dummy Starlink satellites in the 10th flight test, and it will attempt the same process in the upcoming flight. The eight Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as the Ship and are expected to break up upon entry, SpaceX said. A relight of a single Raptor engine while in space is also planned.
Ship stress-test
For the Ship’s reentry, tiles have been removed from the vehicle so that SpaceX engineers can see how vulnerable points on the structure perform under intense heat and pressure. The test will help SpaceX to better understand the Ship’s limits and how well its stainless steel hull and metallic heat shields withstand extreme reentry conditions. So yes, there’s a chance that the Ship may not make it to the Indian Ocean in one piece.
Ship water landing
It stays intact, the Ship will attempt a soft, controlled landing on water as it has done in other flights where it’s made it that far. In future flights, SpaceX wants to bring the Ship home to the Starbase site, landing it in the same way that it’s successfully landed the Super Heavy, using giant mechanical arms attached to a tall tower. In fact, on the 11th flight, SpaceX will mimic the path that a future ship will take on flights back to Starbase, with the final moments set to include a dynamic banking maneuver and a test of subsonic guidance algorithms.
SpaceX is expected to attempt its first Starbase landing in the early part of next year, though the timing will very much depend on the vehicle’s performance in the 11th flight.
The 11th flight will be livestreamed
As with all of SpaceX’s Starship missions, the flight test will be livestreamed on Monday, October 13. Digital Trends has everything you need to know.
