Space 20 August 2025 - 26 August 2025

SpaceX’s Starship program emerged from CEO Elon Musk’s vision of a fully reusable spacecraft to carry humans to Mars. Initially dubbed the Mars Colonial Transporter and later BFR, the vehicle was renamed Starship around 2018. Development ramped up at SpaceX’s Boca Chica site in Texas, where early prototypes made low-altitude hops in 2019–2020. By 2021, test articles like SN8 and SN9 performed high-altitude flights with the trademark “belly-flop” descent, validating Starship’s novel landing maneuver despite explosive landings. In May 2021, SN15 finally stuck the first successful landing, proving the basic design quillette.com. Starship’s first orbital-class test flight came on April 20, 2023, with a full stack lifting off from Starbase. This 120-meter-tall rocket became the most powerful ever launched, producing ~16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff businessinsider.com. The maiden flight cleared the pad but suffered engine outages and failed to separate stages, leading SpaceX to trigger the flight termination system. The gigantic vehicle was destroyed about four minutes into flight en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org. Despite the dramatic mid-air breakup, SpaceX declared the test a success since it “cleared the pad”, achieving the primary goal of avoiding pad destruction en.wikipedia.org. However, the launch showered the pad with debris and carved out a