SpaceX Starship Launch: Highlights From the 2nd Flight of Elon Musk’s Moon and Mars Rocket (2024)

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Big explosions, but also major steps forward during SpaceX’s second test flight of Starship.

But the test flight, the vehicle’s second, did show that the company had fixed key issues that arose during the earlier test operation in April. All 33 engines in the vehicle’s lower booster stage fired, and the rocket made it through stage separation — when the booster falls away and the six engines of the upper stage light up to carry the vehicle to space.

“Just beautiful,” John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer and live launch commentator, said on the SpaceX webcast.

By contrast, the first Starship launch badly damaged the launch site; several engines on the booster failed, fires knocked out the steering of the rocket and the flight termination system took too long to explode.

According to SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn faster” approach toward rocket design, successfully avoiding a repeat of past failures counts as major progress.

However, the second flight revealed new challenges that Mr. Musk’s engineers must overcome.

Soon after stage separation, the booster exploded — a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” in the jargon of rocket engineers. The upper-stage Starship spacecraft continued heading toward orbit for several more minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles, but then SpaceX lost contact with it after the flight termination system detonated.

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said no injuries or property damage had been reported. It will conduct a mishap investigation, which is standard any time something goes wrong with a commercial rocket.

Engineers will now have to decipher what went wrong on both the booster and the upper-stage spacecraft, make fixes and then try again.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly. SpaceX aims to make both parts of the vehicle fully and rapidly reusable. That gives it the potential to launch bigger and heavier payloads to space and to significantly drive down the cost of lofting satellites, space telescopes, people and the things they need to live into space.

The test journey’s outcome was the latest split-screen moment in the career of Mr. Musk, a serial entrepreneur who previously transformed electronic payments with PayPal and electric cars with Tesla. As SpaceX prepared for the flight on Friday, Disney and Apple paused their ad spending with another one of his companies, the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, after Mr. Musk’s endorsem*nt of an antisemitic post on Wednesday.

Many outside observers are optimistic that SpaceX will get Starship to work fully.

“They have fixed issues identified in their first flight and got further than ever before with this type of vehicle,” said Phil Larson, who served as a White House space adviser during President Barack Obama’s administration and later worked on communication efforts at SpaceX. “The magic of engineering is that it is all about learning, iterating the design, and reflying again soon.”

Daniel L. Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, agreed. “This is a large launch system,” he said. “It’s going to take some work to get it to where it needs to go. I have no doubt that the SpaceX team will be able to figure out how to get the launch vehicle working.”

A couple of hours before sunrise on Saturday, liquid oxygen and liquid methane started flowing into the Starship. There was some fog near the ground but the skies above were clear, save for a few wisps of cirrus clouds.

The countdown proceeded smoothly, stopping at a planned hold with 40 seconds left on the countdown clock. Then the hold was lifted, the final seconds ticked away and, shortly after 7 a.m. Central time, the 400-foot-tall rocket slowly rose into the sky. A new water deluge system appears to have protected the launchpad, avoiding the cloud of dust and debris that rose up in April.

A few seconds later, the percussive roar buffeted spectators watching on South Padre Island, about five miles north of the launch site.

At 2 minutes, 48 seconds after liftoff, there was a flash as Starship successfully performed what had been expected to be the trickiest part of the flight — “hot staging,” when the six engines of the upper stage ignited before the booster dropped away. Loud cheers resonated from the SpaceX webcast, which was streaming from the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

Half a minute later, there was a bigger flash when the booster — which was to splash in the Gulf of Mexico and sink — exploded. The upper stage continued onward unscathed. But then a few minutes later, the webcast fell into an uncomfortable silence when contact was lost with the Starship vehicle.

Many of the thousands of people who woke up early to take in the launch on South Padre Island said they had enjoyed the spectacle. By 4:30 a.m., a long line of cars were waiting in darkness to enter Isla Blanca Park at the south end of the South Padre. Others walked from their hotels to avoid the traffic. Boats packed with watchers floated just to the south, outside of the exclusion zone to the east.

The launch was experienced not just by those watching along the coast, but also those farther afield.

Emma Guevara, a resident of Brownsville, the city in South Texas that is west of the SpaceX launch site, said the event had made her house shake.

“It was way earlier than we all expected, so it woke everyone up,” said Ms. Guevara, who is a Sierra Club organizer and has protested operations at the company’s base.

Top NASA officials offered congratulations to SpaceX.

“Each test represents a step closer to putting the first woman on the Moon with the #Artemis III Starship human landing system.,” Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, wrote on X. “Looking forward to seeing what can be learned from this test that moves us closer to the next milestone.”

How quickly SpaceX solves the Starship issues could determine how soon NASA astronauts return to the moon.

The space agency has hired SpaceX to adapt Starship as a lunar lander to take two astronauts to the moon’s south polar regions. Even before the latest Starship test flight, the first landing, currently scheduled for late 2025, had already been considered likely to slip to 2026. SpaceX is also under contract to provide a Starship lander for the second crewed landing, scheduled for 2028.

For the moon landing, SpaceX would need not just one Starship but nearly 20 launches of the spacecraft, because a Starship headed to the moon would have to refill its propellant tanks before leaving Earth’s orbit.

For that, SpaceX is planning two other Starship variants.

One will essentially be an orbital gas station in space — a propellant depot in the language of space business. The other will be a tanker version to carry methane and liquid oxygen to the gas station. A series of tanker flights will be needed to fill the gas station. A Starship headed to the moon or Mars will launch and dock at the propellant depot and refill its tanks. But no one has yet tried pumping tons of propellants in a zero-gravity environment.

As a depot orbits Earth, it passes in and out of sunlight, and the outside of the depot will repeatedly warm and cool. Maintaining the propellants at steady, ultracold temperatures inside the depot will be a challenge.

At a meeting of a NASA Advisory Council committee on Friday, Lakiesha Hawkins, an assistant deputy associate administrator at NASA, said that the number of Starship launches would be in the “high teens.”

The Starships would launch “on a six-day rotation” from both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the current Starship launch site in Texas, Ms. Hawkins said.

NASA does have a backup. This year, it selected a second lunar lander design from Blue Origin — the rocket company based in Kent, Wash., started by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. That design is smaller and is planned for use in the third lunar landing, which will occur no earlier than 2029.

Ryan Mac and Katrina Miller contributed reporting.

Jim Free, a NASA associate administrator involved in the moon missions, added in his own post, “Each test represents a step closer to putting the first woman on the Moon with the Artemis III Starship human landing system.”

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Left unsaid: Exactly how high the Starship upper stage got; when its flight ended and why; and, why the Super Heavy booster exploded after it separated from the upper stage. We may not know the answers to these questions until Elon Musk decides to give an update, which he has done in the past during subscriber-only audio chats on the X social network.

An investigation found many workplace injuries at SpaceX sites.

Reuters also said that the number of reports, which show that injury rates at SpaceX locations across the United States are greater than the rest of the space industry, might underrepresent the company’s actual injury record. That is because SpaceX has not submitted federally required injury data to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for a number of years since 2016.

Over the years, OSHA has levied small fines following worker accidents, but it has issued no sanctions against the company, according to the Reuters report. SpaceX has received billions of dollars worth of federal contracts from NASA.

In a statement on Friday from the Department of Labor, the parent agency of OSHA, a spokesperson said that OSHA was reaching out to companies that appeared not to have complied with requirements to submit annual safety data. The spokesperson said SpaceX might have been one such company.

The spokesperson added that, “We often only discover non-reporting after the six-month statute of limitations for citing a company has expired.”

Tom Moline, a former engineer who was with SpaceX for more than eight years, said the company’s disregard for employee concerns was familiar. SpaceX fired him and eight other employees last year after they signed a letter that outlined worries about Mr. Musk’s online behavior and claimed the company tolerated discrimination and sexual harassment.

“SpaceX employees are repeatedly told to focus on the mission of reaching Mars as quickly as possible,” Mr. Moline said. “This goal is set by Elon Musk and incentivizes a workplace culture that values speed at all costs, even above the health and safety of the workers that make it possible in the first place.”

Eight of those workers, including Mr. Moline, are part of unfair-labor-practice charges brought before the National Labor Relations Board. Those former SpaceX employees are arguing that their firings were illegal because their writing of the letter was protected under federal law as organizing for “mutual aid or protection.”

Reuters said SpaceX did not reply to its requests for comment, and the company did not reply to an email from The Times.

How Starship will get NASA back to the moon.

First, SpaceX plans to launch a propellant depot version of Starship — think of it as a gas station — into orbit around Earth. Then, a tanker Starship filled with liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants will sidle up to the propellant depot Starship. Once the tanker has transferred its load, it will return to Earth.

Mr. Musk had previously said no more than eight Starship tanker flights are needed to fill the propellant depot, but more will be needed, because liquid oxygen, which must be kept at ultracold temperatures, will boil off as the depot repeatedly passes between sunshine and darkness as it orbits Earth.

Space News reported that Lakiesha Hawkins, an assistant deputy associate administrator at NASA, said the Starships would launch “on a six-day rotation” from both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the current Starship launch site in Texas.

Then, the lunar lander Starship will launch from Earth, meet up with the propellant depot and fill its tanks before departing for lunar orbit. There, it will wait for the arrival of four astronauts riding in NASA’s Orion spacecraft.

When Orion and Starship dock above the moon, two astronauts will move to Starship and head to the lunar south polar region, while the other two will stay in orbit on the Orion spacecraft.

Starship and the two moon-walking astronauts will spend about a week on the surface. They will then blast off to dock again with Orion, and Orion will take the astronauts back to Earth. SpaceX has not said what it plans do with the lunar lander Starship once its NASA mission is complete.

The moon landing is scheduled for 2025, but could be further delayed. Before then, SpaceX is to conduct a demonstration landing of Starship, without any astronauts, on the moon. (That uncrewed demonstration is to show that Starship can land, but taking off again is not a requirement.) That demonstration will also require a propellant depot and multiple tanker flights.

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Starship lifts off as Elon Musk faces struggles in other parts of his business empire.

Ms. Yaccarino has faced growing pains. In June, internal documents showed that Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue was down 59 percent from a year earlier as Musk’s decision-making and the social network’s loosened approach to moderating hate speech and misinformation had scared off advertisers.

Last month, as a result of its declining business performance, the company told employees that it valued itself at $19 billion, down more than 56 percent from the price Mr. Musk had purchased it for in 2022.

Mr. Musk has also kept up a steady stream of headline-grabbing antics, such as challenging Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to a mixed-martial-arts cage match in June before offering up a variety of reasons for having to delay the fight. On Wednesday, Mr. Musk called an antisemitic post on X “the actual truth.”

On Friday, the White House condemned Musk’s statement and a host of advertisers including Disney and Apple paused their ad spending on X.

Investors have criticized Mr. Musk for not spending enough time at Tesla, the electric-car manufacturer he leads. In an earnings report last month, the company announced a 44 percent drop in net profit, to $1.9 billion, for the period of July through September, largely a result of lower prices for its vehicles. Tesla’s chief also said on a call with financial analysts that he wanted to “temper expectations” around the production of its next vehicle, the Cybertruck.

The Cybertruck is behind schedule by two years, though the company said the first deliveries of the vehicle should begin by the end of this month. Tesla has not said how much the vehicle will cost. On the call, Mr. Musk said that “there will be enormous challenges in reaching volume production with Cybertruck and making the Cybertruck cash flow positive.”

“We dug our own grave with Cybertruck,” he added.

The progress during Saturday’s Starship flight could take Mr. Musk one step closer toward his goal of making human life multiplanetary. It could also help offset some of the negative attention that has been directed at his other companies.

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The last launch was a party not everyone in South Texas wanted to attend.

“It’s great to have these visitors from literally all over the globe,” he said.

Mr. Henry is hopeful that the area will be “the next Space Coast,” using a nickname for the area of Central Florida around Cape Canaveral, where many NASA flights lift off.

“I think space tourism is poised for significant success, as long as SpaceX keeps shooting rockets on a regular basis,” he said. “I think there’s a real net positive going forward that everyone can enjoy.”

For Anthony Gomez, a rocket chaser who lived in Miami until 2021, the work on Starship was worth uprooting his life for.

“If this is your thing, if you’re into this, it’s mecca,” he said, adding that Starbase is like “space for the people.” He is now a managing partner for Rocket Ranch, which rents rooms and organizes tours for visitors at a location eight miles from Starbase.

Each launch attracts more people to the ranch. While dozens visited for past events, Mr. Gomez anticipates at least 150 people will come for the upcoming launch.

But while places like South Padre Island and Rocket Ranch benefited from the April flight, other areas experienced difficulties. Port Isabel, a small town northwest of Boca Chica, was covered in dust after the Starship launch attempt in April.

Some residents were alarmed, but others did not think it was a big deal. “I don’t know that I heard any big concerns about it,” said Javier Garza, the manager of a recreational vehicle park in Port Isabel. “Sand does happen a lot in a beach town.”

Julio Martinez, the owner of a restaurant in Port Isabel, was more surprised by how it felt: The building shook, windows rattled, and ceiling tiles fell, as in an earthquake, he said.

Effects of April’s launch were felt as far away as Brownsville, the Texas city of about 185,000 people that is west of Boca Chica. “I was really surprised that I was hearing what sounded like gravel hitting the roof of my apartment,” said Christopher Basaldú, who lives nearly 20 miles from the launch site.

SpaceX’s work has caused disagreements in Brownsville. Some welcomed the work on Starship as a boost to the region, which is among the poorest in the country. Others fear that Brownsville’s low-income residents will be priced out of their homes, and some have concerns about the environmental and cultural impact of the launch base.

Dr. Basaldú added that Starbase sits atop land that is sacred to the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. “We’re a small tribe, but we are the original people of the land here,” he said, adding that because the tribe lacks federal recognition, SpaceX was not required to consult with it.

Domingo Martinez, a Brownsville native, was initially “enchanted and fascinated” to learn that the spaceport would come to Boca Chica beach, a place he fondly remembers visiting while growing up.

Years later, he said, Boca Chica is heavily monitored by law enforcement agencies for spaceport activities and border enforcement, and has lost the “mysticism” he said he experienced at the beach in his youth. Unlike space endeavors by government agencies, which to Mr. Martinez feel careful and calculated, the Starship launch in April “seemed like a frat party,” he said.

What will happen during the second Starship test flight.

The journey will start at the site that SpaceX calls Starbase, which is a few miles north of where Texas and Mexico meet along the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket, nearly 400 feet tall, will be mounted next to a launch tower that is about 480 feet tall. It will be filled with methane and liquid oxygen propellants during the hours before liftoff.

Three seconds before launch, computers will begin to ignite the 33 engines in the Super Heavy rocket booster beneath Starship. During the first flight attempt in April, three of the engines shutdown before leaving the launchpad, causing the rocket to lean as it lifted off.

Starship and Super Heavy will begin their ascent over the Gulf. At 52 seconds into the flight, SpaceX says, the vehicle will experience the heaviest atmospheric stress of its trip, a moment flight engineers call max-q.

If the stainless steel spacecraft survives that stress, the next key moment will occur 2 minutes and 39 seconds into flight when most of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 engines power down. Seconds later, the upper Starship vehicle will begin “hot-staging” or lighting up its engines before separating from the Super Heavy.

Super Heavy’s journey will end about seven minutes after launch. SpaceX would typically aim to return the massive rocket booster to the launch site for a vertical landing. But for the test flight, the spent Super Heavy will perform a series of maneuvers before firing its engines one last time to slow its descent into the Gulf of Mexico. For the first flight, the plan was for the booster to sink into the water. If for some reason it didn’t sink on its own, SpaceX crews were to try other means of scuttling it, including puncturing its exterior with a firearm.

As Super Heavy is descending, Starship will be gaining altitude. About 8 and a half minutes into its flight, its engines will switch off. It will then begin coasting around the Earth.

This will last a bit more than an hour. About 77 minutes after launching in Texas, Starship will face a key test as it pivots horizontally into a belly-flop to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. If it survives the extreme temperatures, Starship will splash down some 90 minutes after it left Texas, about 62 nautical miles north of the island of Kauai. The company says it expects the belly-flop ocean landing to end in an explosion.

After SpaceX completes its testing campaign, future Starship flights will return to the Texas Starbase site after they complete their missions in orbit. SpaceX is also building a launch tower for Starship at Kennedy Space Center in Florida where flights could one day launch and land, including the Artemis III mission that NASA plans to return American astronauts to the moon’s surface.

While Mr. Musk in the past referred to Starship’s first launch as an “orbital flight test,” spaceflight experts point out that Starship will not make a full orbit of the Earth. The vehicle should be fast enough to make it all the way around the planet, but the shape of the orbit will remain elliptical enough that it will intersect with the ocean’s surface, ensuring that it will come down somewhere that will not pose a danger even if something goes wrong and SpaceX loses control of the vehicle.

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What is a successful or failed Starship launch? Here are some scenarios.

Why were these observers and others celebrating a launch that went awry?

Starship is an experimental vehicle, and SpaceX has long shown a willingness to experiment in public, streaming its flops on the internet. What looks like a failure to most people provides data that engineers use to diagnose problems that can be fixed for the next flight. To the company and its leadership, getting a 400-foot rocket that’s never flown before off the launchpad can be seen as evidence that the rocket is moving in the right direction.

So while it may seem like a stretch to call a flight that ends in a fireball a “success,” calling it a complete failure may also go too far.

Here are some of the scenarios for Friday’s flight and what they could mean along the spectrum of major failure to total success.

An explosion on the ground

April’s launch got the rocket off the pad and to an altitude high above the Gulf of Mexico. If Starship instead were to fail before getting into the sky, it would be a setback for SpaceX engineers.

A repeat of April’s flight problems

If several engines fail again early in flight and the rocket is unable to reach stage separation, engineers may learn more things about Starship. But they and other observers may also be prompted to ask what isn’t working about the current design and flight plan.

A separation, but an incomplete flight

An important goal of the second launch is for the two sections of the rocket, the Super Heavy rocket booster and the Starship spacecraft, to separate while ascending. That would be a sign that some of the vehicle’s critical mechanisms are able to function as designed, even if the upper spacecraft later has problems.

Starship achieves its full flight plan

This would be like a gold medal prize for SpaceX: launching a rocket, having its two stages separate and then sending its second stage to orbital velocities before a water landing in a military range off the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

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How SpaceX has changed Starship for this flight.

“In launching, what you’re doing is trying to resolve the unknowns, which you cannot know before you launch,” Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said in June during an audio discussion on Twitter, now renamed X.

“Or at least," Mr. Musk said, “we are not smart enough to know.”

At first glance, the Starship rocket on the launchpad on Saturday looks like the same behemoth vehicle that launched in April. It is not.

“There are really a tremendous number of changes between the last Starship flight and this one,” Mr. Musk said. “Well over a thousand.”

The biggest change is something called “hot staging.”

For current American rockets, including SpaceX’s Falcon 9, just before the booster drops away, its engines shut down. The rocket coasts before the booster separates from the upper stage, and only then does the second-stage engine ignite.

With hot staging, Starship’s upper-stage engines will ignite while the booster is still attached and some of the booster engines are still firing. Hot staging, which is commonly used on Russian rockets, could improve the performance of Starship by 10 percent, Mr. Musk said.

Hot staging also “results in kind of blasting the booster,” Mr. Musk said. As a result, a shield was added to the top of the booster to protect it, and a cylindrical segment with vents has been added between the stages. The vents allow the hot gases from the upper-stage engines to flow out into space.

Many of the other changes fix things that went wrong during the April flight. The Federal Aviation Administration set out 63 corrective actions that it said SpaceX had to undertake before a new launch license could be issued.

On the rocket, SpaceX made changes to the design to prevent fuel leaks and fires and improvements to safety systems, including the flight termination system that took much too long to destroy the Starship.

SpaceX added shields between the engines so that an explosion disabling one of them would be less likely to take out neighboring engines as well.

“If you lose one of 33 engines, that’s a 3 percent thrust loss,” Mr. Musk said in April during a Twitter audio discussion. “It’s not a big deal. But if you do not have good engine isolation and an engine failure can domino to other engines or to parts of the stage, then you have an extremely unreliable design.”

For the launchpad, to prevent the rocket engines from destroying the concrete below and sending up a cloud of debris and dust, SpaceX has added a structure that consists of two plates with holes on the top plate. “Basically, a massive, super strong steel shower head pointing up,” Mr. Musk said.

Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water sprayed upward from this system will act as a cushion absorbing the heat and force of the rocket engines, protecting the steel and concrete .

Despite all the changes, something else could go wrong. Mr. Musk said the part of the second flight likeliest to cause problems would be the hot staging. But there is always room for surprises.

“We don’t know with accuracy what the most important thing is, because we’ve not yet reached orbit,” Mr. Musk said. “If we knew what it was, we would actually fix it before launching.”

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Here’s what went wrong during the first flight of Starship.

As Starship rose into the air, it tipped to the side. Three of the booster’s 33 engines had failed to start, and the unbalanced thrust caused the leaning ascent.

Starship cleared the launch tower. But there were signs more was going wrong.

A little over half a minute into the flight, a flash of light could be seen under the rocket, which appeared to be sluggish. A timeline that SpaceX provided before launch said Starship would pass through max-q — the period of maximum atmospheric pressure pushing on the rocket — at 55 seconds, but John L. Insprucker, the SpaceX engineer who narrates the webcasts of many of the company’s most important missions, did not call out that moment until nearly half a minute after the expected time.

Cameras pointed at the bottom of Starship showed 27 bright circles — the flames of the working engines. It seemed that six of the engines had failed.

The booster was to separate from the upper stage at 2 minutes, 52 seconds into flight, but it never did. Instead, Starship started tumbling, and a minute later, explosives meant to destroy a rocket that has gone off course finally exploded. It had reached an altitude of 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico, far short of reaching orbit.

A week later, Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, offered preliminary answers about what had gone wrong during a question-and-answer session on Twitter, now renamed X.

“Some good news items here,” he said. “The vehicle’s structural margins appear to be better than we expected,” he said, pointing to the moments of the flight. He added, “The vehicle is actually doing somersaults towards the end and still staying intact.”

Mr. Musk said that, at liftoff, the flight computer shut down three engines that did not appear to be operating properly. Because the Starship is designed to still make orbit even with just 30 engines, the launch was not aborted.

Twenty-seven seconds into the flight, “something bad happened,” Mr. Musk said. An explosion ignited a fire at the bottom of the rocket. Eighty-five seconds into the flight, the rocket lost its ability to point the direction of the rocket engines, essentially losing its ability to steer.

Back on the ground, the liftoff had gouged a giant hole beneath the launch stand.

“We did generate quite the rock tornado at the base of the vehicle,” Mr. Musk said.

Dust carried for miles, settling in nearby Port Isabel, Texas. Concrete chunks landed half a mile from the launch site. But the United States Fish and Wildlife Service said it did not find birds or other wildlife killed in the launch’s aftermath.

What is Starship?

It is the tallest rocket ever built — 394 feet tall, or nearly 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. The 33 engines that will lift Starship off the launching pad in South Texas will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle. NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket, which made its first flight in November, holds the current record for the maximum thrust of a rocket: 8.8 million pounds. The maximum thrust of the Saturn V rocket that took NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program was relatively paltry: 7.6 million pounds.

An even more transformative feature of Starship is that it is designed to be entirely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is to land much like those for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space belly-flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting to a vertical position for landing.

That means all of the really expensive pieces — like the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster and six additional Raptors in Starship itself — will be used over and over instead of thrown away into the ocean after one flight.

That has the potential to cut the cost of sending payloads into orbit — to less than $10 million to take 100 tons to space, Mr. Musk has said.

Starship and Super Heavy are shiny because SpaceX made them out of stainless steel, which is cheaper than using other materials like carbon composites. But one side of Starship is coated in black tiles to protect the spacecraft from the extreme heat that it will encounter if it gets far enough in its flight to re-enter the atmosphere.