SpaceX Starship V3

Something caused two Raptor engines—one of 33 on the Super Heavy booster and one of six on Starship itself—to fail during Friday’s launch sequence. Raptor failures are nothing new for SpaceX, but this flight marked the first use of the company’s upgraded Raptor 3, a redesign with higher thrust, lighter weight, and improved efficiency. Collectively, the 33 Raptor engines on the booster produced up to 18 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket used on last month’s Artemis II mission. Starship and Super Heavy have engine-out capability, mean

Friday’s results give SpaceX a lot to build on. The performance of the heat shield, widely recognized as perhaps the program’s most challenging engineering problem, must be reassuring for SpaceX officials seeking to eventually recover and rapidly reuse future ships. The ship’s resilience to an engine failure was also encouraging news for SpaceX. But there’s still more work ahead for SpaceX to perfect the Raptor 3 engine, and skipping the engine relight in space will likely prevent SpaceX from attempting a full orbital flight of Starship on the next launch. All 12 of SpaceX’s Starship test flig