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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has completed its 11th test flight of the Starship rocket, marking another major milestone in the company’s ambitious goal to send humans to the Moon and Mars.
The massive spacecraft — comprising the Starship upper stage stacked atop its Super Heavy booster — launched from SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas on Monday at 6:23 p.m. CT. After reaching space, the booster made a controlled soft water landing in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship continued its journey before successfully splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
This mission, which comes after a series of earlier testing setbacks, followed a successful August flight and further tested new heat shield tiles and engine re-ignition systems. It also carried mock Starlink satellites to simulate payload deployment.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy praised the test, calling it “another major step toward landing Americans on the Moon’s south pole.”
SpaceX confirmed that this would be the final test flight of the current Starship model before launching a new, upgraded version equipped with features crucial for deep-space missions.
The upcoming Starship prototype will include docking adapters and orbital refueling hardware — essential for fuel transfer between two Starships in space, a process that will allow longer missions to the Moon and eventually Mars.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, speaking at a Paris conference last month, said the next iteration would be “the vehicle that could take humans to the Moon and Mars,” expressing hopes to fly it by late 2025 or early 2026.
Musk has previously stated that the company aims to perform a Starship-to-Starship refueling mission next year — a key milestone in the NASA Artemis Program, through which SpaceX secured a $3 billion contract to develop a lunar lander capable of carrying astronauts to the Moon’s surface by 2027.
However, a NASA safety advisory panel recently cautioned that slower-than-expected progress on the lander could delay the U.S. lunar return. The Starship’s ability to perform a safe moon landing test remains one of the mission’s critical next steps.
As the most powerful rocket ever built, Starship not only underpins NASA’s lunar ambitions but also SpaceX’s own Mars colonization vision and the company’s plan to deploy heavier Starlink satellites to expand global broadband coverage.
With the successful completion of this test, SpaceX moves one step closer to realizing Musk’s long-term dream — making human life multiplanetary.
