The largest and most powerful rocket ever built is about to get even bigger.
Monday (October 13), EspaceX launched the 11th test flight of its Starship megarocket, sending the 403-foot-tall (124-meter) vehicle into the air from its Starbase site in South Texas.
The suborbital flight was a complete success. Both SpacecraftElements of it – its Super Heavy booster and Starship (or “Ship” for short) upper stage – returned to Earth for precise landings. The ship also managed to re-ignite one of its engines in space and deploy eight dummy payloads.
Flight 11 was a big moment for the Starship program, and not just because everything went so well. It was also a swan song, the final takeoff of the “Version 2” variant of the vehicle.
“The focus is now on the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy, with several vehicles currently under construction and preparing for testing,” SpaceX wrote in a statement. Summary article on Flight 11.
“This next iteration will be used for Starship’s first orbital flights, operational payload missions, propellant transfer and more, as we progress toward a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle with service in Earth orbit, the moonMars and beyond,” the company added.
The next iteration is Starship Version 3, which will be approximately 1.5m taller than its predecessor. V3 will look a lot like V2, but there will be big differences “under the hood,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during Monday’s Flight 11 launch webcast.
For example, the V3 Ship’s propulsion system has been revised to accommodate the Raptor 3, a new, more powerful version of the engine that powers both stages of the Starship. (Super Heavy has 33 Raptors and Ship has six.)
“We’re also getting energy storage upgrades, tons of changes in avionics – lots of things that will enable longer duration missions,” Huot said.
“One notable thing you’ll start to see externally are these new docking adapters, which we’ll use when we bring two spacecraft together for propellant transfer,” he added. “This is a core Starship capability that we will demonstrate next year.”
Indeed, transferring fuel into space is a crucial part of any Starship deep space mission. Ship the upper stages to the Moon or March will be launched with a minimal amount of propellant on board (to save mass for payloads) and will therefore have to meet several “tanker” ships in Earth orbit to refuel.
The V3 Super Heavy, meanwhile, features a redesigned fuel transfer tube, a giant metal structure that channels cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen to the booster’s Raptor engines.
“The new boosters will also have a built-in hot stage, much more ventilation space, and they will be designed to be fully reusable,” Huot said. (The hot stage marks the junction of the Super Heavy and the Ship; the “hot” part refers to the fact that the Ship begins to fire its engines before completely separating from the booster.)
The V3 Super Heavy will also have only three grid fins – the waffle-shaped structures that help the booster return to Earth for precise landings – instead of the V2’s four.
“But they are 50 percent larger, which gives them much higher strength,” Huot said. “They are also going to be used to lift and grab vehicles.”
Lifting and capture will be carried out by the “wand” arms of the Starship launch tower. These arms lift Ship and Super Heavy onto the launch pad, and they will also catch both vehicles when they return home after takeoff. (SpaceX has made three of these chopsticks catch with Super Heavy so far but I haven’t tried it with Ship yet.)
All 11 Starship test flights took off from Starbase Orbital Launch Pad 1. This support will be discontinued for a while, however, as it is revised to accommodate Starship V3.
“Among many other things, we are installing a new orbital launch mount, a new flame trench system and upgrading the wands for future captures,” Jake Berkowitz, SpaceX’s chief propulsion engineer, said during Monday’s launch webcast. “In the meantime, we will launch from Pad 2, which will be live very soon.”
Starship V3 will be able to fly to Mars and could well do so next year, if tests continue to go well: SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company would like to launch a small fleet of unmanned vessels to the Red Planet during the next opportunity, which will occur in late 2026. (Earth and Mars align correctly for interplanetary missions once every 26 months.)
In the long term, however, SpaceX plans to rely on an even larger and more powerful craft – one measuring 466 feet (142 m) tall and sporting 42 Raptors instead of the current 39. This V4 iteration is expected to debut in 2027, Musk said.
2027 could be a pivotal year, both for SpaceX and NASA. This is when the agency plans to launch its Artemis 3 mission, which will land astronauts on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era. The lunar lander for this epic mission will be an upper stage of the spacecraft.
