SpaceX signed a contract with NASA for about $4 billion to design and develop a lunar raid based on the Starship design. Starship Lander is the central part of the NASA Artemis project building, which aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon later in this decade. In order for the interstellar spacecraft to fly to the moon, SpaceX had to refille it with ultra-cold propellant in low-Earth orbit, something no one has done on this scale before.
Musk believes that the interstellar spacecraft is the backbone of the planet, used to transport cargo and people to Mars, which is one of his most stable long-term goals. This also requires track refueling. Musk recently suggested SpaceX could prepare to showcase aft track refueling in 2026, a year later than NASA officials discussed in December 2025.
Starship will also launch SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellite. Before Thursday’s launch, ground personnel loaded four Starlink models in Starship’s payload bay to test the rocket’s deployment mechanism. Officials are eager to evaluate the performance of the Starship 2’s heat shield before committing to trying to fully recover the ship in future missions (like SpaceX has already done the Super Booster). But the premature end of the test flight means that these targets have to wait.
SpaceX uses iterative development cycles to supervise the interstellar spacecraft. Engineers come up with new designs, test them quickly, and then incorporate lessons learned into the next Rocket. It is no surprise to see some spiral development cycles explode and some rocket explosions. However, back-to-back failures, especially in many similarities, may indicate a more fundamental problem.
Flight plans to enter Thursday’s mission call for the dispatch of the Starship to the Texas half of the world, eventually re-entering the Indian Ocean in a controlled re-entering the Indian Ocean and then splashing into northwestern Australia.
Test flights were originally a place for the previous Starship flight on January 16, when the rocket’s upper stage (or a starship or ship itself) was sought to cause the propeller-powered fuel to leak in its engine bay. Engineers determined that the most likely cause of propellant leakage was that the harmonic response was several times stronger than expected, suggesting that the vibrations crawling into space on the ship resonated with the natural frequency of the vehicle. This will exacerbate vibrations beyond engineers’ expectations.
