Why SpaceX will consider this mission a success — even without the booster catch The last test flight in October saw SpaceX successfully land its Super Heavy booster back at the launch site. It was a history-making endeavor that few expected would happen. A repeat of that spectacle didn’t happen today. But the Starship spacecraft did go on to reignite an engine in space for the first time, and execute a safe landing in the Indian Ocean. And the fact that SpaceX cameras captured the landing of this Starship test flight likely means the company didn’t just have a rough idea of the landing place, they were pretty spot on. High hopes for a breathtaking booster landing aside, SpaceX has been known to embrace fiery mishaps, explosions, and rockets crashing into watery ocean graves. That’s all fine — according to SpaceX — at least in the early stages of developing a new rocket. A still from SpaceX's livestream shows Starship landing in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX SpaceX has said its approach to rocket development is geared toward speed. The company makes use of an engineering method called “rapid spiral development.” That essentially boils down to a desire to quickly build prototypes and willingly blow them up in the name of learning how to construct a better one — faster than if the company solely relied on ground tests and simulations. After the first Starship test flight’s explosion in April 2023, the company immediately sought to frame the mishap as a success, saying in a statement at the time, “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount.” Link Copied! Starship still has a long way to go before it carries people to the moon or Mars People take photos of the SpaceX Starship in Brownsville, Texas, on November 17. Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images While SpaceX has made considerable progress — drastically improving Starship’s performance across six different test flights carried out since April 2023— there’s still a lot to get done. Tuesday’s test flight could cue up SpaceX to begin tackling more ambitious projects. “In 2025, SpaceX plans to undertake a long-duration flight test and a propellant transfer flight test,” according to a recent report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, or OIG. Demonstrating the ability to launch a Starship into orbit and then rendezvous the spacecraft with a tanker carrying fuel is considered essential to the success of NASA’s Artemis program. For NASA’s human moon landing mission, called Artemis III — which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era — Starship may need to dock with more than a dozen fuel tankers before continuing its mission to the lunar surface. SpaceX will also face a “critical design review” for the Artemis III mission next summer, according to the OIG. Link Copied!