A Shaky Step Forward for Starship Flight 9

The ninth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy rocket took place on May 27, 2025, achieving a marginal improvement over the previous two missions. Although Ship 35 completed a successful ascent, fuel leaks and a loss of control in space prevented the spacecraft from completing most of its intended objectives. Flight 9 marks the third such failure in a row for the program, a disappointment that arrives as SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk have spurned their obligations to NASA’s Artemis program and touted their conviction to send humans to Mars.

Flight 9 lifted off at 6:36 PM Central Time, and completed a generally successful ascent into space. The most important milestone of the mission was the successful reflight of Super Heavy Booster 14, which was safely recovered and refurbished after launching Flight 7 in January. The first reflight of either stage is a major victory on the road to creating a fully reusable orbital rocket. After separating from Ship 35, Booster 14 was planned to be expended while performing landing tests over the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, the booster exploded during its landing burn, ending its mission prematurely. Meanwhile, Ship 35 avoided the engine failures that claimed Flights 7 and 8, but a fuel leak and fire appeared in the engine bay during ascent. Nevertheless, the burn finished as planned, placing Starship on its intended suborbital trajectory 9 minutes after liftoff—the first time since Flight 6 last November.

Like its predecessors, Ship 35 was fitted with a slot-shaped payload bay door and eight Starlink satellite mass simulators, which it was meant to deploy while in space. However, the door failed to open properly, precluding completion of this test. Furthermore, throughout its suborbital coast, Ship 35’s tumble accelerated into a complete loss of attitude control, which SpaceX later attributed to propellant leaks. Ship 35 was unable to complete a planned relight of its engine due to the spin, condemning it to an uncontrolled reentry over the Indian Ocean. Starship burned and broke apart about 47 minutes into flight, ending the mission.

SpaceX is loath to describe any of the flights in its iterative, experimental Starship test campaign as failures. But Flight 9 marks the third time in a row that a Starship has suffered a catastrophic failure due to propellant leaks, leading to lost test objectives. So far, every Starship in the Block 2 design has failed unexpectedly, kneecapping SpaceX’s ability to advance its in-space operations and recovery objectives. Starship needs to reliably de-orbit, reenter, and be caught by the launch tower to support long refueling campaigns, but the string of failures has delayed these milestones. SpaceX plans to debut the third version of Starship later this year, which it hopes will alleviate these issues, improve performance, and enable more meaningful testing to resume.

Shortly after the flight, CEO Elon Musk delivered a presentation on SpaceX’s roadmap to sending Starships to Mars. In addition to providing details about the new Starship design, Musk outlined SpaceX’s plans to scale production with “Gigabay” factories in Florida and Texas, meant to produce up to 1000 Starships a year. Musk reasserted SpaceX’s intent to send uncrewed Starships to Mars starting in Fall of 2026, sharing a list of ambitious goals for each subsequent transfer window—including landing a fleet of 500 Starships by 2033.

But despite striking renders of Tesla robots building habitats on Mars, the presentation showed no evidence that SpaceX has begun development of any Mars-critical systems besides the rocket itself. Musk shared no plans for habitat design, life support systems, health countermeasures, space suits, or mining of ice for conversion into rocket fuel, which is necessary for Starship to return to Earth. About in-space refueling of liquid methane and oxygen, the most critical technology required for Starship to fly beyond Earth orbit, Musk simply repeated that a test was planned for next year.

Starship’s future has become increasingly entangled with that of NASA’s Artemis program. The White House budget request for FY2026 proposes cancelling the oft-maligned SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, but only after Artemis III, when each of those vehicles will have proven their ability to fly astronauts to the Moon and back—twice. And as long as Artemis III remains on track, Starship will need to land Americans on the Moon in June of 2027, two years from now. The SLS and Orion for that mission are moving steadily through manufacturing, while the design for the Starship HLS hasn’t yet been finalized, and little public work on the vehicle has been exhibited. Starship is meant to perform an uncrewed landing demonstration on the Moon in Q3 of next year, leaving very little time for the company to prove out orbital refueling and then conduct a lengthy, multi-launch tanking campaign for a lander that hasn’t yet been built.

Musk and SpaceX instead have become increasingly adamant about their focus on Mars, as Musk often outwardly disparages the Artemis program. The FY2026 budget request includes a $200M award “to conduct a near-term entry, descent, and landing demonstration for a human-class Mars lander” through the HLS program, a line item which seems tailor-made to fund Starship’s Mars flights. Congress, however, is likely to protest against the sweeping cuts in the budget, which could prevent the realignment towards Mars that Musk and his allies have been advocating for. The White House also recently retracted their pick for NASA Administrator, Jared Isaacman, forecasting another few months before any big changes can be made at the agency. And while SpaceX avoids its Artemis responsibilities, Blue Origin has revealed that its first Blue Moon lander, a precursor to its own HLS, is being assembled for flight later this year.

At the beginning of 2025, Musk’s place at the right hand of the President seemed like an ideal vantage point for him to shape the future of the nation’s space program. Nearly six months later, as Musk’s influence wanes, the immediate fate of NASA isn’t any clearer, and Starship’s political advantage is running short. Musk is expected to be more active at SpaceX for the remainder of the year. If that move brings much-needed focus and direction for the Starship program, our first clue should come with Flight 10 in the coming months.

Edited by Nik Alexander