Starship Flight 9: Super Heavy reused, but ship fails re-entry

SpaceX successfully launched Starship Flight 9, marking the first re-flight of a Super Heavy booster, the reusable first stage of its Starship system. Lifting off from Starbase, Texas, after a couple of brief, and later resolved, holds at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, the mission prioritized aggressively testing the reused first stage. While the Super Heavy booster successfully performed its boost-back burn, achieved its first directional flip thanks to modifications on the hot stage adapter, and began its descent, telemetry was lost shortly after its landing burn sequence began, and it did not complete the full burn before its flight ended with an expected hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

The New York Times characterized the mission as adding to the Starship’s “Mixed Record,” adding that the craft “got all the way up to space, but not all the way back down to Earth.” Space.com framed the launch providing a “historic reuse of giant megarocket.”

Upper stage performance: Reached trajectory, then payload door, attitude control issues, uncontrolled reentry

The Starship upper stage successfully reached its planned suborbital trajectory, completing its engine burn as planned. However, mission objectives for the ship encountered significant setbacks. A key test, deploying simulated Starlink satellites, was aborted when the payload door was “unable to actuate all the way open” and was subsequently closed, according to the launch commentary. Following this, additional complications arose as launch commentators reported that Starship had “essentially lost our attitude control” due to “some leaks on the ship.” This loss of control while on its suborbital path towards re-entry over the Indian Ocean meant the planned in-space Raptor engine relight was skipped and led to an uncontrolled re-entry. Teams performed a “passivation” maneuver, venting remaining propellants as a safety measure before the vehicle entered the atmosphere. During the fiery descent, brief video feeds showed plasma and visible damage, such as a flap “melting away,” before contact with the ship was ultimately lost. Commentators had anticipated the vehicle would break up during this uncontrolled re-entry, meaning much of the desired data from the heat shield and flight control experiments could not be gathered as planned.

This flight is part of an increasing launch cadence from Starbase, Texas, a site SpaceX refers to as “the gateway to Mars.” An FAA license permits Starbase, which recently became its own city, to stage up to 25 Starship flights a year. A SpaceX spokesperson stated during the pre-launch commentary, “This is where we’re soon going to be launching up to 25 starship launches per year from here at Starbase.” This ambition marks a step towards the company’s long-term vision of potentially launching “1000 starships a year” to support making life multi-planetary. Musk hopes initial uncrewed Starships possibly could head to Mars as early as next year.

SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 test (Booster 14-2 with Ship 35) marked a new attempt to push past the upper-stage failures of Flights 7 (January 2025) and 8 (March 2025) and demonstrate new capabilities.

Test goals for booster and ship

Primary objectives for Flight 9 centered on aggressive reusability demonstrations for Booster 14, the first Super Heavy to be reflown. Instead of a tower catch, an offshore splashdown was part of the plan, allowing SpaceX to ‘gather additional data that’s going to improve performance on future boosters’ and conduct ‘higher risk tests without risking the launch pad,’ as SpaceX employees described during the pre-launch event on X. These tests included flying the booster at a “higher angle of attack” to use aerodynamic forces for deceleration, thus reducing propellant needed for landing. SpaceX also planned a detailed engine resilience test: to “intentionally disable one of those three center engines” during the landing burn, use an engine from the middle ring instead, and then “cut one more engine off and go down to only those two center engines” at the very end of the burn to simulate a critical engine-out scenario and assess Super Heavy’s resilience.

Beyond the spectacle, Flight 9 serves multiple demonstration purposes: SpaceX will refly Super Heavy Booster 14. A total of 29 of its 33 Raptors are from Flight 7. Ship 35’s belly sports experimental metallic and actively-cooled tiles, plus bare patches where ceramics were intentionally omitted, so engineers can map heat-flux margins during re-entry. Mid-coast, one Raptor will shut down and relight to vet a vacuum restart sequence needed for true orbital and lunar missions.

In addition to the above, Flight 9 continued to validate changes from previous mishaps. For example, new nitrogen purge systems were installed in the ship’s engine “attic” to prevent the kind of fuel leaks and fires that doomed Flight 7 and 8, as nasaspaceflight.com noted. Additionally, Raptor engine tweaks (feedline reinforcements, adjusted propellant conditions, and updated thrust profiles) were in place to avoid the “flash” ignition issue that caused Flight 8’s upper-stage failure.

The launch was not without its share of pre-flight tension. The countdown initially proceeded smoothly but encountered two holds at the T-minus 40-second mark. The first hold was initiated for “additional checkouts on the booster raptor,” specifically to monitor temperatures on one of the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines. After a brief resumption, the countdown was held again due to a “ground side issue” related to the “quick disconnect to the ship,” according to the launch commentators. Teams were able to resolve this, allowing the countdown to proceed to a successful liftoff.