STARBASE, Texas, July 21 — On the flats of the Texas Gulf Coast, a stainless steel behemoth rises against the humidity and heat. At 121.3 meters tall, the fully stacked Starship is the largest rocket ever built. By nightfall, the floodlights at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility cast long shadows across Super Heavy’s grid fins and the blunt nose of the upper stage.
It is a machine born of failure and rework. Twelve times, as of May 27, 2026, SpaceX has launched this two-stage super heavy-lift vehicle.
Seven of those flights succeeded. Five ended in fire or disintegration. The program’s iterative, incremental approach—build, test, blow up, rebuild—is on full display here.
The first full Starship lifted off on April 20, 2023, and exploded four minutes later. More recently, the first four Block 2 upper stages all failed in 2025.
A Rocket Built for Reusability
The vehicle is two ships in one. The Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft are both powered by Raptor engines burning liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Both stages are designed to return to the launch site and land vertically.
The bodies are made from stainless steel, manufactured by stacking and welding cylinders 1.83 meters tall and 3.97 millimeters thick. Inside, domes separate the methane and oxygen tanks.
The two cryogenic propellant tanks on Super Heavy are separated by a common bulkhead. After the second flight test, that common dome was redesigned to a more elliptical shape, altering propellant capacity. When stacked and fully fueled, Starship has a mass of approximately 5,300 tons, a diameter of 9 meters, and a height of 121.3 meters.
The payload target for the reusable design is 100–150 tons to low Earth orbit and 27 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. SpaceX’s goal is to slash launch costs through full reusability and mass production.
Missions beyond low Earth orbit would require multiple in-orbit refueling flights—a complex ballet of tanker Starships meeting in space.
From Mars to the Moon
The vision has shifted. Originally aimed at crewed Mars missions, the plan now prioritizes returning humans to the Moon. A crewed variant, the Starship Human Landing System (HLS), is under development under a NASA contract as part of the Artemis program.
A docking test is planned for Artemis III, currently scheduled for 2027. A crewed lunar landing is scheduled for 2028.
For reentry, Starship uses heat shield tiles similar to those of the Space Shuttle. The stainless steel skin takes the heat. On the ground at Starbase, engineers stack and weld new cylinders daily.
The pace is relentless. Each failure teaches a lesson.
Each successful flight edges the program closer to the moon—and, perhaps, Mars. The next flights will test the redesigned upper stage and the new common dome. SpaceX declines to announce precise launch dates, but the hardware visible on the pad suggests the pace is accelerating.
Whether Starship will meet its Artemis deadlines remains an open question. On the ground here, the answer is written in steel and methane. The world is watching.
The clock is ticking.
