The Vehicle and Its Promise
Starship is a two-stage, fully reusable super heavy-lift rocket designed to carry up to 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit. The system consists of a spacecraft and a Super Heavy booster, both powered by Raptor engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane. SpaceX began conceptualizing a reusable heavy-lift vehicle as early as 2005, but the current design and the Starship name emerged in 2018. Development has followed the company’s characteristic iterative approach: building numerous prototypes and conducting frequent test flights, learning from each failure. The first full rocket launched in 2023 and exploded shortly after liftoff.
The vehicle is intended to succeed the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, aiming to become the first orbital rocket that is fully reusable. Both stages are designed to land vertically at the launch tower. This design philosophy seeks to lower launch costs through mass production and reuse. The spacecraft uses heat shield tiles to survive atmospheric reentry. SpaceX originally planned Starship for missions to Mars, but the company’s focus shifted toward returning humans to the Moon. NASA relies on a crewed variant of Starship for its Artemis III mission, which would land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era. Other proposed uses include deploying space telescopes and large satellites.
Flight History and the Current Standstill
In 2024, SpaceX conducted three Starship test flights. None completed the full mission profile. The first flight, in March, ended with an explosion over the Gulf of Mexico. The second flight, in June, achieved stage separation but lost the booster. The third flight, in September, successfully reached orbit but failed during reentry. By the end of 2024, the vehicle had yet to demonstrate its full end-to-end capability.
Then, on September 20, 2025, during a static fire test of the Super Heavy booster at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility, an explosion damaged the launch pad. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship pending an investigation. As of October 2025, that investigation remained ongoing. The company has not commented publicly on the FAA investigation’s status since the grounding order. By the numbers: three test flights in 2024, one explosion in 2025, zero flights since September 2025 and counting.
Consequences for NASA and Investors
The grounding has direct consequences for NASA’s Artemis III mission, the planned lunar landing that relies on Starship as its human landing system. The target date has slipped from 2025 to at least 2028. That delay is a direct consequence of Starship’s development timeline. The agency has not announced a revised target date beyond the 2028 estimate.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told an interviewer in August 2025 that Starship’s development is “the hardest engineering challenge I’ve ever seen.” The statement underscores the technical difficulty of creating a fully reusable super heavy-lift rocket that can land vertically at the launch tower and survive reentry.
The FAA investigation remains the single variable that determines when Starship flies again. Until the agency clears the vehicle and SpaceX repairs the damaged launch pad, the test campaign stays on hold. For investors, each delay pushes revenue from operational Starship missions further into the future and, with it, NASA’s return to the moon. The figure that matters for now: zero flights since September 2025, and counting.
