SpaceX Completes 11th Starship Test Launch

Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX completed the 11th test launch of its Starship rocket, which flew half the diameter of the planet and simulated the launch of satellites.

Starship — the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — took flight into the night sky on Monday at 6:25 p.m. (12:25 a.m. Tuesday in Lisbon) from the southern tip of Texas in the southern United States.

The booster detached and made a controlled entry into the Gulf of Mexico as planned, with the spacecraft gliding through space before descending into the Indian Ocean, where it was not recovered.

The rocket is made up of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft, and SpaceX's goal is to find the key so that both parts can be reused in future missions and thus reduce costs in efforts to return to the Moon and reach Mars.

The three previous tests had also ended with the loss of Starship, so SpaceX made modifications, removing a significant number of parts from the vehicle to test the limits of vulnerable areas during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

"Hey, welcome back to Earth, Starship," SpaceX's Dan Huot announced, as employees applauded. "What a day!" he added. Just like in August, Starship placed eight simulated satellites into orbit.

The US space agency NASA aims to send astronauts to the Moon by the end of the decade, but it won't be able to do so without Starship, the 123-meter-long reusable vehicle designed to take them to the lunar surface and back into orbit.

NASA's acting administrator, Sean Duffy, praised Starship's progress. "Another big step toward getting Americans to the Moon's South Pole," he said on the social network X, also owned by Elon Musk.

Another major step toward landing Americans on the Moon's south pole.

The progress @SpaceX demonstrated with today's Starship test is critical for our Artemis missions.

While we prepare for Artemis II, every flight strengthens our progress on Artemis III, and beating China…

— NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy (@SecDuffyNASA) October 14, 2025

In theory, SpaceX should be flying to Mars from 2026 and allowing Americans to return to the Moon in 2027, but these deadlines seem increasingly difficult to meet, with “thousands of technical challenges” still to be overcome , Musk himself admitted.

“We’re about to lose the Moon,” warned three former senior NASA officials in a September SpaceNews op-ed, while a panel of independent experts estimated that at this rate, the modified version of Starship to serve as a lunar lander could be years behind schedule.

"It's highly unlikely we'll reach the Moon before China," former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine told a Senate committee, urging Washington to develop a Plan B.

The risks are even greater given that President Donald Trump openly refers to “a second space race,” a reference to the dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War (1947-1991).