Starship

SpaceX won the HLS competition in April 2021 and was awarded a contract for $2.89 billion to develop the HLS version of the Starship.

The SLS and Orion spacecraft are less capable than the Starship and increase the cost of each Artemis mission by roughly a factor of ten.

Starship is more powerful and can launch significantly heavier payloads than the SLS, and it is fully reusable.

SpaceX’s seventh Starship Super Heavy flight on January 16, 2026 achieved a second successful booster catch while the Starship upper stage exploded during the mission.

SpaceX's Super Heavy booster returned to the launch pad after separating from the Starship upper stage.

One of the six Raptor engines on the Starship shut down during the test flight.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration determined that Starship debris fell outside designated hazard areas and caused air traffic controllers to divert, reroute, or delay commercial flights over the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean.

The FAA and SpaceX need to conduct and close a flight anomaly investigation before the next Starship Super Heavy can launch.

The FAA closed airspace due to debris from SpaceX's Starship test flight.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated an oxygen/fuel leak caused the loss of the Starship.

Liftoff of SpaceX's Starship occurred at 5:37 pm EST.

SpaceX's Starship upper stage failed to complete its test flight due to an anomaly.

The dry mass of the Starship upper stage is nearly 100 tons, posing challenges for lunar missions.

Starship requires between 8 and 20 refueling tanker flights for delta-V requirements for lunar missions.

Starship is not currently human-rated and may take a few years to become so.

SpaceX will conduct the next test flight of its Starship vehicle in early 2025.

The next Starship flight will launch a new-generation Starship with significant upgrades, attempt Starship’s first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared toward ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX plans to test several upgrades to its Starship vehicle on its next test flight scheduled for as soon as 2025-01-10.