Starship is a two-stage, stainless-steel launch system: a Super Heavy booster powered by 33 Raptor engines, topped by the Starship upper stage that shares the vehicle's name. It is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, and it is designed for both stages to be fully and rapidly reusable.
SpaceX flies Starship on an aggressive test campaign from Starbase in Texas, iterating in flight rather than on paper. In October 2024 the launch tower's mechanical arms caught a returning Super Heavy booster out of the air for the first time. NASA has also selected a Starship variant as the human landing system for Artemis missions to the Moon.
If full reuse works at this scale, Starship could cut the cost of reaching orbit by another order of magnitude and move cargo in tonnes rather than kilograms. It is central both to NASA's plan to land astronauts on the Moon and to SpaceX's long-term goal of settling Mars.
Key Facts
- Operator
- SpaceX
- Height
- About 121 m (full stack)
- Booster
- Super Heavy, 33 Raptor engines
- First integrated flight
- April 20, 2023
- Role
- Artemis lunar lander; future Mars transport
Timeline
April 2023
First integrated Starship and Super Heavy test flight
October 2024
Launch tower catches a returning Super Heavy booster
Next up
Continued test flights toward orbital reuse and refueling
Latest Starship News
Volatility is often the price of ambition
For the growing number of constellations being designed around Starship, the wild ups and downs in the early days of SpaceX’s historic IPO have a familiar rhythm. While some of […] The post Volatility is often the price
Starship
ispace to send larger payloads to the moon on SpaceX’s Starship
Japanese lunar exploration company ispace is buying space on a future Starship lunar lander mission to deliver larger payloads to the moon. The post ispace to send larger payloads to the moon on SpaceX’s Starship appeare
Starship
Facts last reviewed 2026-07-12. Official mission page: spacex.com