Flight 11 Is Starship's Second Successful Launch of 2025

Starship Flight 11 launched yesterday from the Texas SpaceX launch facility, and by all measures, it went almost perfectly. Launching exactly one year after SpaceX successfully caught the Starship super heavy booster in its "chopsticks" tower for the first time, Starship Flight 11 hit its suborbital trajectory, released its dummy payload, and brought both the booster and Starship safely down in the ocean just off Western Australia.

It seems clear from SpaceX's aims for this mission that it was mostly hoping for another success to sell the story of Starship as anything but a failure. It certainly wasn't, even if the mission wasn't particularly ambitious by Starship's own aims. The spacecraft is designed to eventually haul over 200 tons into orbit, allow for orbital refuelling, and eventually take humans and cargo to the Moon, Mars, and potentially beyond.

But in the here and now, just getting off the launchpad and back to Earth safely is an achievement for Starship, so it's basking in this latest win. This was the last launch for Starship Block 2, with the Block 3 design coming in 2026. A Block 4 design somewhere down the line will add an additional 20 meters to the Starship's already gargantuan height and dozens of tons of payload capacity into orbit.

SpaceX did showcase some of its reusability with this latest launch, though. In total, 24 of the 33 Raptor engines were repurposed from previous launches, and the booster itself was a reuse model, too.

Along with the change to Block 3, SpaceX will also introduce a new launchpad.

"Among many other things, we're installing a new orbital launch mount, a new flame trench system, and upgrading the chopsticks for future catches," Jake Berkowitz, a SpaceX lead propulsion engineer, said (via Space.com ). "So until that's complete, we'll be running launches from Pad 2, which will be online very soon."