STARBASE, Texas—SpaceX launched the 10th test flight of the company's Starship rocket Tuesday evening, sending the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The largely successful mission for the world's largest rocket was an important milestone for SpaceX's Starship program after months of repeated setbacks, including three disappointing test flights and a powerful explosion on the ground that destroyed the ship that engineers were originally readying for this launch.

For the first time, SpaceX engineers received data on the performance of the ship's upgraded heat shield and control flaps during reentry back into the atmosphere. The three failed Starship test flights to start the year ended before the ship reached reentry. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has described developing a durable, reliable heat shield as the most pressing challenge for making Starship a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.

And there were lessons to learn from Tuesday's test flight. The ship made it all the way to the Indian Ocean intact, arriving next to a prepositioned buoy northwest of Australia, where it was just after sunrise Wednesday morning at the time of splashdown. A camera on the buoy showed the ship slowing down before contacting the water, then tipping over and exploding as expected.

But a large section of the ship had transitioned from its original silver color to a rusty hue of orange and brown. Officials didn't immediately address this or say whether it was anticipated, but it could suggest heating damage to the rocket's stainless steel skin during reentry. If so, that might require more changes to the design of the ship's heat shield, but this is the kind of information engineers were looking for with this test flight.

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting tenth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/5sbSPBRJBP

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 27, 2025

The auspicious results showed that SpaceX has solved the problems that hamstrung the Starship program earlier this year. Most of the issues that led to the ship's recent failures were in the rocket's propulsion and propellant systems. Those all appeared to function well on Tuesday.

It also lays the foundation for SpaceX to test new Starship capabilities, such as recovering the ship back at the launch site and in-orbit refueling. These are critical prerequisites for Starship to achieve its full promise: flying cargo and eventually people to more distant destinations like the Moon and Mars.

"Congratulations to SpaceX on its Starship test," wrote Sean Duffy, NASA's acting administrator, on X. "Flight 10's success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III. This is a great day for NASA and our commercial space partners."

NASA has two contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a version of Starship to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Meanwhile, SpaceX's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, is focused on sending Starships to Mars.

Here’s what happened

Tuesday's mission began a little more than an hour earlier with the liftoff of SpaceX's 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from the company's launch site in Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border, at 6:30 pm CDT (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC). SpaceX called off two launch attempts on Sunday and Monday due to a technical problem and bad weather.

But Tuesday's countdown was smooth, and the rocket lit 33 Raptor engines on its Super Heavy booster stage at the opening of the launch window. Moments later, the rocket lumbered skyward, riding nearly 17 million pounds of thrust and trailing a distinctive blue-orange flame from its methane-fueled engines.

Heading east over the Gulf of Mexico, Starship and its Super Heavy booster accelerated through the speed of sound and rocketed into the stratosphere in the first couple of minutes of the flight. Then, right on time, the booster shut off its engines and released from the Starship upper stage about two-and-a-half minutes into the launch.

Starship ignited six of its own Raptor engines to continue powering itself into space, while the Super Heavy booster flipped around to fly tail-first and relit some of its engines in the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere to reverse course and boost itself back toward the Texas coastline.

Starship and its Super Heavy booster ascend through a clear sky over Starbase, Texas, on Tuesday evening. A visible vapor cone enveloped the rocket as it passed through maximum aerodynamic pressure and the speed of sound. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

On this mission, SpaceX intentionally guided the Super Heavy booster toward a location in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from Starbase, forgoing another attempt to catch the rocket back at the launch pad. SpaceX has recovered three Super Heavy boosters in this manner before.

Instead, on Tuesday's flight, engineers wanted to test the rocket's ability to overcome an engine failure during its landing burn. One of the booster's three center engines was intentionally disabled during descent, and the rocket used a combination of two center engines and one engine from the middle ring of Raptor powerplants to slow down for splashdown.

The booster appeared to handle the stress test well, settling into the Gulf and tipping over as planned. The descent was visible to spectators onshore and was accompanied by a double sonic boom.

Meanwhile, the ship's upper stage fired its engines until the nine-minute mark in the flight, reaching a top speed during launch of 16,463 mph (26,495 kilometers per hour), just shy of the velocity needed for a stable orbit around the Earth. This put the rocket on a trajectory to soar to a peak altitude of 119 miles (192 kilometers), passing over the Atlantic Ocean, South Africa, and then the Indian Ocean before falling back into the atmosphere.

The flight's next milestone was a first for Starship. About 15 minutes into the mission, the ship opened its payload bay door and began releasing eight flat-packed steel panels installed on the rocket to simulate the deployment of SpaceX's next-generation Starship Internet satellites.

This was the first time SpaceX used the ship's payload deployment mechanism, which engineers liken to a Pez dispenser, using pulleys to move the rack of Starlink simulators and push them out of the rocket's side door one at a time. Future Starship flights will launch as many as 60 next-generation Starlinks per launch, greatly increasing the network's capacity, according to Dan Huot, a SpaceX official who anchored the company's live webcast of Tuesday's flight.

The ship then closed its payload bay door and prepared to restart one of its six engines for a brief maneuver to test its ability to change its trajectory. The three-second burn was successful, demonstrating that the ship could guide itself toward reentry on future flights into low-Earth orbit.

This screenshot from SpaceX's official livestream shows heat damage to one of Starship's rear flaps. Credit: SpaceX

Finally, flying belly-forward with its nose pointed skyward, Starship plunged back into the atmosphere. A spectacular sheath of purple-orange plasma surrounded the ship as temperatures climbed to near 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Live video from multiple cameras outside the ship showed it moving its flaps to steer through reentry, using aerodynamic forces from the thickening air to aim for the splashdown zone, where a buoy was waiting to see it drop into the sea.

The reentry profile was designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the ship's rear flaps. Engineers planned to use the test as a learning exercise before SpaceX eventually returns a future ship from orbit back to the launch pad, where giant mechanical arms will catch it in a similar way to how SpaceX has shown it can catch Super Heavy boosters.

The ship made it all the way through reentry, turned to a horizontal position to descend through scattered clouds, then relit three of its engines to flip back to a vertical orientation for the final braking maneuver before splashdown.

Things to improve on

There are several takeaways from Tuesday's flight that will require some improvements to Starship, but these are more akin to what officials might expect from a rocket test program and not the catastrophic failures of the ship that occurred earlier this year.

One of the Super Heavy booster's 33 engines prematurely shut down during ascent. This has happened before, and while it didn't affect the booster's overall performance, engineers will investigate the failure to try to improve the reliability of SpaceX's Raptor engines, each of which can generate more than a half-million pounds of thrust.

Later in the flight, cameras pointed at one of the ship's rear flaps showed structural damage to the back of the wing. It wasn't clear what caused the damage, but super-heated plasma burned through part of the flap as the ship fell deeper into the atmosphere. Still, the flap remained largely intact and was able to help control the vehicle through reentry and splashdown.

"We’re kind of being mean to this Starship a little bit," Huot said on SpaceX's live webcast. "We're really trying to put it through the paces and kind of poke on what some of its weak points are."

Small chunks of debris were also visible peeling off the ship during reentry. The origin of the glowing debris wasn't immediately clear, but it may have been parts of the ship's heat shield tiles. On this flight, SpaceX tested several different tile designs, including ceramic and metallic materials, and one tile design that uses "active cooling" to help dissipate heat during reentry.

A bright flash inside the ship's engine bay during reentry also appeared to damage the vehicle's aft skirt, the stainless steel structure that encircles the rocket's six main engines.

"That's not what we want to see," Huot said. "We just saw some of the aft skirt just take a hit. So we've got some visible damage on the aft skirt. We’re continuing to reenter, though. We are intentionally stressing the ship as we go through this, so it is not guaranteed to be a smooth ride down to the Indian Ocean.

"We’ve removed a bunch of tiles in kind of critical places across the vehicle, so seeing stuff like that is still valuable to us," he said. "We are trying to kind of push this vehicle to the limits to learn what its limits are as we design our next version of Starship."

Shana Diez, a Starship engineer at SpaceX, perhaps summed up Tuesday's results best on X: "It's not been an easy year but we finally got the reentry data that's so critical to Starship. It feels good to be back!"

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Fresh off his thorough victory over CBS News, President Trump is taking aim at ABC and NBC.

"Why is it that ABC and NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the absolute worst and most biased networks anywhere in the World, aren't paying Millions of Dollars a year in LICENSE FEES," Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. "They should lose their Licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans and/or Conservatives, but at a minimum, they should pay up BIG for having the privilege of using the most valuable airwaves anywhere at anytime!!! Crooked 'journalism' should not be rewarded, it should be terminated!!!"

While Trump's many threats to revoke broadcaster licenses have never led to any actual license revocations, the CBS developments show how he can use the government to influence operations at news organizations. CBS owner Paramount recently inked a $16 million settlement with Trump and then agreed to install a "bias monitor" in order to gain Federal Communications Commission approval of an $8 billion merger with Skydance. Now Trump is turning his attention to ABC and NBC.

"Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES," Trump wrote in another post last night. "IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC. I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!! MAGA."

We contacted ABC and NBC today and will update this article if either company provides any response to Trump's statements.

License revocations are a lot more complicated than Trump makes them sound. The FCC doesn't issue licenses directly to networks such as CBS, NBC, or ABC. The FCC's licensing authority is over broadcast stations, although many of those stations are owned and operated by a big network.

As we've written, revoking a license in the middle of a license term is so difficult legally that it has been described as effectively impossible. The FCC can go after a license when it's up for renewal, but there are no TV station licenses up for renewal until 2028.

FCC chair backs Trump’s war on media

The FCC had immediate leverage over CBS because Paramount and Skydance were eager to complete their merger. They agreed to a merger condition requiring an ombudsman, which FCC Chairman Brendan Carr described as a "bias monitor."

Paramount was also facing a lawsuit from Trump over his claim that 60 Minutes deceptively manipulated a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. CBS published unedited transcripts and video that rebutted Trump's claims but chose to settle with the president in a deal that congressional Democrats described as bribery.

The FCC and Paramount both denied that the $16 million settlement had any connection to the merger review, but the deal with Trump was followed quickly by the FCC merger approval. Trump also previously obtained a $15 million settlement with ABC over false statements made on air by George Stephanopoulos.

Carr has made it clear that he supports Trump's battles against broadcast stations.

"For years, people cowed down to the executives behind these companies based in Hollywood and New York, and they just accepted that these national broadcasters could dictate how people think about topics, that they could set the narrative for the country—and President Trump fundamentally rejected it," Carr told NewsMax after the FCC announced its Paramount/Skydance merger approval. "He smashed the facade that these are gatekeepers that can determine what people think. Everything we're seeing right now flows from that decision by President Trump, and he's winning. PBS has been defunded. NPR has been defunded. CBS is committing to restoring fact-based journalism... President Trump stood up to these legacy media gatekeepers and now their business models are falling apart."

Shortly after Trump promoted him to the FCC chairmanship, Carr revived several bias complaints against broadcast stations that were dismissed by the FCC's previous leadership. The ABC complaint accused the network of biased fact-checking during a presidential debate, while the NBC complaint pertained to the network putting Harris on a Saturday Night Live episode.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the commission's only Democrat, has warned against the FCC's licensing authority being "weaponized to curtail freedom of the press." In a statement after the Paramount/Skydance merger approval, Gomez said that "this will not be the end of this administration's campaign of intervention in media to silence critics, gain favorable coverage, and impose ideological conformity on newsrooms that should remain independent. With longstanding institutions like CBS compromised in this way, it will be up to us—as citizens—to hold this administration accountable for its abuses."

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Blade Runner's third live-action entry will be a streaming miniseries on Amazon Prime Video, and Deadline reports that it is now slated for release in 2026.

"The update was provided by Laura Lancaster, Head of US SVOD TV Development and Series – Co-Productions at Amazon MGM Studios, in an internal memo announcing promotions for two executives, Kara Smith and Tom Lieber," Deadline explained.

We previously reported that the series, titled Blade Runner 2099, had been greenlit under original film director Ridley Scott back in 2022.

There have been a few new developments since then, mainly in casting news. Blade Runner 2099 will star Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All At Once; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and will also feature Hunter Schafer (Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), Tom Burke (Black Bag, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), and Dimitri Abold (Warrior Nun, also The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), among others.

Very little else is known about the show beyond the fact that it will take place 50 years after the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049, that it will be a live action miniseries, and that it will run for six episodes.

The showrunner will be Silka Luisa, a writer best known for her work on the TV series Shining Girls. (She also wrote one episode of Paramount+'s Halo TV series.) Ridley Scott is involved as an executive producer and is rumored to direct one or more episodes.

Neither Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve nor prior big-screen franchise stars Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, or Ana de Armas are known to be involved.

The series will come as part of a wave of revivals of classic Hollywood sci-fi franchises on streaming—for example, recently premiered FX series Alien: Earth (which is streaming on Disney+) has achieved huge viewership numbers and widespread critical acclaim.

On the other hand, Amazon's own The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV series has found relatively lukewarm reception given its massive budget.

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Donald Trump was asked about the Epstein files again in a meeting with the media on Friday, and his response has folks talking.

Google will require identity verification for all Android app developers, including those distributing apps outside the Play Store, starting September 2026 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand before expanding globally through 2027. Developers must register through a new Android Developer Console beginning March 2026. The requirement applies to certified Android devices running Google Mobile Services. Google cited malware prevention as the primary motivation, noting sideloaded apps contain 50 times more malware than Play Store apps. Hobbyist and student developers will receive separate account types. Developer information submitted to Google will not be displayed to users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In recent comments to the Russian state-run media service TASS, the chief of Roscosmos said the country's newest rocket, the Soyuz-5, should take flight for the first time before the end of this year.

"Yes, we are planning for December," said Dmitry Bakanov, the director of Roscosmos, Russia's main space corporation. "Everything is in place."

According to the report, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, the debut launch of Soyuz-5 will mark the first of several demonstration flights, with full operational service not expected to begin until 2028. It will launch from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

From an innovation standpoint, the Soyuz-5 vehicle does not stand out. It has been a decade in the making and is fully expendable, unlike a lot of newer medium-lift rockets coming online in the next several years. However, for Russia, this is an important advancement because it seeks to break some of the country's dependency on Ukraine for launch technology.

What is the Soyuz-5

The new rocket is also named Irtysh, a river that flows through Russia and Kazakhstan. The rocket has been in development since 2016 and largely repurposes older technology. But for Russia, a key advantage is that it takes rocket elements formerly made in Ukraine and now manufactures them in Russia.

Essentially, the Soyuz-5 booster is a slightly larger copy of an older rocket manufactured in Yuzhmash, Ukraine, the Zenit-2. This medium-lift rocket made its debut in the 1980s and flew dozens of missions into the 2010s. It was the last major rocket developed in the Soviet Union and was designed by the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in Dnipro, Ukraine. The Zenit's first and second stages were manufactured there. However, the first-stage engine, the extremely powerful RD-171 engine, was designed and built by NPO Energomash in Russia.

This partnership held together after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but all cooperation ended after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. (Russia even went so far as to strike the factory where Zenit rockets were once made with an intermediate-range ballistic missile last November.)

With the Soyuz-5 booster, Russia seeks to replace both the Zenit family of rockets and the aging Proton-M launch vehicle. The new Irtysh rocket will have slightly larger main propellant tanks than the Zenit-2 vehicle, giving it a lift capacity of about 17 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Not much new here

Probably the most interesting element of this rocket is its engine, the RD-171MV. This is based on technology that goes back decades to the Energia launch vehicle, which the Soviet Union used to launch the Buran space shuttle. A modified version, the RD-171, was used for Zenit rockets. Unlike the previous engines, this newest version does not use any Ukrainian components.

This line of rocket engines, powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen, produces more than three times the thrust of a NASA Space Shuttle main engine. They are the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engines in the world.

One key question for the Russian space program is whether the Soyuz-5 rocket can become commercially successful and attract non-Russian launch business. The country will also continue to fly the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle, which is presently used for crewed missions and the newer line of Angara rockets.

It's notable that the Russian space program—which has had its funding curtailed to help pay for the war against Ukraine—has managed to bring the Soyuz-5 to the launch pad. However, a far more significant achievement would be delivering another Soyuz rocket in development, the Soyuz-7, also known as Amur. This is because the Amur rocket marks a significant break from traditional Russian designs.

This rocket, with new liquid oxygen-methane engines, is intended to replace the Soyuz-2 vehicle. The rocket could also be more price competitive, as it is intended to have a reusable first stage. The vehicle's debut has been repeatedly pushed back, however, with Russia now expected to debut the vehicle no earlier than 2030.

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