SpaceX's Starship rocket 38 launches during its 11th test flight on October 13, 2025, as seen from South Padre Island in Texas.
Gabriel V. Cardenas | Episode | Getty Images
Elon Musk's SpaceX launched its 11th Starship rocket from Texas on Monday and landed it in the Indian Ocean, the final flight before the company begins testing a new version of the giant rocket equipped with more features for lunar and Mars missions.
Starship, including the Starship upper stage atop the Super Heavy booster, launched from SpaceX's Starbase facilities at 6:23 PM CT (2323 GMT). After sending the Starship stage into space, Super Heavy returned for a soft-water landing in the Gulf of Mexico about 10 minutes after takeoff.
The latest mission, in August, ended a series of failed tests earlier this year. Monday's flight was similar to the previous one, once again deploying a series of mock Starlink satellites, briefly reigniting the engines in space and testing new heat shield tiles during the scorching return from space before crashing west of Australia.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said on X that the mission was “another important step toward landing Americans on the moon's south pole.”
SpaceX expects to launch a more advanced Starship prototype in future tests, tailored with upgrades essential for long-duration missions in space, the company said Monday.
That includes docking adapters and other hardware changes essential for in-space refueling, a complex process in which two spacecraft dock in orbit to transfer hundreds of tons of supercooled propellant.
The improved prototype “is really the vehicle that could take humans to the moon and Mars,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said at a conference in Paris last month. “So that's really the one we want to achieve.”
Shotwell said she expected the version of Starship to fly by the end of the year or early next year. Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, has said he expects a two-spacecraft refueling mission to take place next year, a goal NASA expects to achieve this year in 2024.
Refueling is one of several remaining test objectives needed before the rocket takes humans to the moon's surface, which is scheduled for 2027.
Multiple Starship tankers would be needed to fill one Starship with enough fuel for a moon landing under SpaceX's proposed moonshot plan.
That's part of a more than $3 billion contract that SpaceX won in 2021 as part of NASA's Artemis program, the American effort to put humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. SpaceX's prize puts it at the center of a race to the moon between the US and China, which is aiming for its own manned landing by 2030.
A panel of NASA safety advisers warned last month that lackluster progress in developing elements of the rocket's lunar lander design could delay U.S. moon efforts by years. Making a test landing on the moon's rough surface is another top priority for SpaceX to achieve.
Starship, the most powerful rocket ever launched and many times larger than SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, is also crucial for launching heavier Starlink satellites that are essential to the company's lucrative mobile broadband goals. It's also the centerpiece of Musk's vision to eventually send people and cargo to Mars.
