SpaceX released new high resolution photos and video of the SpaceX Starship 10 soft landing in the Indian Ocean. The images were taken by the floating camera created by the company, Marksetbot.
View of Starship landing burn and splashdown on Flight 10, made possible by SpaceX’s recovery team. Starship made it through reentry with intentionally missing tiles, completed maneuvers to intentionally stress its flaps, had visible damage to its aft skirt and flaps, and still… pic.twitter.com/QgcbPN8lY4
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 28, 2025
Starship can be seen controlling its movement. Its speed and control look very good for a future tower catch.
Tower catches of the booster and starship will reduce the cost to space to 1% of its current cost.
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India and also the Angry Astronaut more accurately call the latest Starship test (really, 11th not 10th) a pair of “crashes”, not “landings” https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/starship-crashes-into-indian-ocean-after-launch-spacex-calls-it-big-success-2777349-2025-08-27
So far, the upper stage has never been recaptured by Mechazilla and the booster stage only 3 times, hardly a rapid reuse proof.
The heat shields basically all fell off Starship and severe rust/burns can be seen on the external surface. It’s unclear – to me at least – how much of the ocean crash resulted in the fiery end or preceded it with a fire.
There is still a long way to go towards re-usability and safety at the level of crewed flight. Also, refueling in space hasn’t been tested yet and it looks like Starship will have to grow again to carry the kind of payload promised – 100 tons (a suspiciously round number that sounds more aspirational than calculated).
But sure, the last test was a significant improvement.
While Brian is exaggerating a bit there, (It was still pitching, and didn’t quite hit zero vertical velocity before reaching the water.) it would be well to remember that SpaceX has more experience with retropropulsive landings than everyone else in the world combined. Betting against them on this is not smart.
It’s also worth remembering that they were deliberately coming in extra hot, to see where things would fail. They MEANT to land it damaged.
If they can maintain a once a month test cadence from here, they’ll have 3-4 more tests this year, and we will probably see it land intact and fully controlled before the year is out.