On January 16, SpaceX launched its Starship spaceship stacked atop the Superheavy booster for the seventh time ever. The 403.5-foot-tall (123 meters) reusable spaceship was launched into space from the Starbase site in South Texas when the launch window opened at 5:37 p.m. EST (2237 GMT; 4:37 p.m. local time). The Starship flight 7 mission was indeed historical as SpaceX achieved a lot of its goals during the mission.
During that launch, SpaceX planned to accomplish many goals including catching the Starship’s superheavy booster using its Starbase’s launch tower known as “chopstick arms.” SpaceX has previously caught this superheavy booster during the fifth test flight in October 2025.
The aerospace company successfully repeated the same historic goal again during its Starship Flight 7 on January 16.
What SpaceX Accomplished during the Starship Flight 7
During the Seventh test flight, SpaceX accomplished most of its flight goals, including safe liftoff, perfect separation of the two space vehicles, safe touchdown of the superheavy booster, and a lot more. Catching the 33-engine booster is one of SpaceX’s most historic accomplishments during the Starship flight 7.
About seven minutes after liftoff, the Superheavy booster returned to Starbase and flew safely into the chopstick tower arms. The arms caught it with perfection, revealing that SpaceX engineers have mastered recovering the Superheavy booster after launching the upper stage into orbit.
During the seventh test flight, SpaceX planned to catch the Starship’s 171-foot-tall (52-meter-tall) upper stage. However, everything didn’t go as planned. About 8.5 minutes into the seventh space flight, SpaceX lost communication contact with its Starship upper stage.
The loss of contact made the spaceship explode. SpaceX revealed that the entire six raptor engines of the starship fired up as the spaceship made an ascent burn. However, when the Starship was approaching closer to the end of the ascent burn, the engineers noticed that the spaceship’s engines were dropping out. Dan Huot, a member of SpaceX’s communications team revealed during the company’s webcast that they lost contact with the ship.
Why Upper Stage Lost Contact During Starship Flight 7
Hot and Kate Tice, a fellow launch webcast announced that the reason for the loss of contact was not confirmed immediately. SpaceX planned to fly around the world with the Starship upper stage and land it softly in the Indian Ocean about 66 minutes after the mission commenced.
During the last three launches, the Starship attained such milestones. SpaceX wanted to showcase the Starhip’s new exciting features during flight 7. Some of these features include deploying 10 mock satellites of similar weight and size as the next-gen Starlink satellite about 17.5 minutes after liftoff.
However, the spaceship didn’t last that long during the flight. SpaceX wanted to use the deployment to show the practical usefulness of the starship. Keep in mind that the aerospace company is yet to complete the deployment of its Starlink mega constellation.
SpaceX plans that this mega constellation would comprise about 7,000 satellites in low Earth orbit and it plans to complete building it with Starship. The mock satellites that were to be deployed could have followed the Starship’s suborbital trajectory to splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
However, since the upper stage didn’t deploy the dummy satellites before exploding, SpaceX didn’t attain this milestone during Flight 7. The SpaceX Flight 7 team announced that the SpaceX Starship during test flight 7 had a lot of system upgrades and modifications.
What’s Next?
SpaceX hopes to attain a greater milestone in 2025 to ensure that its future test flights with the Starship are successful. The aerospace company hopes to send humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond using its Starship. With the progress made so far, SpaceX is surely getting closer to making this exciting future a reality.
