Astronomy Prints 🌌: Editor's choice: What to expect in the next Starship

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Editor's choice: What to expect in the next Starship

10/15/2025

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By Mike Gruss

Goodbye Starship version 2. Hello and welcome to Starship version 3.

With a successful launch of the Starship rocket Oct. 13, SpaceX closed the book on its Starship version 2 launch system.

Version 3, SpaceX officials said, will include a series of upgrades. They include:

✔ A "complete overhaul" of the Starship upper stage,

✔ New Raptor engines,

✔ New docking adapters that will allow for in-space propellant transfers.

The new version of Super Heavy is expected to include:

✔ An upgraded fuel transfer line,

✔ An integrated "hot-staging" ring at the top of the booster that will remain attached,

✔ Redesigned booster grid fins

"Bottom line, this is the Starship we're planning to use for all of our next major milestones," SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said during the launch webcast.

Perhaps, more importantly, as SpaceNews' Jeff Foust wrote, version 3 will " play a key role in NASA's Artemis lunar exploration campaign, sending a lunar lander version of Starship to the moon for the Artemis 3 crewed landing."

Version 2 had a difficult start to 2025.

✔On Flight 7 in January, a harmonic response much stronger than expected stressed elements of the ship's propulsion system, causing propellant leaks that fed fires.

✔ The Flight 8 launch in March failed at almost the same phase of the vehicle's ascent, but this time because of an unspecified hardware failure in a Raptor engine that caused several other engines to fail.

✔ Flight 9 on May 27, completed its ascent, avoiding the problems from the previous flights. However, the vehicle suffered a propellant leak that led to a loss of attitude control and an uncontrolled reentry that destroyed the ship.

✔ Then on June 19, a Starship upper stage being prepared for the company's next flight exploded during preparations for a static-fire test.

But the last two launches, including another on Aug. 26, had been successful. On the Oct. 13 flight, SpaceX officials said it accomplished all of its goals.

SIGNIFICANT DIGIT

11%

The percentage of employees NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was expected to lay off - about 550 - in the latest round of job cuts at the space science center. Dave Gallagher, director of JPL, said the layoffs are necessary to restructure the lab amid uncertain budgets.

K2 Space's manufacturing facility in Torrance, California. Credit: K2 Space.

AN ORBITAL TRINITY

Satellite platforms are typically purpose-built for specific orbits.

But satellite manufacturer K2 Space recently announced plans to launch a three-spacecraft mission in 2027 on a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with each satellite deploying to a different orbital regime to prove out the startup's bet on a multi-orbit satellite platform.

The mission, dubbed Trinity, will see two spacecraft deployed in low and medium Earth orbits, with a third heading to geostationary transfer orbit. GTO is a high radiation environment that's historically been really hard to operate in.

Trending This Week

The Golden Dome missile defense program could require an "and not or" approach.

Dark, a French startup developing air-launched spacecraft technology to capture and dispose of orbital objects, has shut down operations.

Chinese launch startup Orienspace successfully conducted its second launch with a Gravity-1 solid rocket lifting off from a barge in the Yellow Sea.

Stoke Space, a company developing a fully reusable launch vehicle, has raised $510 million to fund operations through its first launches. It's total capital raised is nearly $1 billion.

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