Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neurolink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
SpaceX sent its Starship rocket on its 10th test flight this
week and pulled off a rare kind of success.
Everything broke, but it broke exactly how it was supposed to.
Flight 10 launched from Starbase early Tuesday morning and hit
every major milestone SpaceX was aiming for.
Starship survivor re entry. the Super Heavy booster executed a
soft landing in the Gulf, and both vehicles completed
controlled descents that gave engineers exactly the data that
they were looking for. The mission didn't hurt
perfection, though it wasn't supposed to.
This time the goal was durability under stress, not
flawless execution of a normal mission.
Now SpaceX built Flight 10 as a stress test.
The company hardened the heat shield, added redundancy across
flight systems, and tweaked the booster for reusability rather
than single use performance. The results made that
engineering philosophy look smart.
Starship lost several heat shield tiles and even suffered
localized burn throughs, but it kept flying and landed safely.
That outcome is more valuable than a pristine flight because
it confirms the design can take damage and keep going safely.
And Super Heavy's return marked another major step.
For the first time, SpaceX lit a subset of Raptor engines during
splashdown and attempt in a soft landing on the water.
The maneuver was not only successful, but also matched the
target time and location with tight precision.
Engineers will now examine the booster to determine how much of
it survived and whether similar landings can lead to a rapid
reusability. Starship's re entry phase was
the most aggressive test yet. The vehicle hit Earth's
atmosphere at a high angle. It's higher than in previous
flights and endured heating levels far above anything it had
seen before. Sensors captured how the new
heat shield design handled this thermal load in some parts
failed and controlled ways that match pre flight predictions.
The data will now feed into design changes for flight
11/12/13 and even into the Block 3 systems.
The flight also proved out several new backup systems.
SpaceX installed redundant avionics and control hardware in
case of single point failures and during descent.
One of those backup pathways kicked in when a guidance system
momentarily lost signal vehicle corrected itself in real time.
It continued on its course. That kind of fault tolerance is
critical for eventual crude missions to the moon and to
Mars. Now SpaceX stream the entire
flight publicly, of course, but the most useful parts happen
behind the scenes. The engineers received terabytes
of high fidelity telemetry that will inform the next round of
structural, thermal and control updates.
This test was about building a rocket that survives even when
things go wrong. And a lot of things kind of were
made to go wrong in this situation.
One reason this flight is important more than the previous
ones is its timing. SpaceX is still targeting 2027
for a crude lunar landing as part of the Artemis program for
NASA. It hit that date.
Starship has to prove it can fly.
It has to land and it has to fly again with little to no
refurbishment. Flight 10 didn't get Starship
all the way there, but it made real progress toward that kind
of resilience and that kind of flight.
And this mission also gave NASA and other stakeholders something
they needed evidence. And that's proof that SpaceX can
identify failure modes and control them.
Starships past test flights have ended an explosion.
So last three they lost signals or they had uncontrolled
landings. Now this one delivered a stable
flight rofile, contained damage within the systems, and lanned
system handoffs that all worked as designed.
SpaceX has started testing ground systems for rapid turn
around, too. New cryogenic propellant loading
rigs, water deluge pads, and robotic tile inspection systems
are ready, being installed as Star Base.
Next phase of testing will focus not just on flight performance,
but on how quickly the team can prep Starship for another
flight. Flight 10 didn't just advance
the rocket, though. It validated a specific mindset.
SpaceX is betting that controlled failure builds better
hardware than cautious. Success.
Strategy only works when the systems are designed to handle
those failures without catastrophic consequences.
And this time, they handled it with ease.
Now Flight 11 is already in its stacking prep.
It'll carry the next generation of heat tiles, a tweak booster
layout, and more aggressive return profiles.
And if Starship keeps surviving increasingly hard conditions,
the next big milestone may not be a test flight at all, and may
be the first one SpaceX tries to fly again.
Now. This flight made the risk feel
calculated. That's what matters right now.
But in the next flights, they will launch possibly actual
Starlink satellites. So with every flight of
Starship, SpaceX will be making money and possibly making their
money back every time they fly. Now, flight 10, they did some
dummy Starlinks and those went very well.
If they could do that every flight, they could pay for each
one of these flights, one of these test flights with just
deploying these Starlinks. That is a huge, gigantic step
forward with Spacex's Starlink system and the Starship cargo
system for Starlink launches. Hey, thank you so much for
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