With Starship Flight 10, SpaceX prioritized resilience over perfection

SpaceX’s Starship Flight 10 test emphasized resilience and fault tolerance over flawless performance, marking a key step toward achieving rapid, full reusability for missions to Mars and beyond. The flight intentionally introduced faults to evaluate critical systems such as the heat shield, propulsion redundancy, and engine relighting capabilities. Engineers removed heat shield tiles and tested new actively cooled tiles to assess how much damage the vehicle could endure during atmospheric reentry, addressing one of the biggest engineering challenges for reusability. Additionally, the Super Heavy booster demonstrated engine-out capability by disabling one center Raptor engine during landing burn and successfully using a backup engine, while the in-space relight of a Raptor engine was confirmed for the second time, crucial for deep-space missions. These tests align with NASA’s stringent safety requirements for crewed lunar missions under the Artemis program, which depends on a heat shield that can survive reentry and reliable orbital engine restarts. NASA has contracted SpaceX for a lunar Starship variant, aiming for