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This was Starship’s 14th test flight, and the first to get high enough above Earth – roughly 275 kilometres – to enter orbit. While it was up there, it deployed 26 Starlink satellites. Instead of circling the planet six times as planned, its operators decided to bring it right back down to land in the ocean.

That decision was made because during the flight to space, one of the rocket’s six Raptor engines shut down prematurely. The others fired for a little longer than planned to make up for it, but it did mean that SpaceX officials briefly considered aborting the mission before reaching orbit. Evidently, they were determined enough to continue, but the last several hours of cruising around the planet were cancelled out of “an abundance of caution given the engine issue”, according to a SpaceX statement.

For this particular flight, that’s not a big deal. The spacecraft made it into orbit, it dropped off its satellites, SpaceX has made contact with all of them and they’re working as planned. But Starship is an important part of the architecture for NASA’s Artemis programme: it is one of only two spacecraft under development to land astronauts on the moon, which is planned for 2028. The Artemis III mission, scheduled for next year, is meant to test in-orbit docking for both Starship and its competitor from Blue Origin: a crew will attempt to dock the Orion capsule with the uncrewed landers, as will be necessary for actually landing on the moon.

If Starship isn’t ready in time, that could pose a longer-term problem for SpaceX. The prospect of a commercial partner missing the deadline is exactly why NASA wanted a back-up, switching from earlier plans to rely on a single lunar lander to selecting two competing companies to build lunar landers. Starship will need more tests before the Artemis III launch next year and even more before humans are put on board, and we’ll have to keep our fingers crossed that all the engines work as planned.

Credit: NASA/Mark S. Robinson et al. 2026

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Credit: SpaceX

You know I love a good rocket launch picture, and this one is pretty extraordinary. The bottom part of the vehicle is SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster, which has 33 engines and provides the thrust needed to get into space. The top part is Starship (the whole thing together is also called Starship, it’s very confusing), and its six engines provide the final boost into orbit and back down to the ground. Together, they’re more than 120 metres high – look at those billowing steam clouds!

Paul wrote: “Some of the recent deep space pictures have shown, possibly, millions of galaxies. Obviously, they are incredible distances away from us but is it possible that some are close enough to others that if you lived on a planet in one of them, you would be able to make out other planets?”

The idea of being able to see an extragalactic exoplanet is an extraordinary one. Even with all our enormous telescopes, we only really have one solid hint of an individual planet beyond our galaxy. It came about in 2020, when researchers were using a powerful space telescope called the Chandra X-ray Observatory to look for exoplanets passing in front of their stars, causing a regular dip in the stars’ light. What they spotted in the Whirlpool galaxy, about 28 million light years away, was a single dip in the light from a binary star system. This leaves the planet itself unconfirmed – ideally, we’d want a whole bunch of regularly spaced dips to map out an orbit.

The only way you could see an extragalactic exoplanet with your own eyes, as far as I can think up, is if your galaxy were in the process of merging with another. At that point, it’s not really extragalactic anymore, though. And the other problem with this is that if the star your planet is orbiting got close enough to another star to see its planets in your night sky, the stability of every planet’s orbit in both systems would be in trouble. We can’t even see Neptune with the unaided eye, and that’s inside our own solar system. I hate to be a downer, but I just can’t see a way this one is possible, and if it did happen, you’d have much bigger fish to fry.

Credit: Daan Botlek

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