3 things to look at during the last Starship flight of 2025

It was an interesting year for the SpaceX spaceship. Megarocket’s launch calendar experienced a difficult start with consecutive explosive failures, then returned to the right track with an almost perfect test flight in August. Needless to say, the pressure is exerted for the final launch of 2025 starships, currently scheduled at the beginning of October 13.

Flight 11 will be the fifth large -scale test for Starship version 2 and the last before SpaceX deploys version 3 larger and improved at the beginning of 2026. But the exact moment of this transition will largely depend on the result of the launch to come. For the most part, the flight plan is as usual, but this time, SpaceX will do some things differently during the return of starship.

Adding a dynamic bank maneuver

Like the flight 10 in August, the super heavy booster of the rocket will splash into the Gulf of Mexico while the upper floor – also known as “ship” – continues on a suborbital arc and returns to the atmosphere for landing in the water in the Indian ocean. SpaceX will revive one of the raptor engines of the ship before entering and testing the satellite deployer of the rocket.

If the success of flight 10 is an indication, these repeated events should take place smoothly. To imitate the path, Starship will face future flights returning to Starbase, however, SpaceX added a “dynamic banking maneuver” to the final phase of the ship’s trajectory. This maneuver “will test the subsonic orientation algorithms before a burn and an landing splash in the Indian Ocean”, according to SpaceX.

New landing sequence for super heavy

While Flight 10 used a brand new super -heavy booster, the booster on this flight – B15 – stole with the flight 8 in March and was captured by the “Chopstick” weapons from Mechazilla after a back to school. According to SpaceX, 24 of the 33 raptor engines launched on the booster this month are also “proven by the flight”.

This time, the main test objective for Super Heavy will be to demonstrate a unique landing burn engine configuration to be used on the next generation of super heavy “, SpaceX states. In this new landing sequence, the booster will ignite 133 of its 33 motors to start the burn, go to five motors during the” diversion phase “to refine its trajectory, then downshift central for the final phase of the burn.

Previously, the booster went directly from the 13 initial motors to three engines. The addition of an intermediate phase at five motors should provide “additional redundancy for spontaneous engine stops”, according to SpaceX.

No mention of the addition of metal tiles to the thermal shield

As in flight 10, SpaceX has removed some of the starship ceramic thermal protective tiles from vulnerable stress test areas through the vehicle. “Several of the missing tiles are in areas where the tiles are linked to the vehicle and do not have an ablative backup layer,” according to SpaceX.

Unlike flight 10, however, it does not seem that SpaceX added experimental metal tiles to thermal shield this time. “We mainly did a test to see if we could manage with non -brain tiles,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, a spacex manager in charge of construction and the reliability of flights, during a presentation in September, according to Ars Technica.

The metal tiles would be easier to manufacture and more durable than those in ceramic, but when it comes to providing heat control, they “did not work so well,” said Gerstenmaier. Live images of the ship landing showed a large orange discoloration area on one side of the vehicle due to the oxidation of the metal during the flight, reports Ars. Perfecting the thermal shield is essential to the objective of rapid reusability spacex, because any damage would require a renovation.

These new tests and demonstrations should make an interesting flight later this month. Stay listening for updates on the last Starship flight of 2025 – You can watch the action here in Gizmodo.