A rocket has been floating on the surface of the Indian Ocean for the past five days and its pictures are all over the internet. While one would assume it to be a scene from a sci-fi movie, the image is of SpaceX’s most recent spacecraft that made a successful return from space.On Friday, SpaceX launched Starship for the 13th time from its Starbase, Texas launch site on Friday, July 24. The upper stage Starship 40 made the softest splashdown landing in the Indian Ocean. The landing burn and engine cutoff sequence worked flawlessly, resulting in a better-than-expected soft water landing that also had the spacecraft remaining intact. What is even more interesting is that the spacecraft has stayed afloat on the surface of the Indian Ocean near Australia for the past five days.SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk shared a video of the celebrated feat on X, taken by a Starlink satellite, where the Starship looks as intact as it was at the time of its landing.
Inside the Starship
There are two major parts of a fully integrated Starship: the lower or first stage Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper or second stage Starship spacecraft.
The spacecraft floating in the ocean might look like a normal object, but it is actually a megastructure. There are two major parts of a fully integrated Starship: the lower or first stage Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper or second stage Starship spacecraft.In the Flight 13 launch test (IFT-13), SpaceX landed the Starship 40 upper stage in the Indian Ocean. It’s the latest V3 generation of the Starship; the upper stage alone stands at 52.1 meters (171 feet) tall, which can be translated to a 16-story building to understand the massive scale of the spacecraft alone (without the booster).Made of steel, it has around 18,000 heat-shield tiles installed on it. At the bottom section, six Raptor 3 engines are installed, three sea-level and three vacuum-level, for atmosphere and space, respectively. These objects combine to have a weight of around 100 tons.A smooth splashdown landing of an enormous object is a great achievement in aerospace technology. This also paves the path for reusability. Interestingly, most of the Starship 40 and its engines have stayed intact during the flight and after landing. This is why Musk confirmed in a later post on X that SpaceX is sending a ship to the Indian Ocean to recover Starship 40.
Not so great track record
SN8 and SN9 which were launched between December 2020 and February 2021 both crashed hard into the landing pad during their terminal landing burns and exploded violently.
After powering Starship Flight 13 into the sky, SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster returned but wasn’t able to perform a successful controlled splashdown as all engines couldn’t fire up. Booster 20 encountered a partial engine ignition issue during the landing burn, with not enough Raptors lighting successfully. This prevented a controlled soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX confirmed that the booster was unsuccessful in completing its planned flight profile.Interestingly, this is not the first time SpaceX creations have failed. Most previous SpaceX Starship test flights broke, crashed or exploded upon touchdown or impact. SN8 and SN9 which were launched between December 2020 and February 2021 both crashed hard into the landing pad during their terminal landing burns and exploded violently. In March 2021, SN10 was successful in descent and touched down upright but a hard impact crushed the landing legs, leading to a methane leak that resulted in an explosion on the pad within eight minutes. The same month, SN11 suffered an in-flight anomaly during the landing burn sequence and broke apart before hitting the ground. ‘Flights 1-3 aimed at early orbital tests ended in destruction either mid-air via the flight term or hard, destructive high-speed impacts with the ocean. Flights 4-12 executed proper landing flips and controlled deceleration burns over the ocean but ultimately tipped over and ruptured into fireballs.Flight 13, which was launched in July 2025, was the first and only to have completed its landing burn, splash down softly in the Indian Ocean and stay intact for the next five days, thus making the event worth a record.