SpaceX’s all-new Starship V3 made a properly dramatic debut, its upper stage pulling off a textbook splashdown in the Indian Ocean after a high-stakes suborbital jaunt. The Super Heavy booster, however, evidently didn’t get the memo about “soft landings,” opting for a far more percussive homecoming in the Gulf of Mexico after its fresh Raptor 3 engines had a bit of a tiff during the boost-back burn. It’s not a failure, mind you; it’s simply a high-velocity data-harvesting mission that ended with a bit of a bang.
