Flight report · January 16, 2025
Flight 7: Booster catch again; ship lost on ascent
January 16, 2025 repeated a Super Heavy tower catch while a redesigned Ship was lost after hot-staging, a sharp reminder that ship and booster risk can diverge on the same flight.
Starship / Super Heavy · Orbital Launch Pad 1 · Flight 7 of 13
Outcome
Booster catch / ship lost after staging
- Ship
- Ship 33Failure
- Lost · Lost on flight
- Booster
- Booster 14Success
- Lost · Lost on flight
Key figures
- Liftoff
- 4:37 p.m. CT · Jan 16
- Pad
- Orbital Launch Pad 1
- Booster result
- Tower catch
- Ship result
- Lost after staging
The flight
What happened
Flight 7 lifted off at 4:37 p.m. CT on January 16, 2025 with a dual brief: catch another booster, and put an upgraded Starship through a harder set of ship demos.
Ascent and hot-staging succeeded. The booster returned and was caught again. The ship did not complete its planned profile after staging.
Another catch
Booster 14 flew the return playbook, boostback, landing burn, chopsticks, and reinforced that tower catch was becoming a repeatable Super Heavy mode, not a one-off.
Ship anomaly
Ship 33’s loss after staging put the focus back on upper-stage propulsion and propellant-system robustness.
Those lessons fed hardware and process changes that showed up on later V2 flights.