Flight report · January 16, 2025
Flight 7: Booster caught again as the ship is lost on ascent
January 16, 2025 repeated a Super Heavy tower catch while a redesigned Ship was lost after hot-staging. It was a sharp reminder that ship and booster risk can diverge on the same flight.
Starship / Super Heavy · Orbital Launch Pad 1 · Flight 7 of 14
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
01 / 03
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.
02 / 03
Another catch
Booster 14 flew the return playbook of boostback, landing burn, and chopsticks. It reinforced that tower catch was becoming a repeatable Super Heavy mode, not a one-off.
03 / 03
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.