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.
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.