Starship Header Tanks & No Landing Legs - Explained During the belly-flop reentry, Starship falls horizontally. Propellant in the main tanks sloshes to one side. If the Raptors tried to pull from them, they’d ingest air and destroy themselves. That’s why Starship carries two small, dedicated header tanks (one in the nose, one inside the main tank). They stay completely full and pressurized, feeding the engines only for the final flip and landing burn. Landing legs were dropped for the same reason everything else was simplified: • Massive dead weight = less payload to orbit • Terrible turnaround: land off-pad → cranes → transport → slow ops Catching the ship and booster with the tower arms puts them straight back on the mount. That’s what makes rapid reuse (target: refly in under an hour) actually possible.

Ship 40’s incredible journey 🔥 • Launched from Starbase • Flew through space • Survived reentry • Splashed down intact in the Indian Ocean • Was towed to Christmas Island • Was lifted aboard Forte • Is now ready for its journey home 📸 SpaceX and Chris Bray Photography

SpaceX is making some serious heat shield upgrades for Starship Flight 14 🔥 This flight will test several new changes designed to make reentry even more reliable: • Extra tile retention mechanisms in the highest-risk areas to stop tiles from coming loose during ascent • Fixes for newly discovered paths where plasma can get behind the heat shield • New curved tile designs that have already shown lower heating in the gaps between tiles • Two heat shield tiles recovered from Ship 40 will fly again on Ship 41....the first reuse of flown Starship heat shield tiles That last one is especially cool....hardware recovered from Flight 13 is already going back to space on Flight 14 This is exactly how Starship gets closer to true rapid reusability Fly it, recover it, learn from it....then fly the hardware again

Starship Ship 40 has been recovered after 24 days at sea. After surviving reentry and achieving Starship’s first intact ocean splashdown in the Indian Ocean, Ship 40 is now in sheltered waters near Christmas Island for engineering analysis. A major step toward proving Starship can survive, recover, and eventually fly again.

This is bigger than just fishing a rocket out of the ocean. Flight 13’s Starship is the first to survive a controlled reentry and soft splashdown intact — and stay floating long enough for recovery. That means engineers can finally put their hands on real flight hardware: heat shield tiles that endured peak heating, engines that fired through the landing burn, and flaps that guided it hypersonic. Every previous Ship was lost. This one can teach us exactly what worked, what didn’t, and how to make Starship truly reusable. The data from this recovery could accelerate the path to tower catches and rapid turnaround more than any telemetry ever could. That’s why the recovery team is fighting rough seas right now. History in the making. 🚀

Starship Flight 13’s Ship 40 remains the highest-value data return in the program to date. An intact vehicle after full reentry and soft splashdown delivers measurable heat-shield performance, tile retention, and structural margins that no prior flight or any simulation could provide. Recovery imagery and telemetry from the floating ship close critical feedback loops on thermal protection and landing systems. This is how iteration compresses the timeline from test article to operational, catch-capable vehicle.

This is what hope looks like. That one day, humanity will be multiplanetary. Starship 13 survived reentry, completed its softest splashdown, deployed v3 Starlink satellites & floated intact. Every flight brings us a step closer to Mars. It’s happening.