Starship Block 1

Block 1 was the first version to fly as a complete rocket, the Super Heavy booster below and the ship on top, following the low-altitude hops of the 2020 and 2021 prototypes. The booster stood 71 m and the ship 50.3 m, for a stack of 121.3 m and 9 m across, built in stainless steel and powered by Raptor engines burning liquid methane and oxygen.

The programme was frankly iterative: fly early, accept losing the vehicle, fix what the flight revealed. The first two flights ended with both stages destroyed, and between them the thrust vector control was swapped from hydraulic to electric actuation, the inter-engine shielding was reworked and staging changed to a hot-staging scheme with a vented section added between the stages.

The first launch, on 20 April 2023, ended with the rocket tumbling and its flight termination system triggered minutes after lift-off; the engines also tore up the concrete under the pad. The flights that followed gained ground piece by piece: control through ascent, clean separation, a controlled booster splashdown and finally a ship re-entry.

On 13 October 2024, on the fifth flight, the tower arms caught a booster for the first time — Booster 12. The sixth and last Block 1 flight, on 19 November 2024, gave up the catch and put the booster in the water, but achieved the first Raptor relight in vacuum, a prerequisite for ever deploying a payload. It also carried the ship's first payload of sorts: a stuffed toy banana as zero-gravity indicator.

Block 1 never reached orbit or released a satellite, and its quoted capacity fell far short of what the mature design promised. Its contribution was proving that the stack flies, that hot staging works and that a booster of that size can come home and be plucked out of the air by the tower that assembled it.