Watch a supercut of the various iterations of SpaceX's Starship rocket

A primer on SpaceX's primary rockets and spacecraft

SpaceX has developed several lines of rockets, from its workhorse Falcon 9 to the visionary Super Heavy rocket of the company's Starship designed for massive payloads. Each iteration costs millions of dollars and came with scientific and economic challenges and several are no longer in development. Learn more about the company's roster of rockets and craft here.

Starbase is SpaceX's testing ground for their most powerful rocket, Starship

Located near the southernmost part of Texas, the complex includes rocket bays, test pads, the "Rocket Garden" where flown, cancelled, or retired spacecraft are kept. The outdoor seating area of the site's private restaurant is covered in Mk1 Starship prototype flaps.

Starship is the space travel ship that rides atop the world's largest rocket

SpaceX hopes to use the vehicle for both interplanetary travel and shorter flights around Earth. At 30 feet wide, it allows for more storage and headspace for inhabitants than previous NASA spacecraft.

SpaceX successfully caught a rocket booster in mid-air

As part of the fifth test flight of its Starship system, the Super Heavy booster used high-speed navigation systems, grid fins, and Raptor engines to steer itself onto the mechanical arms of a tower called Mechazilla.

The reusability of Falcon 9's first stage rocket has slashed launch costs

Unlike older rockets left to sink in the ocean, the first stage was designed to steer itself back for a controlled landing on a sea-based barge. Refurbishment of these components are half the cost of building new.

SpaceX was built to achieve Elon Musk's vision of making humans an interplanetary species

Learning quickly from early Falcon rocket failures and clashes with vendors and safety regulators, the company has focused on reusability as a first step to reaching Mars and is backed by NASA funding to do so.

How reusable rocket boosters work

Reusable rockets drastically reduce the costs of space travel, saving agencies and companies millions of dollars by preserving expensive, complex boosters and their engines. The advancement required engineers to develop systems that restarted a booster in mid-flight to slow it down before landing.

The Space Launch System: NASA's most powerful rocket ever

The Space Launch System is intended to be the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA. Possible missions include returning to the moon and perhaps even reaching Mars. This speculative and mostly silent video uses animation to explore the inner workings of the SLS, showing it launching and in space flight.

In 2018, SpaceX launched a Tesla Roadster into heliocentric orbit for publicity

As of February 2023, the vehicle and its mannequin driver—dubbed "Starman"—have completed three and a quarter revolutions around the sun. One paper estimated that the car has a 22% chance of crashing into Earth within the next 15 million years.

Watch how the Space Shuttle launched

This 3D visualization illustrates the Space Shuttle launch, breaking down the roles of the solid rocket boosters, main engines, the crawler transporter, and the timing sequence that carried the vehicle from liftoff to orbit.

SpaceShipOne was the first privately built spacecraft to reach the boundary of space

The rocket-powered aircraft was built by Richard Branson's company Virgin Galactic. The English business magnate has described being inspired to go to space since he was a child watching NASA's moon landings.

NASA's big dream that never came to life

Conceived in the early 1960s, the Sea Dragon was an audacious ocean-launched rocket design that would have dwarfed the Saturn V in both scale and payload—but its extreme engineering challenges kept it firmly on the drawing board.

Watch a documentary on what the first 10,000 days of colonizing the moon look like

Alongside the construction of the first lunar base with help from SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System, transported astronauts would establish a sustainable human presence through the construction of lunar dust shields, light-bending towers, and 3D-printed habitats.

SpaceX has launched thousands of its Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit

Every launched batch of satellites contains roughly 60 of the desk-sized gadgets. The batch is released at random into an initial orbit, and it takes time for them to naturally spread out enough before operators begin unfolding their antennae.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

Explore a timeline of advancements in American aviation

From the Wright brothers' flight of the first powered plane in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to SpaceX's debut of the Falcon 9 rocket in 2010 with reusable boosters, this interactive shows off the technological evolution of flight, from mechanical propulsion to ballistic spaceflight. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Guide a ship to dock at the International Space Station

Dozens of ships dock at the ISS yearly, rotating astronaut crews and delivering supplies. This simulation lets you try docking a SpaceX Dragon 2 using the same interface and controls as NASA astronauts.

A lunar 'satellite catapult' revives a 50-year-old idea for launching rockets

Elon Musk has proposed building a mass driver on the moon to fling satellites into space, exploiting low gravity to cut fuel and costs. The concept dates to 1970s space-settlement studies, highlighting how older industry ideas are resurfacing amid today's AI and space-infrastructure race.

Watch the hypersonic flight of a reusable aircraft

Stratolaunch completed a second hypersonic flight of its Talon-A2 autonomous vehicle, showcasing reusable hypersonic aircraft capabilities. The aircraft carried payloads and Department of Defense experiments while achieving Mach 5 speeds.

Viking established entry, descent, and landing methods for future planetary visits

The most significant engineering challenge was slowing the Viking lander, which would move through space at nearly 29,000 kilometers per hour before reaching Mars. This required the invention of supersonic parachute technology, which is still used today.

A short history of space exploration

Let us to take you back through the timeline of space exploration and its rich, fascinating history, starting in 1946, with a rudimentary German military rocket.

Since its 2019 reveal, the Cybertruck underwent numerous delays and design changes

Elon Musk first envisioned the Cybertruck in 2012, with its design inspired by "Blade Runner" and "The Spy Who Loved Me." Semiconductor shortages and battery manufacturing issues made it impossible to manufacture enough vehicles to meet the 250,000 preorders without shifting delivery dates.

Play a space junk collection game

Developed by Astroscale, a company with a contract from the UK to remove satellites from orbit safely, the game enables players to simulate the company's planned COSMIC mission and test their space debris-catching skills.

Designs for the Hubble Space Telescope were based on Cold War spy satellites

By incorporating elements of the KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellites, NASA could incorporate existing classified manufacturing expertise and infrastructure from the intelligence community to expedite the research project.

Listen to the five-part podcast series that reconstructs how Challenger failed

The "American Scandal" podcast devotes a five-part series to Challenger, tracing the engineering warnings, internal pressure to launch, the moment of the explosion, and the long aftermath that reshaped NASA's safety culture.

The 'Star Wars' series begins where George Lucas believed the story was most accessible

The director originally conceived 'Star Wars' as a single long story, but recognized it was far too big for a single movie, so he split each act into its own film. He began with the fourth act, which would later be renamed "A New Hope."

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

Astronauts have repaired genetic damage in space using CRISPR—a molecular tool that can make precise changes to DNA and is used in single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses.

Explore our favorite visualization of the immense scale of space, from an astronaut to the size of the observable universe

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Shooting stars, or meteors, are fragments of asteroids and comets that burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere, creating streaks in the sky called meteor showers.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

One disco producer saw 'Star Wars' four times on its opening weekend and was so inspired that he recorded the album 'Star Wars and Other Intergalactic Funk,' which produced a chart-topping single.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

This real-time tracking of the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak in May 2026 offers a unique glimpse into the global reach of the outbreak and whether the virus sickened passengers and their communities around the world.

Explore chaos in this simulation of two double pendulums, where small differences in the release angles produce wildly different outcomes.

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.