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Starship Flight LabAn interactive mission model
T−00:30
Fuelled and waiting
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How each piece actually works.
The flight lab shows the whole mission and the forces at every moment. These sections take the three hardest parts apart: the engine, the catch, and coming home through the atmosphere.
01 The Raptor engine
Full-flow staged combustion: no propellant wasted.
Raptor is the first full-flow staged combustion engine to fly. Every drop of methane and oxygen passes through a turbine before it is burned, which is how it reaches chamber pressures above 300 bar.
02 Boostback & the catch
The tower that catches rockets.
Super Heavy has no landing legs. It flips, flies itself back to the launch site and slows to a hover beside the tower, where two giant arms nicknamed the “chopsticks” close around it. Then try it yourself.
03 Reentry & the flip
Falling sideways at 26,000 km/h.
Starship comes home belly-first like a skydiver, shielded by thousands of hexagonal tiles and steered by four flaps. Seconds before touchdown it relights its engines and swings upright.
04 Physics and sources
What the lab is computing.
This is a reconstruction for teaching, not SpaceX telemetry. The trajectory is modelled on public flight-test information; forces are calculated from it with textbook physics.
ΣF = m·a
Every arrow in the lab is an external force on the vehicle. Their vector sum, divided by the mass, is the acceleration. Upward force does not always mean upward motion: during the landing burn the net force points up while the vehicle is still falling, so it slows down (OpenStax: Newton's second law).
Thrust
Each Raptor's thrust is modelled as T = Tvac − (Tvac − Tsl)·p/p₀: it grows as the outside air pressure p falls. Sea-level Raptor ≈ 2.26 MN at sea level, 2.53 MN in vacuum; Raptor Vacuum ≈ 2.58 MN (NASA: thrust equation, Raptor).
Mass and propellant
Propellant flow is ṁ = T / (Isp·g₀), integrated along the burn schedule, so the vehicle gets lighter every second. Assumed dry masses: booster 275 t, ship 130 t; about 3,500 t and 1,500 t of propellant (OpenStax: rocket propulsion).
Gravity and drag
Gravity falls off as g·(R/(R+h))². Drag is D = ½ρv²·Cd·A with an exponential atmosphere (scale height 7.4 km); the ship's belly-first reentry uses ~430 m² of area and a little lift (L/D ≈ 0.3) (NASA: drag equation).
Model assumptions
Trajectory keyframes are interpolated with monotone cubic splines; the timeline is a compressed teaching sequence, with the real mission clock shown as T±. Downrange is mapped onto a curved Earth along a due-east track from Starbase, Texas. The full-reuse profile (one orbit, then a tower catch) is a projection of SpaceX's stated plans, not a flown mission.
Visuals
Vehicle and tower geometry are illustrative, not manufacturer CAD. Plumes, steam and plasma are visual approximations, not fluid simulations. Earth imagery: NASA Blue Marble (public domain). Arrow lengths use a square-root scale with a display cap; the numbers keep their calculated values.
An independent educational project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by SpaceX. Figures are approximate and based on public information about Block 2 vehicles and flight tests through 2025.