Starship V3 Sticks the Landing While Ebola Spreads Fast

Here's a stat worth sitting with: the two previous versions of Starship both blew themselves apart on their very first flights. Starship V3 did not. That alone counts as a significant milestone for a rocket program that has historically treated early test flights like expensive, dramatic stress tests.

SpaceX launched V3 from its Starbase facility in South Texas on Friday afternoon, and the 408-foot rocket — the tallest ever built, for the record — cleared the launch tower within seconds and headed east over the Gulf of Mexico. Just over an hour later, it splashed down in the Indian Ocean, on target, northwest of Australia. For a first flight, that's a genuinely strong result.

The heat shield was the headline performer. On previous Starship flights, the thermal protection system and aerodynamic flaps took serious punishment during reentry — sometimes catastrophically so. This time, onboard cameras showed both surviving the fiery descent intact, which is exactly what needs to happen if Starship is ever going to ferry astronauts to the Moon and back. The ship also executed a series of banking maneuvers during descent that mirror the approach future operational flights will use when returning to Starbase.

The landing sequence itself was almost cinematic. The vehicle flipped from horizontal to vertical, fired its Raptor engines in a braking burn that throttled down from three engines to two to one, and settled into the Indian Ocean with what SpaceX would call a gentle splashdown. Drone and buoy cameras caught the whole thing live.

NASA was watching closely, and for good reason. The agency is counting on Starship to serve as its human-rated Moon lander under the Artemis program. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was on-site in Texas for the launch and made his enthusiasm clear. When the people responsible for returning humans to the Moon are flying out to watch your rocket test in person, the stakes are pretty obvious.

That said, the "mostly successful" framing in SpaceX's own characterization deserves some attention. The company hasn't fully detailed what didn't go according to plan, and the word "caveats" is doing real work in the post-flight assessment. SpaceX is a company that sets ambitious internal benchmarks, and a splashdown rather than a full catch — the kind of precision return the program is ultimately building toward — means there's still meaningful ground to cover.

The gap between this flight and the last one is also worth noting. SpaceX hadn't flown Starship since October, a stretch of more than seven months that represents the longest pause in the program's history. The company spent that time completing a second launch pad at Starbase and running V3 through ground testing that had its own rough patches. The pressure to deliver something positive on Friday was real.

For now, though, SpaceX has its best Starship debut yet. The rocket survived. The heat shield held. The landing worked. In a program defined by iterative progress and occasional fireballs, that's a meaningful step forward.

The Ebola outbreak now raging through the Democratic Republic of the Congo was only officially reported one week ago. It has already become the third largest in recorded history. That pace of escalation should alarm anyone paying attention.

As of Friday, the World Health Organization reported nearly 750 cases, 177 deaths, and roughly 1,400 people under contact tracing in the Ituri province. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed the outbreak is still "spreading rapidly," and the agency has upgraded its national risk level from "high" to "very high." The global risk remains "low" for now — but the trajectory of this outbreak suggests that assessment could change.

The troubling part isn't just the speed of spread. It's how much of a head start the virus had before anyone knew to look for it. WHO officials now believe the earliest suspected case dates to April 24, when a health worker in Bunia, the capital of Ituri, developed symptoms. WHO didn't receive word of a potential outbreak until May 5, when a cluster of deaths among health workers triggered alarm. By the time a response team arrived on the ground, 80 people were already infected.

Dr. Anne Ancia, a WHO representative speaking from the DRC, described finding the virus "already rampant and silently disseminating for a few weeks." That's a brutal phrase. Silent dissemination means weeks of unchecked transmission in communities, health facilities, and across whatever movement corridors exist in a region already defined by instability.

Making containment even harder: the virus in question is the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, one of the rarer variants. Unlike the more familiar Zaire strain that drove the catastrophic 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, Bundibugyo doesn't have approved vaccines or established therapeutics. That strips away some of the most powerful modern tools in outbreak response and pushes responders back to basics — case finding, isolation, and contact tracing — in an area marked by armed conflict, severe food insecurity, and fragile health infrastructure.

Then there's the question of American involvement, or the lack of it. The United States was, for decades, the single most important external actor in African Ebola responses. USAID funded critical on-the-ground infrastructure. CDC personnel helped lead outbreak investigations. That institutional presence is now largely gone — USAID has been gutted, the CDC has faced steep cuts, and the US has withdrawn from the WHO entirely.

Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine doctor at Brown University who contracted Ebola while treating patients in Guinea in 2014, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece this week that the US has effectively abandoned its leadership role in global health security at exactly the wrong moment.

The WHO is sprinting to catch up to a virus that got a weeks-long running start. With its primary historical partner on the sidelines, the margin for error just got a lot thinner.