Customer Stories
Starship Flight 9: Photographing History, Triumph, and Turbulence
When have you felt most locked-in behind a camera? Was it on the sidelines, framing a game’s do-or-die play? Or perhaps glimpsing a rare animal after days of patiently waiting in harsh conditions? For me, it’s the instant all 33 Raptor engines ignite beneath SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle, the ground literally trembling as the rocket climbs its way into the south Texas sky, emitting the most thunderous of noises. It’s visceral, all-encompassing, and gone almost as quickly as it arrives. On May 27, 2025, during Starship’s ninth test flight in Starbase, Texas, that fleeting moment carried the weight of the thousands who had their hands on the hardware now bound for space. As a photographer, I wasn’t just capturing another launch—I was documenting a critical step toward humanity’s multiplanetary future, an evolution of a rocket designed to outdo Apollo’s legacy and carry us to Mars. Flight 9, with its triumphs and stumbles, was a chapter in that saga, and through my lens, I aimed to capture its place in history.
Flight 9 Context
SpaceX’s Starship rocket is the company’s answer to Elon Musk’s vision of making humanity multiplanetary. Since we last visited this stainless steel behemoth in a previous article from December 2023, Starship has grown in height now to 403 feet (123 meters) tall; as it currently stands, it remains the largest and most powerful launch vehicle yet developed by a large margin. Starbase itself has also seen many changes, including the construction of a new launch complex adjacent to the current one in service and a brand new “Starfactory” where major components are built before final assembly, among others, more detail-oriented changes not necessarily relevant here.
The objectives of Flight 9 weighed heavily on the vehicle itself and those responsible for building it. After Flight 6, SpaceX debuted a brand new design for the upper stage, otherwise called Ship, in order to optimize potential prototype payload capacity, propellant storage, and control authority when reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. However, Flights 7 and 8 did not go according to plan as the ship suffered catastrophic engine failures before making it to its targeted suborbital trajectory on both flights. While the program is still heavily in its prototype phase, the lack of success on these two flights was a blow to the program as a whole, breaking the track record of progress from Flights 1-6. So Ship 35, selected for Flight 9, had a lot riding on it to prove the viability of this next-generation ship and make up for lost time from the beginning of 2025.
In addition to this, the Super Heavy booster selected for this mission was Booster 14, and the significance of this was that it had previously flown on Flight 7. By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the viral footage of the launch tower’s “chopsticks” catching boosters out of the air for recovery – this is how SpaceX recovers these boosters and, eventually, turns them around rapidly for another flight. In this case, Booster 14 would be the first to ever attempt a reflight in the program.
In all, the flight was a stepping stone of progress as the Booster performed well, considering its reuse without a catch attempt, and Ship made it to MECO (main engine cutoff). However it quickly began to rotate uncontrollably in space and never fully recovered – this resulted in an uncontrolled entry into the atmosphere without in-flight objectives being met. The launch itself made for a great show on the ground, as we will now dive into.
Crafting the Shots & Execution
Of the 9 launches so far in the Starship program, I have been fortunate enough to cover 7 of them. With the experience of each building on those that came before, the hunt for novel or unique images becomes increasingly difficult, but a rocket that launches with the drama and flare that Starship does leaves the imagination constantly wandering. Starbase itself is unique in that the general public can come extremely close to this massive rocket; in fact, this is the only location in the world where you can do this. The side-effect of this open access is an abundance of compositions for any sort of lens. SpaceX is kind enough to grant credentialed media additional access to place cameras all around the launch complex to be remotely triggered by sound when T-0 arrives. The launch pad is located right next to Highway 4, by a public beach on the Gulf, so the surrounding areas are predominantly sand dunes and silty wetlands.
The itch I’ve been trying to scratch for a few launches now is a setup farther away from the pad, roughly half a mile away, and at a three-quarter angle from the southeast. This perspective offers a view of the rocket climbing away in between the massive exhaust plumes billowing on either side of the pad – looks absolutely epic when framed correctly. However, this spot also requires a bit of homework to study the weather forecasts and, more specifically, the wind speed and direction. If it so happens to be blowing in the wrong direction, the building dust cloud will obscure the entire launch pad and leave you with next to no usable imagery of the launch itself. With that now cleared, my mind turned to camera settings; with the launch window this time falling in the late afternoon, it was a fairly simple conclusion that exposing for slightly darker than ambient conditions would work best in combination with a clear sky and the brightness of the exhaust.
With a location scouted out in the dunes, I planted 3 total remote cameras at this southeast perspective and then moved on to prepare for launch viewing. In the previous article, I elaborated on the perspective of South Padre Island, around 5-6 miles from the launch site, and its pros and cons. This time around, I was able to shoot from the Rocket Ranch Outpost right on the Rio Grande River, only 3.4 miles away and directly to the west of the launch complex. In other words, a front row seat. Armed with a Canon RF 600mm f/4 lens paired with a 2x teleconverter on my Canon R5, all of the finest details on Starship’s shiny stainless steel surface would be on full display.
The last few minutes of the count always seem to arrive before you know it, yet when they arrive, they can simultaneously feel like an eternity. Ready or not, T-0 eventually arrives, and your job begins. Starship has recently moved into launching in the late afternoon hours, so there is plenty of sunlight to work with in this case, allowing for super-fast shutter speeds to compensate against any chance of motion blur. The acoustic energy from all 33 Raptors at this distance is intense, so while the camera gear shakes like mad, as do you and the surrounding landscape. The iconic shape of Starship contrasted against a picturesque blue sky, with the Raptors’ purple exhaust glistening as vibrantly and violently as ever. Meanwhile, out in the dunes, my remote cameras were being bombarded by acoustic energy at liftoff, waking up the triggers and firing them away against an intimidating dust cloud that grew prominently as the vehicle cleared the pad. Starship continued to ascend, and I continued to fire away for as long as it remained visible in the far distance over the Gulf until stage separation, and both vehicles disappeared into the haze.
As the echoes of Starship’s 9th flight faded over Starbase, the weight of the moment began to settle in. The context leading up to then was critical in constructing the story, no matter the outcome. The images captured served as small points in time documenting the history and continued development of the Starship program, much like those that captured the Apollo and Shuttle programs alike. Photography helps shape how the world sees the realm of spaceflight as a whole, and each frame keeps the story alive, whether the progress is messy or straightforward. The show must go on.
