Every part in the model
Select a name to find it in 3D. Parts marked inside open the cutaway automatically.
Ship
Built from two segments and heavily reinforced around the forward flap mounts and the lift points the tower's arms grab. Four Starlink antennas ride inside.
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Two small reserve tanks in the tip of the nose: liquid oxygen at the very top, methane directly below. Dedicated downcomers route their propellant to the engines, and pressure vessels around the methane header store engine startup gas.
Two hinged surfaces that steer reentry. Since Block 2 they sit farther toward the leeward side, thinner and angled, which reduced heating and a tendency to pitch up. Cameras watch from the hinges.
The section between the methane tank and the nosecone. On Starlink missions a slot door folds inward to open the dispenser to space.
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Mounted on the methane tank's forward dome. A moving track in its truss base pushes each satellite out, the next is lowered into place, and a retention frame keeps the stack from floating free in zero-g.
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Too large for Falcon 9, so they fly only on Starship. SpaceX says each carries 1 Tbps of downlink capacity, and one Starship load adds about 20 times the capacity of a Falcon 9 launch of V2 Mini satellites. Select them to watch a deployment.
Holds the fuel. Block 2 added internal stringers to this tank, and its forward dome carries the payload dispenser.
Attitude control in space using leftover pressurant gas from the tanks. Four sit just below the payload bay and two on the oxygen tank.
A single bulkhead separates methane above from oxygen below, the same approach used on Saturn V's S-II and S-IVB stages.
The oxidizer, and most of the propellant by mass. The tank ends in the thrust structure that carries the engines.
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Pipes that carry methane down through the oxygen tank. Three smaller lines feed the vacuum Raptors and a central one feeds the inner three engines through a large sump.
About 18,000 black hexagonal silica tiles pinned to the windward side, with small gaps for expansion. An ablative layer sits underneath, and after Flight 10 a felt layer was added to fill the gaps between tiles.
Two large flaps on the sides of the engine bay and oxygen tank. With the forward pair they steer the belly-first fall, taking the place of wings or a tail.
The bottom of the oxygen tank. The three sea-level engines mount to the thrust puck, braced by a conical steel structure inside the dome. The vacuum engines mount directly to the aft dome.
A shielded, vented compartment around the engines. Gaseous nitrogen purges it during flight for fire suppression.
The steering engines. They gimbal on electric actuators and relight for the landing burn. Raptor 3 burns methane and oxygen in a full-flow staged combustion cycle with its plumbing built into the engine.
Engines with much larger nozzles optimized for the vacuum of space, doing the heavy lifting after stage separation.
Super Heavy booster
The ship lights its engines while still attached. On V3 the booster's forward dome faces that blast directly, shielded by a non-structural steel layer and tank pressure, replacing the separate vented interstage earlier boosters carried and later jettisoned.
Steer the booster home. V3 has three instead of four, each about 50% larger and stronger, mounted lower to avoid hot-staging heat with the shaft and actuator inside the fuel tank. They double as the catch points for the tower.
The upper tank. On V3 the hot-stage section is built directly into it.
One bulkhead shared by both tanks. The change to a more elliptical shape shifted the capacity of each tank slightly.
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Carries methane from the upper tank straight through the oxygen tank to the 33 engines. The redesigned V3 tube enables faster flips and simultaneous engine startup.
The lower and larger tank. Each tank is stiffened by roughly 74 stringers on its inside walls.
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Supplies liquid oxygen to the inner 13 engines during the landing burn. The methane feed passes partly through it on its way to the engines.
Aerodynamic strakes on the oxygen tank that add lift during descent. On earlier boosters they also housed batteries, spin-start pressure vessels and CO2 fire suppression tanks, a system V3 removes.
Closes the bottom of the oxygen tank. The inner 13 engines hang from the thrust puck, while the outer 20 mount to a ring on the lowest barrel. V3 adds metallic heat shield tiles to the dome.
The ground connections that load propellant before launch. V3 replaces the single main quick disconnect of earlier boosters with two physically separated connection points. On Pad 2 the liquid oxygen and methane units are separate and sit on the side of the mount opposite the tower.
The engine compartment. Raptor 3 carries its own thermal protection, so SpaceX dropped the large individual engine shrouds and kept lighter shielding between engines. Fuel transfer, power and computers are packed in more tightly.
Among the few engines still running through hot staging, and the last three burning at the end of the landing burn.
With the center three, these make up the inner 13 steerable engines that reignite for boostback and the start of the landing burn.
Fixed engines for maximum liftoff thrust. The Raptor 2 versions could only be started by ground equipment; with Raptor 3 all 33 engines can relight.
Launch site
The tower stacks the vehicle with its two arms, nicknamed chopsticks, and can catch returning boosters. Pad 2's tower uses a newer design: shorter arms with two truss sections removed, electromechanical actuators in place of hydraulics, no ship lifting pins, and a roof covered in cladding. The arm length shown is an estimate. All three catches so far, Boosters 12, 14 and 15, happened at Pad 1's tower; the first was Booster 12 on October 13, 2024. On Flight 14 the booster splashed down in the Gulf instead, as SpaceX sticks with ocean landings until upgrades are tested.
Starbase's second pad, where V3 flies from. Ship 41 and Booster 21 lifted off from here on Flight 14. It replaces Pad 1's ring on six legs with a square mount on columns under a water-cooled steel deck, much thicker hold-down arms, and a steel-clad service bunker at the side for the propellant, hydraulic, pneumatic and electrical hardware. Below it, a split flame deflector built from drilled pipes, with a ridge cap that sprays water, sends the exhaust out of a flame trench with two exits. The deck size and height, the number of hold-down arms and the trench layout shown are estimates.