SpaceX has launched the upgraded third version of its Starship rocket for the first time, though the test launch did not go perfectly for Elon Musk’s spaceflight company.

The 407-foot rocket — the most powerful ever built — lifted off from SpaceX’s company town Starbase, Texas, at 5:30 p.m. local time. Just a few minutes later, the upper stage ship separated from the Super Heavy booster and continued on into space.

The booster pitched away from the Starship vehicle and headed back to Earth, where it was supposed to perform a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico. But the booster’s engines did not properly re-ignite for the sustained burn that is meant to deliver it back to the launch site. The booster then tumbled down to the water, where it likely exploded.

Starship, meanwhile, lost one of its six Raptor engines as it ascended into space. But it successfully deployed all 20 of the Starlink satellite simulators along with two modified Starlink satellites meant to record footage of Starship’s exterior. Roughly one hour after liftoff, Starship simulated a landing in the Indian Ocean, before tipping over and exploding as expected.

While it didn’t go exactly according to plan, this was an important test launch for SpaceX. It was the first real shakedown of the upgraded Starship V3 hardware, which has been in development for months. The company was also testing out an all-new launchpad at Starbase that it’s been developing and building for years.

The test launch also comes at a historical inflection point for SpaceX as a company. Its IPO filing was made public this week, and SpaceX is expected to list on the Nasdaq in mid-June. The IPO is reportedly supposed to raise around $75 billion for SpaceX, which the company plans to use to fuel further development, massive AI ambitions, and to pay off some of the debt associated with xAI and Musk’s social media company X. (That means this could also be the last Starship test launch to happen without a stock market reaction.)

SpaceX has spent years and billions of dollars developing Starship, which it sees as crucial to its mission of making life multi-planetary. The company plans to use Starship for NASA missions to the moon, and eventually Mars. But the big job it needs to perform in the near-term is delivering more advanced Starlink satellites to Earth orbit, as Starlink is the only profitable part of SpaceX’s business.

This was the first Starship flight since October 2025. SpaceX had planned to attempt launching Starship V3 earlier, but one of the first upgraded boosters suffered an explosion during testing in November. SpaceX first attempted the launch on Thursday but ultimately had to delay it as a hydraulic pin on the launch tower arm refused to retract, according to Musk.

This new version of Starship features SpaceX’s third-generation Raptor engines, which have more thrust and a far simpler design. The new booster is designed for faster takeoffs and easier catches by the launch tower.

This story has been updated to include information about Starship’s simulated landing.

On Friday, the ultrafast-fashion giant Shein finalized its acquisition of Everlane, a US clothing retailer that made its name by promising “radical transparency” into how its clothes were made. Neither company disclosed the price of the deal, but Puck reported last weekend that it clocked in at $100 million.

Founded in 2010, Everlane became synonymous with a certain strain of millennial consumerism that was supposed to be the exact opposite of Shein. It mainly sold elevated basics, and told a generation of anxious and high-minded shoppers that they could feel morally good about buying yet another pair of plain ballet flats or black high-waisted skinny jeans. Shein, by contrast, became notorious by flooding the internet with astonishingly cheap, trendy clothing produced at enormous scale. It has been criticized for years for alleged poor labor practices.

Given how differently Shein and Everlane positioned themselves, many people online felt the acquisition fell somewhere between darkly ironic and outright dystopian. The fashion writer Derek Guy, better known online as the “menswear guy,” articulated the vibe in a post on X: “Under Shein,” he wrote, “Everlane’s ‘radical transparency’ means you get to read about the small child making your boring gray crewneck sweater.”

Really, though, the deal makes perfect sense. In the long run, it may end up looking like a preview of where Chinese consumer companies are heading next.

Chinese ecommerce giants conquered the global market largely by selling cheap stuff at eye-watering scale. Companies like Shein and Temu thrived in part because of the “de minimis” loophole, a US trade rule that allowed packages worth under $800 to enter the country tariff-free and with relatively little customs scrutiny. That system became the backbone of a new era of cross-border ecommerce, enabling Chinese companies to ship cheap stuff directly to American consumers faster and more efficiently than many traditional retailers could manage.

But after US president Donald Trump imposed sweeping new tariffs on Chinese imports and ended the de minimis exemption, the economics underpinning that model began to falter. Chinese companies quickly realized they could no longer rely solely on flooding Western markets with bargain-priced products. If they wanted to keep growing internationally, they needed something more durable: a good old-fashioned brand.

Shein buying Everlane, however culturally cursed it may appear, is part of a broader trend already unfolding across Chinese commerce and manufacturing. Increasingly, Chinese companies are trying to move beyond anonymous low-cost production and toward owning recognizable global brands associated with quality, lifestyle, and status.

One of the clearest examples comes from Temu’s parent company, Pinduoduo. In March, the company announced a major new initiative called New PinMu, a multibillion-dollar effort designed to help Chinese manufacturers build premium international brands. The project is part of a larger strategic vision outlined by Pinduoduo co-CEO Jiazhen Zhao, who has been hyping up the company’s ambitions to elevate manufacturing standards and create pathways for Chinese factories to move up the value chain.

Meanwhile, Luckin Coffee, a Chinese coffee chain that has become one of Starbucks’ biggest rivals, recently acquired Blue Bottle, the cultish specialty coffee brand that helped define American third-wave coffee culture. Anta Sports, a Chinese sportswear giant that began largely as a domestic sneaker company, has spent years buying into premium global sportswear brands, including controlling stakes in Arc’teryx and Salomon.

The trend also reflects broader political pressures inside China. The government has become increasingly critical of the brutal price wars and hypercompetition that dominate industries like ecommerce and electric cars, a phenomenon often referred to as “involution.” Beijing now wants companies to focus more on sustainable growth, higher-end manufacturing, and global competitiveness rather than an endless race to the bottom.

When you think of Memorial Day sales, you probably think of mattresses and other home goods. And while those items are definitely discounted, now is also a good time to purchase tech. Personally, I’m not buying anything right now unless it’s discounted—and fortunately many of our top picks are. Whether you’re shopping for a power bank, a new pair of headphones, or some other gadget, I’ve rounded up the best Memorial Day deals for your perusal. We’ll update this article again over the weekend.

Check out our buying guides for more recommendations, including the best headphones, the best laptops, and the best cheap phones.

Updated May 22: We’ve checked prices, removed expired deals, added ten new deals, and ensured accuracy throughout.

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The Sony WH-1000XM5 have a very frustrating name, but they’re the predecessor to our favorite wireless headphones, and they’re still an excellent pick if you don’t want to shell out for the new WH-1000XM6. They go on sale frequently, but rarely drop this low in price, which comes within $5 of their all-time low. If you’re in the market for over-ear headphones, they’re hard to beat. They’re comfortable, portable, lightweight, and stylish, and they’ll make your music sound great no matter what you like to listen to.

In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that voices of pilots who were killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been re-created using AI and were circulating on the internet.

The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains troves of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident docket for this flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to turn sound signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image.

Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber whose channel combines physics, astronomy, and video games, noted on X that it could be possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.

And that’s what happened. People took the spectrogram, along with the publicly available transcript, to create approximations of the cockpit voice recorder audio from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky, according to the NTSB. They used AI tools like Codex, according to posts on social media.

The agency restored public access to the docket system on Friday but kept 42 investigations closed pending review — including the one related to Flight 2976.

SpaceX lifted its upgraded Starship V3 rocket from the pad at Starbase in Texas late this afternoon for its first full test flight. At 407 feet tall and carrying more thrust than any rocket before it, the vehicle rose on 33 engines in the Super Heavy booster and six in the upper stage. One booster engine failed to ignite at the start, yet the stack cleared the tower cleanly and kept climbing.

The sound of an engine roaring on the coastal flats filled the air as the rocket began to accelerate. Only a few minutes in, the stages separated from each other high above the Gulf. The upper Starship ship continued to ascend, while the booster abruptly reversed course and returned to Earth. SpaceX had hoped to gently guide the booster back down to the Gulf’s surface with a controlled return and a soft landing, but the main brake burn engines failed to relight properly. So the booster tumbled through the air before colliding with the sea and breaking apart.

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However, attention quickly moved to the ship that was still on its way up. This one was carrying out a slew of test objectives, not the least of which was the launch of twenty dummy Starlink satellites and two actual ones outfitted with cameras to capture footage of the heat shield as it traveled through the skies. One of the six Raptor engines on board opted to shut down during the ascent, but the other five did a decent enough job to get them up to the height they planned, which was close to 195 kilometers. As they did so, the ship floated free and released each satellite exactly on time before beginning its long, arcing curve out over the Indian Ocean.

Re-entry produced the normal glow of plasma around the ship as it plunged lower into the atmosphere. The flight controllers watched as it flipped and calmed itself down with a succession of small, precise burns. In the final moments, it flopped onto its side in the sea, precisely where the engineers had hoped to land it for this test. Then, guess what? The ship exploded on contact. That was always part of the plan, of course, because the goal was to collect some data without taking too many risks, especially given this was the new hardware’s first trip.

Meanwhile, engineers at Starbase had utilized the flight to test a whole new launch pad configuration. That pad kept its position despite the tremendous liftoff, which was a quiet but significant victory, especially if it will be used for future operations. The entire mission lasted about an hour, from liftoff to splashdown. Earlier, there had been some delays due to a minor hydraulic fault on the tower arm, forcing them to cancel the attempt the day before.

This was the first Starship flight since October of last year, and it marked the introduction of the V3 design. The version has third-generation Raptor engines, which are expected to be more easier to work with and have a faster turnaround. Although the booster did not return and the ship went up in the water, the hardware met a number of key objectives: it separated cleanly, delivered the payload on time, and ran steadily even after one of the engines failed. Now, the teams will review all of the data to see where they can make changes for the next round.