On July 24, 2026, a SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy V3 booster will lift off on their 13th test flight from the SpaceX Launch Facility in Starbase, Texas, USA.
Steve Nessius | Reuters
space x launched its giant Starship rocket on Friday night from its company town and launch facility in Starbase, Texas, on its 13th test flight, but the first since the company’s record-setting IPO last month.
The rocket’s super heavy booster separated from the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf.
In a post-flight statement, SpaceX said the landing was not perfect as the booster “attempted to reignite the engines for a landing burn,” but only some were able to successfully ignite before the “violent splashdown.”
SpaceX announced that the rocket’s upper stage had a “soft splashdown” in the Indian Ocean and “came to rest intact in the Indian Ocean, providing the first critical view of its intact heat shield.”
Employees called the test flight “lucky number 13” during a livestream of the event.
Elon Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor designed Starship, the largest rocket ever built or flown, to be fully reusable and able to lift more cargo into orbit for less cost. Starship, among other missions, is considered critical to the company’s goal of significantly expanding its Starlink satellite network.
About 18 minutes into Friday’s test flight, SpaceX successfully deployed 20 of its new Starlink V3 satellites into orbit, giving the company its first chance to see how they perform in flight. The satellite was designed to burn out after about 20 minutes.
The new satellite will be manufactured at the SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington, and is intended to be larger and more powerful than Starlink’s previous satellites. It is also equipped with a solar array that generates twice as much power as the previous generation, SpaceX business analysts explained in a livestream.
SpaceX is currently developing the Starmind satellite, which the company plans to launch and eventually use as an orbital data center.
In addition to using its largest rocket to launch new, larger satellites, SpaceX wants to use its Starship rocket to return American astronauts to the moon and eventually power human missions to Mars. The company is preparing Starship for NASA’s large-scale test flight next year.
Friday’s test flight was the second for the latest version of the rocket, Starship V3.
Tim Farrar of TMF Associates, a satellite services industry expert, said the test flight shows SpaceX has made some progress with Starship, but “we’re still a long way from achieving rapid reuse of the entire ship.” He pointed to issues with SpaceX’s attempt to reignite the Raptor engine on Friday. “A similar failure during a landing attempt at the company’s launch site could cause significant damage to the launch pad,” he said.
In a post on SpaceX-owned X, the company said an initial test flight scheduled for Thursday was delayed “due to weather.” Also on July 16, a test flight was aborted after the rocket’s booster caused an outage and “the engine stopped the moment it started to ignite,” a SpaceX employee said in a livestream of an earlier event.
SpaceX stock has fallen in four of the past five weeks, dropping 43% from its June 16 closing high.
Watch: SpaceX falls below IPO price
