The SpaceX Starship and Tremendous Heavy v3 Booster carry off on its thirteenth take a look at flight from the SpaceX launch complicated in Starbase, Texas, U.S., July 24, 2026.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
SpaceX launched its large Starship rocket Friday night from its firm city and launch facility in Starbase, Texas, in a thirteenth take a look at flight and the primary for the reason that firm’s report IPO final month.
The rocket’s Tremendous Heavy booster indifferent from the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight, and made a managed splashdown within the Gulf. The higher stage of the rocket made a “comfortable splashdown” within the Indian Ocean. SpaceX workers known as the take a look at flight “fortunate quantity 13,” in a livestream of the occasion.
Elon Musk’s aerospace and protection contractor designed Starship, the most important rocket ever constructed or flown, to be absolutely reusable and to carry extra cargo for much less value into orbit. Starship is taken into account essential for the corporate’s purpose to vastly increase its Starlink satellite tv for pc community, amongst different missions.
About 18 minutes into Friday’s take a look at flight, SpaceX efficiently deployed 20 of its new Starlink V3 satellites into orbit, a primary likelihood for the corporate to see how they carried out in flight. The satellites had been meant to expend after about 20 minutes.
The brand new satellites, produced at a SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington, are constructed to be bigger, and extra highly effective than Starlink’s earlier satellites. They’re additionally outfitted with photo voltaic arrays that generate twice as a lot energy as prior generations, a SpaceX enterprise analyst defined in a livestream.
SpaceX is now creating Starmind satellites, which the corporate intends to launch and finally use as orbital knowledge facilities.
In addition to utilizing their largest rockets to launch the brand new, bigger satellites, SpaceX needs to make use of the Starship rocket to carry U.S. astronauts again to the moon’s floor, and to finally energy manned missions to Mars. The corporate is making ready Starship for a serious NASA take a look at flight subsequent 12 months.
Friday’s take a look at flight marked the second for Starship V3, the newest model of the rocket.
TMF Associates’ Tim Farrar, a satellite tv for pc companies trade skilled, stated the take a look at flight confirmed SpaceX has made some progress with Starship however “stays a great distance from reaching speedy reusability of all the ship.” He pointed to issues SpaceX had relighting its Raptor engines on Friday. “Any related failure throughout an tried touchdown on the firm’s launch web site might trigger extreme harm to the launchpad,” he stated.
In a publish on X, which is owned by SpaceX, the corporate stated it delayed an earlier take a look at flight deliberate for Thursday “as a consequence of climate.” It additionally beforehand scrubbed a take a look at flight on July 16, after the rocket’s booster triggered a maintain, which “shut down the engines proper as they had been beginning to ignite,” a SpaceX worker stated throughout a livestream of the sooner occasion.
SpaceX’s inventory has dropped in 4 of the previous 5 weeks, slumping 43% from its peak shut on June 16.
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