The SpaceX Starship and Effectively-organized Heavy v3 Booster snatch off on its Thirteenth test flight from the SpaceX starting up complex in Starbase, Texas, U.S., July 24, 2026.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket Friday evening from its company city and starting up facility in Starbase, Texas, in a Thirteenth test flight and the necessary since the corporate’s anecdote IPO last month.
The rocket’s Effectively-organized Heavy booster quiet from the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight, and made a controlled splashdown within the Gulf.
In a assertion following the flight, SpaceX acknowledged the touchdown used to be no longer excellent as the booster, “attempted to relight its engines for the landing burn,” nonetheless easiest a subset successfully ignited earlier than the “hard splashdown.”
The upper stage of the rocket made a “soft splashdown” within the Indian Ocean, SpaceX acknowledged, “coming to rest intact in the Indian Ocean and providing critical views of an intact heatshield for the first time.”
Staff called the test flight “lucky number 13,” in a livestream of the match.
Elon Musk’s aerospace and protection contractor designed Starship, a in point of fact grand rocket ever constructed or flown, to be fully reusable and to grab extra cargo for much less rate into orbit. Starship is belief of as necessary for the corporate’s goal to vastly magnify its Starlink satellite network, among other missions.
About 18 minutes into Friday’s test flight, SpaceX successfully deployed 20 of its new Starlink V3 satellites into orbit, a first chance for the corporate to glance how they performed in flight. The satellites were meant to make use of up after about 20 minutes.
The brand new satellites, produced at a SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington, are constructed to be higher, and extra grand than Starlink’s earlier satellites. They’re additionally outfitted with portray voltaic arrays that generate twice as unheard of energy as prior generations, a SpaceX industry analyst defined in a livestream.
SpaceX is now constructing Starmind satellites, which the corporate intends to starting up and within the end use as orbital knowledge centers.
Moreover the usage of their excellent rockets to starting up the brand new, higher satellites, SpaceX wants to make use of the Starship rocket to elevate U.S. astronauts wait on to the moon’s ground, and to within the end energy manned missions to Mars. The corporate is making ready Starship for a necessary NASA test flight next year.
Friday’s test flight marked the 2d for Starship V3, the most up-to-the-minute model of the rocket.
TMF Mates’ Tim Farrar, a satellite services industry knowledgeable, acknowledged the test flight confirmed SpaceX has made some development with Starship nonetheless “remains a long way from achieving rapid reusability of the entire ship.” He pointed to problems SpaceX had relighting its Raptor engines on Friday. “Any similar failure during an attempted landing at the company’s launch site could cause severe damage to the launchpad,” he acknowledged.
In a put up on X, which is owned by SpaceX, the corporate acknowledged it delayed an earlier test flight deliberate for Thursday “due to weather.” It additionally previously scrubbed a test flight on July 16, after the rocket’s booster precipitated a retain, which “shut down the engines right as they were starting to ignite,” a SpaceX employee acknowledged throughout a livestream of the sooner match.
SpaceX’s stock has dropped in four of the past 5 weeks, slumping 43% from its peak close on June 16.
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