SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will take to the skies once more in the present day (July 16), and you’ll watch the thundering motion stay.
Starship, the largest and strongest rocket ever constructed, is scheduled to elevate off from SpaceX’s Starbase website in South Texas in the present day — the 57th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Apollo 11 moon mission, by the best way — throughout a 90-minute widow that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. native Texas time). It is going to be Starship’s thirteenth flight general and its second mission of 2026.
You possibly can watch Starship Flight 13 stay right here at House.com, courtesy of SpaceX; coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff. Follow our Starship live blog for updates and other news about the test flight.
A potentially revolutionary rocket
Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage vehicle known (somewhat confusingly) as Starship, or simply Ship. Both elements are made of stainless steel and are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
The stacked vehicle stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall and can carry more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to Earth orbit. SpaceX thinks Starship’s combination of power and reusability will revolutionize spaceflight, allowing humanity to settle the moon and Mars, among other bold exploration feats.
Starship debuted in April 2023 and has flown 11 more suborbital flights since, most recently on May 22. That Flight 12 test was the first mission for Starship Version 3 (V3), an advanced iteration of the megarocket that was many months in the making. (Flight 11, the last launch of Starship V2, lifted off in October 2025.)
Starship V3 will be the first operational variant of the vehicle. It will fly on NASA’s Artemis III mission to Earth orbit in 2027, for example, and land the agency’s Artemis IV astronauts on the moon a year later, if all goes to plan.
Starship V3 performed quite well during its launch debut in May. During Flight 12, Ship successfully deployed 22 payloads via its “PEZ dispenser” slit — 20 dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites and two actual Starlinks equipped with imaging sensors — and came back to Earth in one piece, splashing down as planned off the coast of Western Australia.
There were a few hiccups, however. Super Heavy suffered engine issues during its return to Earth, for instance, and ended up crashing in the Gulf of Mexico rather than making a controlled splashdown there.
SpaceX will run it back on Flight 13, shooting mostly for the same objectives that Flight 12 targeted — with a few notable exceptions.
The plan for Starship Flight 13
Eventually, SpaceX plans to return both Super Heavy and Ship directly to the launch pad after liftoff, catching each with the “chopstick” arms attached to Starbase’s two launch towers. (Starship will also fly from Florida and perhaps other places as well in the coming years; these future pads will have chopstick arms, too.) This strategy will allow each vehicle to fly multiple times per day, according to the company.
SpaceX has caught Super Heavy three times to date, but it’s been a while; the last such snag came on Flight 8 in March 2025. And the company has never tried a chopsticks catch with Ship.
Those trends will continue on Flight 13. If all goes to plan, Super Heavy will steer its way to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (which the Trump administration has renamed the Gulf of America) about seven minutes after launch.
“The booster’s primary test objective will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 13 mission description. “There have been a number of modifications to {hardware} and software program to handle points seen on the earlier flight.”
Ship will once more goal a splashdown within the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, which can happen about 65 minutes after launch. And the car will once more deploy some objects into suborbital house — however here is the place Flight 13 will break new floor.
These objects might be 20 V3 Starlink satellites — next-gen variations of the broadband spacecraft, which can “vastly increase the community’s capability and consumer speeds,” SpaceX wrote within the mission description.
Ultimately, SpaceX needs to function as much as 100,000 V3 Starlinks in low Earth orbit — a daring plan, contemplating that the present megaconstellation, the biggest such community ever assembled, incorporates “solely” about 10,800 spacecraft.
The Starlink V3 plan would require 1000’s of launches — a load that is past even the capabilities of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which flew 165 occasions in 2025. (Including to the problem: Starship V3 satellites are significantly heavier than their predecessors. Each will apparently weigh round 4,400 kilos, or 2,000 kilograms.)
The 20 Starlink V3 satellites “will prolong photo voltaic arrays and antennas and can try to attach with the bigger Starlink constellation through high-capacity lasers,” SpaceX wrote within the Flight 13 description. “The Starlink satellites might be on the identical suborbital trajectory as Starship and are anticipated to demise upon reentry roughly 20 minutes after deployment.”
Six of the 20 spacecraft are outfitted with cameras, which they may use to scan and examine Ship’s heat-shield tiles. SpaceX needs to assemble extra knowledge in regards to the heat-shield system earlier than it makes an attempt to convey Ship again to the launch pad for a chopsticks catch.
And SpaceX will not simply passively observe the warmth defend throughout Flight 13; it would conduct some experiments as properly.
For instance, the defend “may have load-sensing tiles to take measurements because the car experiences larger dynamic strain on ascent than earlier flights, placing added stress on the tile attachments in change for elevated payload-to-orbit functionality,” the mission description reads.
So there’ll certainly be some new issues to look out for throughout Flight 13. And watching the world’s greatest and brawniest rocket elevate off is a deal with it doesn’t matter what form of mission it is flying, so make sure you tune in in the present day!
