Starship’s V3 booster roars off the pad with its 33 Raptor 3 engines, climbing over Starbase, Texas, on July 24, 2026. All 33 engines ignited usually on this flight — the car’s thirteenth check — earlier than the booster separated and got here down onerous within the Gulf of Mexico. Credit score: SpaceX through X
SpaceX launched its Starship for the thirteenth time on July 24, sending a V3 Starship and Tremendous Heavy booster via practically each milestone the corporate had deliberate — deploying the primary batch of next-generation Starlink satellites, relighting an engine in house, and bringing the higher stage all the way down to the gentlest ocean splashdown SpaceX has ever managed. Simply moments after the higher stage splashed down, SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot captured the joy on the SpaceX livestream, remarking, “Fortunate quantity 13. Hell of a flight for Starship.”
Hours after Flight 13 wrapped, SpaceX founder Elon Musk stated the corporate is able to attempt catching the higher stage with the launch tower’s mechanical arms on the very subsequent flight — assuming the info holds up. “Until we uncover issues after mission knowledge evaluate, SpaceX will try to catch the ship with the tower on subsequent flight,” Musk wrote on X after the launch.
Starship is SpaceX’s absolutely reusable, two-stage rocket — a 408-foot-tall (124 meters) stack pairing the Tremendous Heavy booster with the Starship higher stage, each powered by Raptor engines burning methane and liquid oxygen. V3, which debuted in Could, options upgrades to stronger Raptor 3 engines, and is the model of the car SpaceX intends to fly for NASA’s Artemis moon landings.
A flight of firsts
In the course of the first launch of V3, Flight 12 in Could, the Tremendous Heavy booster misplaced an engine on ascent, then did not relight sufficient engines for its boostback burn, ending in a tough, uncontrolled fall into the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship higher stage reached its deliberate trajectory regardless of shedding one in all its six engines alongside the way in which. The FAA opened a mishap investigation earlier than clearing SpaceX to fly once more.
Flight 13 didn’t come straightforward, both. A July 16 launch try led to an computerized, computer-triggered abort proper earlier than launch after 4 Raptors did not ignite. SpaceX traced and glued the difficulty, then misplaced one other day to climate, earlier than lastly lifting off July 24.
All 33 of the Tremendous Heavy’s Raptor engines ignited usually this time, and the booster’s ascent and separation went as deliberate. Throughout Tremendous Heavy’s touchdown nonetheless, solely a subset of the 13 engines meant to fireplace for splashdown relit, leaving the booster to hit the Gulf onerous.
For the primary time, the higher stage deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites — the constellation’s latest design — via its PEZ-dispenser-shaped payload door, with two of the departing satellites turning their cameras again for a parting have a look at their trip.
The higher stage additionally accomplished a profitable in-space relight of 1 Raptor engine. Throughout reentry, Starship relit all three of its touchdown engines, flipped upright, throttled down from three engines to 2 to 1, and settled onto the water intact — the primary Starship to outlive splashdown with out breaking up or catching fireplace, and the primary clear have a look at a warmth protect that made it via a flight in a single piece.
“That is the primary time we’ve put an intact Starship within the water,” Huot stated through the launch livestream. The spacecraft continued to ship telemetry and video even because it bobbed on the waves — one other first, and one that permit SpaceX engineers watch their warmth protect dwell simply moments after touchdown. “This can be a dream situation,” Huot stated. “Usually you’re working with a barely charred Starship within the water, and now we’ve got one intact.”
The warmth protect is without doubt one of the greatest hurdles SpaceX faces on the street to full reusability. Constructed from roughly 18,000 particular person tiles, it has to carry up flight after flight with out requiring intensive rework or inspection between flights. The information from Flight 13 is little question invaluable as SpaceX continues to enhance the design, and the truth that the warmth protect survived intact is a step in the correct route, but it surely additionally underscored the size of the issue. The warmth protect didn’t come via in a situation that factors to speedy reuse.
In a narrative for Ars Technica, Eric Berger famous that footage of Starship after splashdown confirmed “notable white streaks throughout the warmth protect” coming from the tile boundaries, indicating that scorching gasoline could have penetrated the seams throughout reentry. Berger reported that exterior specialists, together with former NASA warmth protect researcher Dan Rasky, stay skeptical that the present tile-based design can ever assist the speedy, low-cost reuse SpaceX is aiming for.
What’s subsequent for Starship
If SpaceX goes to try a tower catch of Starship with the Mechazilla arms on Flight 14, that additionally means the ship should attain orbit, fly round Earth, and return to Starbase, Texas — a feat Starship has but to realize, as all earlier flights have been suborbital. It might characterize an enormous step for a rocket that NASA is relying on because the lander for Artemis 3 and 4. Though the Artemis program can be relying on one other milestone SpaceX hasn’t tried but: transferring propellant between two Starships in orbit.
Brooks Mendenhall is a employees author for Astronomy journal and is predicated in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
