SpaceX's Starship Rocket Completes 13th Test Flight with Mixed Outcomes

SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket Friday evening from its company town and launch facility in Starbase, Texas, in a 13th test flight and the first since the company's record IPO last month. The rocket's Super Heavy booster detached from the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight, and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf. In a statement following the flight, SpaceX said the landing was not perfect as the booster, "attempted to relight its engines for the landing burn," but only a subset successfully ignited before the "hard splashdown." The upper stage of the rocket made a "soft splashdown" in the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said, "coming to rest intact in the Indian Ocean and providing critical views of an intact heatshield for the first time." Employees called the test flight "lucky number 13," in 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 to lift more cargo for less cost into orbit. Starship is considered crucial for the company's goal to vastly expand 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 company to see how they performed in flight. The satellites were intended to burn up after about 20 minutes. The new satellites, produced at a SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington, are built to be larger, and more powerful than Starlink's earlier satellites. They're also equipped with solar arrays that generate twice as much power as prior generations, a SpaceX business analyst explained in a livestream. SpaceX is now developing Starmind satellites, which the company intends to launch and eventually use as orbital data centers. Besides using their largest rockets to launch the new, larger satellites, SpaceX wants to use the Starship rocket to bring U.S. astronauts back to the moon's surface, and to eventually power manned missions to Mars. The company is preparing Starship for a major NASA test flight next year. Friday's test flight marked the second for Starship V3, the latest version of the rocket. TMF Associates' Tim Farrar, a satellite services industry expert, said the test flight showed SpaceX has made some progress with Starship but "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 said. In a post on X, which is owned by SpaceX, the company said it delayed an earlier test flight planned for Thursday "due to weather." It also previously scrubbed a test flight on July 16, after the rocket's booster triggered a hold, which "shut down the engines right as they were starting to ignite," a SpaceX employee said during a livestream of the earlier event. SpaceX's stock has dropped in four of the past five weeks, slumping 43% from its peak close on June 16.