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Starship’s 13th test flight
SpaceX launched its Starship on a 13th test flight from the company’s base at the southern tip of Texas, carrying 20 of the most advanced Starlinks.
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The rocket, towering 407 feet (124 meters), blasted off Friday and was monitored by NASA as a critical step toward using Starship as a lunar lander for moon crews.
SpaceX replaced six of the 33 engines on the first-stage booster after they failed to ignite last week, and the previous Starship flight in May experienced engine trouble that prevented the booster from making a controlled return.
The flight lasted about an hour, with the Starlinks’ solo-flying time expected to be no more than 20 minutes before they reentered over the Indian Ocean.
After deploying the satellites, the Starship followed its suborbital trajectory into Earth’s atmosphere and burned up, while the booster was bound for the Gulf of Mexico.
Heat shield data and telemetry
France 24 reported that Starship splashed down in the Indian Ocean after a successful test flight, with Elon Musk saying on X, "Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry!"
Dan Huot told the livestream, "This is the first time we've put an intact Starship in the water," as the mission aimed to generate heat shield data.
ABC News said the heat shield was equipped with sensors to measure the extreme pressure placed on the spacecraft during launch, and that some thermal tiles were deliberately painted white to simulate missing tiles.
The mission also included cameras on six of the newly launched Starlinks to photograph Starship’s heat shield, while the satellites attempted to communicate via lasers with older Starlink models already in orbit.
France 24 added that the flight tested upgrades to the heat shield and that the landing burn of the booster was harder than hoped, with Huot saying it "came in with quite a bit of velocity still."
NASA, Starlink, and next steps
SpaceX’s test flight was framed as moving toward regular Starship operations by the end of the year, after deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites that briefly connected with SpaceX’s existing network of some 10,000 satellites in orbit.
“SpaceX launches Starship on test flight, this time with most advanced Starlinks SpaceX’s Starship rocket has blasted off on another test flight, this time carrying 20 of the most advanced Starlinks SpaceX’s mammoth Starship rocket blasted off Friday on another test flight stretching halfway around the world, this time carrying 20 of the most advanced Starlinks”
The mission was also tied to NASA’s timeline, with ABC News saying NASA needs Starship to wrap up testing and reach orbit soon so the Artemis III astronauts — three Americans and one Italian — can practice docking next year.
CNBC reported that SpaceX said the upper stage made a "soft splashdown" in the Indian Ocean, "coming to rest intact in the Indian Ocean and providing critical views of an intact heatshield for the first time."
In the same CNBC account, SpaceX said the booster landing was not perfect because it "attempted to relight its engines for the landing burn," but only a subset successfully ignited before the "hard splashdown."
ABC News also connected the program to broader ambitions, saying Starship is the vehicle with which Elon Musk intends to build a city on Mars, while NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman commented that it was "pretty clear from this shot that SpaceX knows where we are going!"
