After a last-second automatic abort on the 16th, and a bad weather delay Thursday, SpaceX was able to launch its Starship/Superheavy vehicle successfully on Friday (24 July 2026). This was Flight 13, called by some “Lucky 13”, the second flight for the new version 3 vehicle, which is bigger, and uses a new, upgraded version of the rocket engines.
Unlike the previous test flight, nearly everything about this flight appeared
to work perfectly. Kudos to SpaceX for a
job very well done! Very well indeed!
The upper stage Starship vehicle flew perfectly, with all its engines working, and re-lighting just fine. It deployed some 20 examples of the latest
version Starlink satellites, performed
the in-space re-light of an engine (which proved not possible on the previous
Flight 12), re-entered the lower atmosphere
without any problems over the Indian Ocean near Australia, descended to low altitude, re-ignited its engines, made its flip to nose-up, and a very soft splashdown landing in the
sea.
It even survived toppling over into the water without
exploding! So, it might even be towed to Australia for
direct inspection, a real bonus for
evaluating the heat shield performance!
The Superheavy booster flew most of its intended flight plan
quite well, excepting the final
touchdown burn into the sea, just off
the SpaceX launch site near Brownsville,
Texas. The “hot staging” seemed
to work fine, with 3 of the 33 booster
engines keeping the propellants settled in free fall, inside the tanks during its flip-around, so that 13 engines could be ignited to perform
the boost-back burn.
This failed on Flight 12, due to multiple lost engines, but it worked just fine this time on “Lucky
13”. There was something wrong about
that Flight 12 flip-around maneuver,
which may have in some way induced those failures-to-ignite. It occurred in the wrong plane, for one thing, according to reports.
The coasting booster then arced over, back toward the launch site, and fell into the lower atmosphere, stabilized tail-first by its grid fins, toward a low altitude touch-down burn event. This last burn is where the trouble happened! Instead of igniting the intended 13 engines
to slow down its very supersonic speed,
a handful of engines failed to ignite!
The booster descended stably, but
did not decelerate adequately on too-few engines, and so it struck the sea at something still
near the speed of sound! That intended
soft booster splashdown was the only failed objective in this entire test
flight, as near as I can tell.
We did not see quite so many engine ignition failures in the
version 2 Starship/Superheavy test flights that happened before Flight 12 (which
was the very first version-3 flight).
Something is going on with version 3 that will have to be found and
fixed, before SpaceX can risk attempting
to catch the booster with the arms on the launch tower. They did that catch successfully more than once, with version 2 in the earlier flights. A truly spectacular thing to watch, too!
But a failure to decelerate to a slow hover would end up
destroying both the booster and the launch-and-catch tower! And right now, there is only one of those facilities in
existence that is compatible with the version 3 booster! They have to solve this engine ignition problem
with version 3, before they risk
attempting another booster catch.
The upper stage Starship is another story entirely, now after its complete success during “Lucky
13”, and near-complete success during
Flight 12! It would be a reasonable bet
that they might attempt a ship catch, on
the next flight. Musk himself even hints
at that, on social media. If they do
attempt this feat, that would be the
very first recovery of a Starship that has been into space at near-orbital
speeds. Such would be invaluable, both for heat shield evaluations and
improvements, and for eventually demonstrating
the readiness of this vehicle to actually do real orbital missions.
There will be tension within SpaceX over this. Some will want to see another Starship upper
stage water landing success, before
risking the catch facility. Others will
want to forge ahead as fast as possible.
That is normal. We will soon hear
what they decide to do next.
I wish them success,
especially since doing spaceflight successfully, really is a very, very hard thing for any outfit to do. And once again, kudos to SpaceX for a flight test that was
almost entirely successful!
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Note: this same article was submitted to the Waco “Tribune-Herald”
7-25-2026 as a possible column for the op-ed page. I am on their board of contributors.
Meanwhile, here are the search items for this article:
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