Posted on 07/26/2026 10:13:09 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Two months ago, version 3 Starship left us with more questions than answers. A booster that couldn't stick its return. A ship down an engine. And a whole community asking the same thing: is this new design actually the one? On Thursday, SpaceX flew it again. Here's what happened!
Massive Reveal From SpaceX's Starship Flight 13! | 25:52
What about it!? | 657K subscribers | 57,710 views | July 26, 2026
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
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YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Published 12 hours ago on July 25, 2026
By Joey Klender
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-catch-starship-launch-14-elon-musk/
Starship Flight 13 is the second flight of the V3 Starship, Superheavy and of course the V3 Raptor Engines. Flight 12 had both the Ship and booster affected by engine issues, and flight 13 was scrubbed after its first attempt due to engines not lighting on the pad.
After destacking and replacing a couple of engines they returned to the pad a week later and had a much more successful flight, and miraculously the Starship didn't explode. Starship was always expected to explode after touchdown in the ocean because when something this tall falls over it creates forces that are incompatible with the tanks structure. Somehow it survived.Starship Flight 13 - Where's The Kaboom? | 24:31
Scott Manley | 1.87M subscribers | 299,827 views | July 25, 2026
We’ve seen them catch the booster phase of Starship, if they can also catch the upper stage of Starship, it opens up full reusability and dramatically lowers the cost of putting objects into orbit.
They’re on a roll. It’s easy to forget that getting reliable with landing the Falcon 9 wasn’t an overnight thing.
I wonder what the math would be when calculating the cost, size, and weight of the fuel required to catch it.
Probably trivial when compared to the cost of building an entirely new spacecraft. Reusability injects a huge economy into the equation of cost.
Yep, it reminds me of the “dancing bear” analogy. Some, watching the bear dance, think “he doesn’t dance perfectly”. But others think “It’s amazing that he can dance at all”.
Just add a landing gear and wheels. Job done.
And then you would have? A Space Shuttle?
Uncle. What was the reveal?
'Massive Surprises From Starship Flight 13!'
There's also an outline of Space-X's activities and progress made by a rival Indian company.
So glad to see all this happening after it seemed certain that space exploration was given up on.
“I wonder what the math would be when calculating the cost, size, and weight of the fuel required to catch it.”
They have been catching boosters for years. I think they know the math.
Not like Musk catches them where they land on a bath or caught on a tower.
Detailed Summary of "Massive Reveal From SpaceX's Starship Flight 13!" (YouTube video by What About It!?, Felix Schlang)
This video provides an in-depth recap and analysis of Starship Integrated Flight Test 13 (IFT-13), the second flight of the Version 3 (V3) Starship design. It occurred on July 24, 2026 (after a scrub on the 23rd), roughly five weeks after Flight 12. The host, Felix Schlang, breaks down preparations, the launch attempt, outcomes, technical insights, and implications for SpaceX's rapid reusability goals.
Key Background and Preparations“Not like Musk catches them where they land on a bath or caught on a tower.”
Just like Musk catches them.
This is the same company.
Transcript
Two months ago, version three Starship left us with more questions than answers. A booster that couldn’t stick its return, a ship down an engine, and a whole community asking the same thing. Is this new design actually the one? On Thursday, SpaceX flew again. Here’s what happened.
My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It? Let’s dive right in. Starship updates. What a time to be alive.
Starship flight 13 has happened and there’s a lot we can analyze and take away from this second version 3 Starship flight. Is version 3 the solution SpaceX has been hoping for? Is SpaceX able to fulfill all its goals moving forward? Or are we looking at yet another year of hard work and slow progress? Let’s take a look together. It all started with a full 33 engine static fire for booster 20 on July 10th. It lasted for a full 24 ground-shaking seconds, the longest test for a super heavy booster ever. The following night, crews got to work on the chopsticks, going after an actuator that hadn’t performed as intended. That work wrapped up the next day with the actuator replaced, and the path to a full stack was clear. And with every preparation made, it was finally time to fly once again. On Thursday, July 16th, SpaceX and the entirety of Starbase were ready for Starship’s 13th test flight. The second outing for the new and massively different V3 generation.
Flight 12 hadn’t managed to tick off every item on its mission plan. And now it was time to try to prove once more that V3 was fully operational. As we started our live stream, the tank farm had already come to life, prepping for the fuel transfer into both Starship stages. Uh, we have flight 13 today. It is absolutely incredible that we’re talking about this what, 5 weeks after the last launch. Those preparations get the pipes and valves ready for the volumes of super cooled pressurized liquid that rush through the system as fueling begins.
The fuel transfer speed on these vehicles is still worth mentioning again. Both stages fully fueled in under 1 hour. In fact, just 37 minutes, seconds and 30 seconds, which is even quicker than the flight 12 timeline. SpaceX is improving with every test and that speed isn’t a luxury. Truly rapid reusability depends on it. As mentioned in the last episode, pad 2, according to SpaceX, is designed to be used continuously every 60 minutes, seconds. It’s all already in the design and in active testing, even if launches aren’t rapid yet.
Here’s another detail that lines up with the goal of making launches as routine as airliners take off. The flight director runs the first major pull, the one that clears the vehicle for propellant load inside the final hour before launch, roughly 50 minutes before t-minus 0. SLS, in contrast, does the fueling pull 10 hours and 50 minutes, seconds before flight, a full 10 hours earlier. There is the different philosophy in plain sight. And if you’re saying that that’s because it’s an older design or because it’s not reusable, think again. New Glenn starts fueling around 4 hours before launch. Even though Starship has a three to four times larger fuel capacity, here is a quick mind-blower. Starship has a combined fuel capacity of 5,250 tons according to SpaceX’s official numbers.
Now, fuel flow isn’t uniform during the tanking process, but for simplicity, let’s just assume it is. Considering the 37 minutes, seconds and 30 seconds, we’d end up with an average fuel flow of 2,333 kg per second or a staggering 140 tons per minute of propellant flowing into the full stack. 140 tons per minute. The reason again is rapid reuse. It’s already in the design even if flights are not rapid yet. In space flight, you almost never trust a single instrument. Critical systems get backed up and the smart move is always to compare your sources before you commit to anything.
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Back to Starship and flight 13. But not everything was ready for a flight. SpaceX proceeded through fueling with blistering speed. Everything looked excellent. Then came the ignition and roughly one or two seconds in, the booster pulled the brake. Hard stop aboard after ignition. During the actual launch on July 24th, we got the real reason. Ice had built up inside the engines, likely caused by the static fire just a day before.
So, four of Superheavy’s 33 Raptor engines aborted at startup due to issues with their ox turbo pumps. Those rapidly pressurize and feed liquid oxygen into the engine for combustion. For those of you that like to pay real close attention to the onscreen telemetry, you saw this at T0 during that first attempt. We dug through the data and what we saw was some off-nominal spin response in the ox turbo pumps on six of the engines. So the most likely root cause was determined we were collecting some moisture inside of the pumps from previous operations which then froze when we introduced that cryogenic propellant and that either slowed those pumps down or stopped them completely from spinning. That ice caused two engines to not ignite and that’s an abort criterion.
Losing two engines during the initial ignition means there is no safety margin anymore. It’s just too risky. Even if the rocket could make it, that’s why the onboard computers decided to cancel the launch. SpaceX rolled the booster back to Mega Bay 2 and the ship to Mega Bay 1. Engines were replaced as it looks more than just those two. A fastboard can cause damage to engines. Pressure spikes and cavitation are the biggest problems here. After having the engines replaced, SpaceX dodged bad weather on the 23rd. The reason for the scrub on Thursday, SpaceX was planning to image the Starship from the ground while it was going through a faster than usual Max Q to test the heat shield even further. If you have solid cloud coverage, imaging the rocket from the ground is simply impossible during Max Q. So, they moved the flight to the 24th. And Friday, Friday was that day.
All was ready for the big show. Roughly 50 minutes, seconds before launch, SpaceX went through the fueling pole. All looked good. When the frost lines appeared, we had visual confirmation that cryogenic oxygen was rushing in. 30 seconds later, the booster’s oxygen tank followed. One of the biggest upgrades on the V3 booster is the key to this faster tanking. There are now two quick disconnects at the bottom, one for liquid oxygen, one for methane. That lets oxygen and methane load as separate operations. And so methane loading started less than a minute later. At t-minus 40 minutes, ship 40’s methane tank was the last to join in. Now every tank was filling at once, 140 tons per minute.
Before you start a Raptor engine, you have to make sure it’s ready. And that means pre-chilling it so the engine’s material can survive the flood of super cooled high pressure liquid to come. All 33 Raptors on the booster and six on the ship began that treatment at T-minus 21 minutes, seconds. When the booster loading procedure wrapped up, there were 2 minutes, seconds and 50 seconds left on the countdown. 40 seconds later, within the same minute, the same was true for the ship. With the vehicle fully fueled, the countdown ran down toward the 30 second mark. That’s the point where the countdown stops for one final check of every system involved in the launch and the flight.
Our primary test objectives for today’s test flight include a successful liftoff, stage separation. Uh, we also plan to deploy 20 Starlink V3 satellites. We have real satellites on board. We expect to have about 20 minutes of available time to speedrun some tests and really allow the Starlink engineers to put them to the test in that time.
A series of polls runs in the background and only once everything comes back go does the flight director speak the words we’d all been waiting for. Prop load now closing out on both vehicles. We have no holds on the board.
All right, we are through the gate. Still no holds on the board. 50 seconds to go. Starship getting ready to fly. Go for launch. At t-minus 17 seconds, the flame diverter deluge system came to life, flooding the trench with water to soften the shock waves of the engines. 650,000 gallons or 2.4 million L of water per minute.
3 seconds before liftoff, the booster’s engines received their startup command. Two, one. And that was it. No way back. The only way from here is up. Booster 20’s 33 brand new Raptor 3 engines lit, hitting the flame diverter with a combined thrust of 8,240 tons. We’ve seen this trench work before on static fires and on flight 12, but I still can’t get enough of this. I’m glad that SpaceX had the pad 1 launch stool design ready fast, and I’m equally glad that it’s gone now. Booster 20 with ship 40 on top jumped off the launch table and started its climb into the Texan sky. The speed it builds is hard to overstate. Starship, even though it’s the largest rocket ever, clears the tower surprisingly fast now that SpaceX has reached version three.
Here’s a small comparison to bring this into perspective. Starship has a thrust-to-weight ratio of around 1.35. New Glenn sits at roughly 1.3. SLS is slightly higher at around 1.45, and Falcon 9 is the Roadrunner at 1.7. The higher the number, the faster it accelerates. Throughout development, SpaceX was able to considerably ramp this number up from 1.25 on version 1, which took noticeably longer to clear the tower. Version two hovered around 1.3, just like on flight 12. Clearing the tower meant pad 2 was done for the day. Once again, there were no plans to bring either stage home. Yes, we still have to wait for a ship catch, but this flight was the missing piece of the puzzle that had to be set in place first. One more clean run to prove the new design before the program can push onto its next milestones.
Since the first sign of trouble on flight 12 was the loss of a booster engine, our eyes were on the engine diagram as the mission climbed. At the 52 mark, you can see something ripping off the right aft flap. I don’t think that’s ice. It might be the heat tiles on the underside of the flaps. That’s why they went through this tougher Max Q to test the tiles under a higher aerodynamic load. Less than a minute in, Starship reached max Q, the moment of peak aerodynamic stress on the whole journey. And this rocket is quick, just 58 seconds to max Q.
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Flight 13 had one important addition for SpaceX. The heat shield carried load sensing tiles that record the force the ship experiences. Why now? After 12 previous flights, because this time the vehicle was deliberately flown through higher dynamic pressure on ascent than any Starship before it, putting extra stress on the tiles and their attachments. If that approach holds up, it opens the door to carrying more payload to orbit. The less you slow down during Max Q, the less energy you waste.
There’s one thing to highlight during the ascent. One of the center engines on booster 20 had a pretty spectacular hiccup. It’s not visible in the live stream, but NSF’s cameras captured it, and we took pictures of it. Thank you, Amy. This might just be a temporary thing, but it is worth noting. Starship kept accelerating on its way up, heading for the next milestone a bit over a minute later. Mo, it arrived right on cue. At 2 minutes and 18 seconds into the mission, most of the super heavy booster engines shut down. That is a Starship specialty. Normally, Miko stands for main engine cutoff. On this rocket, it is most engines cut off. The difference comes down to hot staging.
Most rockets separate like this: shut down the first stage, split the stages with mechanical or pyrotechnic systems, and only then light the second stage. Starship hot staging holds on to more of the thrust already invested in reaching separation altitude. The first stage keeps some engines running while the upper stage lights its own and leaps off the booster. Think of a cheerleader pushing off the hands, lifting her at the same moment they lift her. Two motions in one direction combining into a single push. Just 3 seconds after Mo, at 2 minutes and 21 seconds, hot staging began. Ship 40’s Raptors lit and pushed the upper stage off the top of the booster. Exhaust streamed through the fixed strut structure of the V3 hot staging hardware we got to know last flight.
And now came the part we’d all been waiting for. Because if you watched flight 12, you’ll remember exactly where booster 19 got into trouble. Last time, slight differences in how the ship’s engines started up through the booster’s directional flip off by roughly 90°. Then, during the boost back burn, five of its 33 engines refused to relight cleanly, cutting the burn short and ending the booster’s day with a hard splashdown. SpaceX went to work on both. The startup sequence was reworked to be far more robust to timing variability.
So, the booster flips the way it’s supposed to, and the engines got hardware modifications to improve relight reliability with the engine alarms and aborts retuned to match what the vehicle actually sees in a multi-engine environment. So, SpaceX did its homework. It was now time to put it to a test. Jordan was in the heli again during launch, something you can do, too. These aerial images are essential for my reporting. If you are down at Starbase, make sure to pay our official partner, SPI Helicopters, a visit and book a flight. The same views our photographers get. It is unforgettable and worth every penny. Click the card or the link in the description. Help. Why?
In return, check it out today. At 2 minutes and 25 seconds, the booster executed its flip and lit its engines for the boost back burn. This time, the flip was clean, and the engines came alive exactly as intended. The burn ran its full course and shut down at roughly 3 minutes. Just what we wanted to see, and the best was still to come. Booster 20 settled into its long coast back toward the Texas coast. That’s the point at which things went south for booster 20 this time. Everything up to this point was perfect. You can see the booster gliding through the atmosphere, guided by its three grid fins. The landing burn started at 6 minutes and 25 seconds. The ignition pattern was erratic. Usually, the pattern starts with 13 engines, then five in a symmetrical pattern, then three. But as you can see, the booster had trouble igniting all 13.
Five of 13 didn’t light. Then it wanted to go down to five and already started compensating by leaving other engines on to replace the faulty ones. It did try hard, but it wasn’t enough. We got a spectacular onboard view of the booster making it into the exclusion zone, but too fast for a soft splashdown. It hit the water hard. Something in there didn’t work the right way. Maybe SpaceX will give us an official statement later. We’ll have to wait and see. This unfortunately was the end of booster 20. It was never meant to be caught by Macazilla’s chopsticks, and it went into the water offshore. Not because it couldn’t have been caught, but because it’s a different design from the one they already caught, and it still needs to show that it’s as good and reliable. But the booster was only half the story.
Now it was ship 40’s turn, and this second V3 upper stage still had a lot to prove. At 8 minutes, the ship shut down its engines on schedule. And that timing matters because last flight, the ship lost one of its three vacuum optimized Raptors about 40 seconds after separation. It still reached its trajectory on engine cutout capability, but now the latest upgrades were on trial. Several hardware and operational changes went into the propulsion system to address the cause behind that engine out on ship 39. This time, all engines carried the ship through to a clean cutoff on the planned suborbital trajectory. No drama in the engine bay.
As with every Starship flight so far, the ship wasn’t aiming for a stable orbit. It rode a ballistic trajectory that would bring it back into the atmosphere on its own. And here’s the common misconception again. That is a safety measure, not an inability to reach orbit. SpaceX could keep burning and put the ship in orbit if they wanted to. The suborbital course simply guarantees that whatever happens during the mission, the vehicle comes down in the Indian Ocean, far from any inhabited land.
Next up were the secret stars of the show. Get it? At roughly 16 minutes, the payload deploy demo began. And this was a first. For the very first time, Starship carried V3 Starlink satellites to space. Real satellites, not the dummy simulators we’d seen on previous deployment demos. And these aren’t the Starlink satellites already beaming data to a dish on your roof. This is a new generation built to expand the network’s capacity and the speeds users get. For this initial test, the plan called for 20 of them to deploy, extend their solar arrays and antennas, and try to link up with the wider Starlink constellations through high-capacity lasers. Pew pew.
You know, this is a preview of what we’ll be seeing a lot of soon because this is the first everyday job waiting for Starship once it’s fully operational, taking over Starlink duty from its older sister, Falcon 9. And that’s not a small change. Starship lets SpaceX deploy bigger satellites on a bigger scale. The move from Falcon 9 to Starship will be as pivotal as the move from expandable rockets to Falcon 9 was in the first place. The satellites on this mission had a short life ahead of them. Though they rode the same suborbital trajectory as the ship, so they were never meant to stay up. They were expected to demise on re-entry roughly 20 minutes, seconds after deployment. And again, SpaceX made a few of them special. Six of the 20 were fitted with cameras to scan ship 40’s heat shield and beam the imagery down to operators.
It’s part of deploying a reliable way to check heat shield readiness before committing a ship to a return to the launch site to give those cameras something to measure against several tiles on the ship had been painted white, standing in for missing tiles and serving as clean imaging targets. This inspection step will almost certainly become standard on future flights, at least for now. The reason is clear once you remember that a returning ship’s path takes it across the continental United States on the way home to Texas. Better safe than sorry. A Starship coming down over an inhabited area is the last thing anyone wants. Right on plan, the deployment wrapped up at 27 minutes, seconds. Then at t plus 38 minutes, ship 40 performed its in-space Raptor relight demo, relighting a single engine in the vacuum of space. Another item of the list. Flight 12 skipped this test. Flight 13 completed it. Just under 9 minutes, seconds later, the final phase began.
Barbecue Time
At around 47 minutes, ship 40 hit the upper atmosphere for re-entry. The part of the flight that’s reliably given us some of the best views in spaceflight. Plasma began wrapping around the hull and the aerodynamic surfaces as the ship pushed into ever denser air. Now it was time for the heat shield to prove once again that it could take the punishment. And like on previous flights, SpaceX packed this final act with things to learn. Test tiles were attached to the metallic side of the aft flaps, most likely to compare attachment methods. The aft skirt carried special tiles too, some modified, some using different attachment mechanisms. The point is to gather data on which options hold up best.
At 1 hour and 2 minutes, the ship went transsonic in the upper atmosphere, decelerating hard as it dropped into thickening air. Less than 40 seconds later, at 1 hour and 3 minutes, it had slowed to subsonic speed, closing in on the Indian Ocean under control. This is the genuinely hard part of full reuse. All that speed has to be bled off and the shield has to protect the ship from every bit of heat generated by that deceleration. That is what makes Starship’s upper stage so much harder to develop than any other rocket’s upper stage. The goal is to come back to base intact, ready to fly again after a quick inspection within hours of landing. Now moving slower than sound, ship 40 reached the final act. At 1 hour and 5 minutes, the landing burn started. Two seconds later, the ship snapped into its landing flip. A move that still looks a little surreal. This ship has an estimated dry weight of about 130 tons and is flung around in the air like a toy. But as they say, true mastery is making the difficult look easy.
The burns throttled down from three engines to two and then to one. And then came the SpaceX thing. You know, these moments when jaws drop, the stuff you don’t get to see anywhere else. Ship 40 did a soft splashdown, and soft isn’t cutting it. Usually, ships explode when they fall over onto the ocean. Ship 40 came down so softly, it just gently slid over, and it was still intact. SpaceX’s recovery crew did an incredible job reacting extremely fast. The drone moved over the ship, and for the first time in the Starship program, we saw a heat shield in such incredible detail, it blew all our minds. This heat shield looked very good. A few tiles missing on the engine skirt edge. A few cracked tiles here and there. The tiles under the aft flaps were largely missing as well. But as you can see, the hull was not damaged at all.
Starship turned into Star Boat. It was still transmitting telemetry and video. Everything survived intact. Those images went around the globe. Some titled that Musk’s Starship miserably drowned or something along those lines. Others that this is the beginning of a new era for space flight. You decide which one you go with. I am going with the latter. SpaceX gave us the views to match. Something that was all but impossible just a few years ago. At a glance, flight 13 was what we’d hoped for.
The booster flew up and back down except for a troubled landing burn. The ship kept all six Raptors through to cutoff and completed the relight in space and the heat shield held again. No burn-through as in the past. Only a few tiles cracked or were missing. It survived exceptionally well. Flight 13 answered the biggest questions Flight 12 left open. V3 is ready for the next step. And this is where it gets interesting again.
Next Steps
Now comes the series of firsts on the road to the moon. Ship catching is next, proving full reusability the next time a ship flies. We’ve seen SpaceX pull this off with the booster already, but watching a ship come home will be something else. The big news came right after the flight. It’s already confirmed by Musk. Unless they discover problems after mission data review, SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight. That next flight is likely in August, next month. Oh boy, I’ll need CPR after that. And after that, orbital refueling. And then onto the big one, HLS. The human lander variant is slated to bring people back to the moon just 2 years from now. Excitement is guaranteed and I’m here with you for every step of this journey. And that’s it for today.
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Thx, I streamed that one as well.
Thanks for the summary. I have a couple hours now to watch the SpaceX replay feed.
A ship catch, maybe next time. The booster? It came back better but still not good enough.
Well put! And it went very well.
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