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Posted on 07/24/2026 6:12:44 PM PDT by aquila48
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. The upper stage of the rocket made a “soft splashdown” in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX 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.
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Because of this, SpaceX managed to get some incredible views of the heat tiles and how they endured the plasma phase of re-entry!
I’m sorry, but the vision of the future that Elon Musk has (and his commitment to make it happen) is, in a word, amazing.
You’re right.
Don’t apologize.
Amaze amaze amaze!
This was the most exciting, non-destructive rocket launch to date of the big rocket...
The floating rocket carcass was hugely delightful...
I was disappointed that they stopped the video after such a short time watching the floater...
Is it going to be recovered???
they should use the starships to launch the satellites into orbit but once they’re all deployed don’t bring them back. Putting them up there was the hard part... don’t waste it. park them in a geosync orbit.
then repeat.
stack them up as a temporary warehouse/storage location.
and have them join each other combining into a much larger craft to be used on the mars mission.
I bet the stock is popping tonight/tomorrow. I don’t own it unless the fund mgrs bought in.
Is the pilot’s name Zefram Cochrane?
Beautiful views of the earth.
That might also be a good place to have robots, tethered, controllable from the ground, so that it could perform any needed repairs both outside and inside the structures, and perhaps do experiments like they do on the space station.
Course in a few years the robots will gain autonomous status a d will likely fist fight each other when they delicate codes get insulted by another robot. There might even be a lot of jealousy where one robot thinks it isn’t getting the respect to its authoritaaay it thinks it deserve.
But yeah, robots could do the dangerous work on outside of structures, won’t need oxygen or protective suits etc. Gonna be a lot of uses for robots in near future. Might even populate the space stations with them and that way wouldn’t have to worry about the million dollar toilets malfunctioning again lol.
As of two hours ago...
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry!
12:09 AM · Jul 25, 2026 1.3M Views
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2080807557992443969
I don't understand this. What was the point of launching them, if they are to burn up after 20 minutes?
To test the satellite dispersal mechanism.
That thing left in a hurry, especially compared to the early ones.
I was momentarily disappointed when it didn’t go kaboom, but when I saw it float? Amazing!
Thx...😎
Thanks for the reply. It seems rather wasteful to me. Wouldn’t they use mock-ups rather than real satellites?
This was a deliberate developmental test on Starship Flight 13 (a suborbital trajectory), not an operational deployment intended to add lasting capacity to the constellation.The 20 Starlink V3 satellites were real next-generation hardware (not pure mass simulators). SpaceX used the flight to validate the “Pez dispenser” deployment system, solar-array and antenna extension, laser inter-satellite links with the existing constellation, communications performance, and related systems under actual flight conditions. Engineers confirmed contact with all 20 and successful laser communications. A subset also carried cameras pointed at Starship’s heat shield to gather thermal-protection data during the vehicle’s own reentry. After roughly 20 minutes the satellites followed the planned suborbital path, reentered, and burned up over the Indian Ocean, as intended.
This approach is standard aerospace practice: expend limited numbers of flight articles early to obtain high-fidelity data on deployment mechanics, thermal/vacuum behavior, power systems, and communications in the real environment. Ground testing and simulation cannot fully replicate those conditions. The data reduce risk and accelerate the transition to routine, high-capacity V3 deployments that will deliver substantially higher throughput (on the order of 1 terabit per second class performance per satellite) and support expanded services.
In short, the brief flight life was the planned cost of validating new satellite hardware and the Starship deployment system under flight conditions.
Need to test comms between the satellites and the network while in flight.
can’t test a real sat with a mock up. These’s a silver lining to the short duration. If anything had gone wrong, no space junk in low orbit.
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