SpaceX launched a large Starship rocket on the first test flight since the IPO
The SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy v3 Booster take off on its 13th test flight from the SpaceX launch pad at Starbase, Texas, US, on July 24, 2026.
Steve Nesius Reuters
SpaceX launched its largest Starship rocket Friday evening at its company’s hometown and launch site at Starbase, Texas, with its 13th test flight and the first since the company’s record IPO last month.
The rocket’s Super Heavy booster came off the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight, and made a controlled explosion in the Gulf. The rocket’s upper stage made a “soft splashdown” in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX employees called the test flight “lucky number 13,” in a live broadcast of the event.
Elon Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor designed the Starship, the largest rocket ever built or flown, to be fully reusable and lift large payloads at low cost into orbit. Starship is considered essential to the company’s mission to significantly expand its Starlink satellite network, among other missions.
About 18 minutes into Friday’s test flight, SpaceX successfully sent its new Starlink V3 satellites into orbit, the company’s first chance to see how it performed in flight. The satellites were intended to burn up after about 20 minutes.
The new satellites, manufactured at SpaceX’s facility in Redmond, Washington, are designed to be larger, and more powerful than previous Starlink satellites. They are also equipped with solar arrays that produce twice as much energy as the previous generation, a SpaceX business analyst explained on live radio.
SpaceX is now developing the Starmind satellites, which the company aims to launch and eventually use as orbital data centers.
Besides using their big rockets to launch new, larger satellites, SpaceX wants to use the Starship rocket to return US astronauts to the lunar surface, and eventually power missions to Mars. The company is preparing Starship for NASA’s largest test flight next year.
Friday’s test flight marked the second of the Starship V3, the latest version of the rocket.
TMF Associates’ Tim Farrar, an expert on the satellite services industry, said the test flight showed that SpaceX has made some progress with Starship but “is still far from achieving rapid reusability of the entire ship.” He pointed out the problems with SpaceX restarting its Raptor engines on Friday. “Any similar failure while trying to land on the company’s launch site can cause serious damage to the launch site,” he said.
In a post to X, which is owned by SpaceX, the company said it had delayed an earlier test flight scheduled for Thursday “due to weather.” It previously also cleaned the test flight on July 16, after the rocket booster seized, “which shut down the engines as they started to fire,” a SpaceX employee said during an earlier event.
SpaceX stock has fallen in four of the past five weeks, down 43% from its peak on June 16.
WATCH: SpaceX falls below IPO prices
