SpaceX Targets July 16 for Starship Flight 13, Reveals What Went Wrong on Previous Launch

SpaceX is targeting Thursday, July 16, for the launch of Starship Flight 13, with the company announcing the no-earlier-than date in a July 11 social media post following engine tests on both vehicle stages.

What Happened

The mission will mark the second flight of Starship Version 3 (V3), coming roughly two months after V3's debut on Flight 12. During that earlier launch, SpaceX traced Super Heavy's orientation anomaly to a sequence change in Ship's engines during hot staging, which caused a 90-degree error after stage separation. Five of Super Heavy's 33 Raptor 3 engines also failed to relight for the boostback burn. On the upper stage, one of Ship's three vacuum-optimized Raptors was lost 40 seconds after stage separation, though the vehicle still reached its suborbital trajectory and demonstrated engine-out capability; the loss prevented a planned in-space engine relight attempt. SpaceX traced that failure to interconnected causes. The company says it has introduced a modified startup sequence for Ship and hardware updates to Super Heavy to address both issues.

Why It Matters

Flight 13 carries significant new hardware beyond fixes—it will deploy the first functional Starlink V3 satellites to fly on Starship, with 20 spacecraft planned, six equipped with cameras to inspect heatshield tiles. Those satellites will burn up in Earth's atmosphere approximately 20 minutes after deployment due to Starship's suborbital trajectory. The mission also marks an attempt at an in-space Raptor engine relight and separate splashdown targets for each stage: the Gulf of Mexico for Super Heavy and the Indian Ocean for Ship. The FAA closed its Flight 12 mishap investigation on July 13, approving SpaceX's corrective actions and clearing the path for this launch.

The Bottom Line

Flight 13 serves as a validation exercise for V3 hardware improvements while expanding Starship's payload demonstration capabilities with functional Starlink V3 satellites, setting the stage for future operational missions using the upgraded vehicle configuration.