Flight 13 is the 13th test launch overall of the Starship megarocket and the second flight this year, following the May 22 launch of Flight 12. It will also be the second flight of SpaceX’s new Starship Version 3, or V3. The vehicle stands more than 400 feet tall and is being designed as a fully reusable rocket capable of launching missions to the moon, Mars or beyond.<\/p>\n
The suborbital test will last just over 1 hour and 5 minutes and follow the same mission profile as Flight 12. SpaceX has a 90-minute launch window running from 6:45 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. EDT, with at least one backup day available on July 17. The company will begin its launch webcast 30 minutes before liftoff via its X account and the official Flight 13 mission page.<\/p>\n
During Flight 12, the Super Heavy booster failed to return for a controlled landing and splashdown, instead crashing into the ocean. SpaceX said it has made changes for Flight 13. “The booster’s primary test objective will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America,” the company wrote in a mission overview. “There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight.”<\/p>\n
Flight 13 will launch from SpaceX’s new Pad 2 at Starbase, which the company upgraded with shorter, faster capture arms known as chopsticks. Those arms are designed to catch returning Super Heavy boosters and Ship upper stages during landing, and to lift vehicles into place on the pad for launch. NASA has selected Starship to land its Artemis IV astronauts on the moon by 2028, and SpaceX has sold at least one Starship passenger flight to Mars.<\/p>\n
Deploying the first V3 Starlink satellites would move Starship from a test vehicle to an operational one, the milestone SpaceX has been working toward. Using the rocket to carry revenue-generating cargo signals the company is confident enough in the vehicle to trust it with an operational payload, and represents the clearest sign yet that Starship is on a path to replacing Falcon 9 for at least some commercial missions.<\/p>\n
The immediate test is whether Flight 13 can deploy the V3 Starlinks and execute a controlled booster landing burn after the Flight 12 failure. Should the launch slip, SpaceX has July 17 available as a backup, with the same 6:45 p.m. EDT target and 90-minute window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Flight 13 is the 13th test launch overall of the Starship megarocket and the second flight this year, following the May 22 launch of Flight 12. It will also be the second flight of SpaceX’s new Starship Version 3, or V3. The vehicle stands more than 400 feet tall and is being designed as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32592,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[316,440,317],"class_list":["post-31912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-spacex","tag-starlink","tag-starship"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31912"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31912"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32593,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31912\/revisions\/32593"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}