The honest verdict: Super Heavy’s return failed. Starship’s performance was extraordinary.
SpaceX’s 13th integrated Starship flight test—and only the second flight of the Version 3 vehicle—did not end with a perfect score. The Super Heavy booster came back toward the Gulf of Mexico, but too few engines relit for its landing burn. It hit the water with far more speed than planned.
But everything that happened above it made this one of the most important—and most visually astonishing—Starship flights yet.
Starship launched cleanly from Starbase, carried 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites into space, deployed all 20 through its side payload system, successfully relit a Raptor engine in space, survived atmospheric reentry, and lowered itself into the Indian Ocean so gently that it remained floating after splashdown.
There was no giant explosion at the end. No abrupt loss of the vehicle. Just a stainless-steel spacecraft sitting in the ocean after an hour-long journey across the planet.
For a rocket program defined as much by spectacular failures as spectacular ambition, that was a remarkable sight.
Watch the launch: SpaceX’s official Flight 13 broadcast on X or open the official Flight 13 mission page.
The embedded replay is a Space.com simulcast of SpaceX’s mission coverage.
First, one timing correction
Coverage began at roughly 6:15 p.m. Eastern on July 24. Liftoff itself occurred at 6:51 p.m. EDT, or 5:51 p.m. local time at Starbase in South Texas.
That distinction matters because this was more than another launch broadcast. Once all 33 Raptor engines came alive, Flight 13 began checking off milestones that move Starship closer to becoming an operational launch system.
Thirty-three engines—and a clean climb out of Texas
The launch was a reminder that it is difficult to communicate the scale of Starship through specifications alone.
The full vehicle stands roughly 407 feet tall. At liftoff, Super Heavy’s 33 engines turned the base of the rocket into a concentrated wall of light, sound, steam, and exhaust. The video looked enormous. The audio made it feel even bigger.
This clean departure was especially meaningful after SpaceX’s first Flight 13 attempt was automatically aborted at the final moment on July 16 when multiple booster engines did not ignite as planned. SpaceX inspected the vehicle, replaced engines, conducted more testing, and returned to the pad.
On Friday evening, all 33 engines fired and Starship climbed away. After hot-stage separation, all six engines on the Version 3 ship continued burning for roughly eight minutes to second-engine cutoff.
Super Heavy flipped and completed its boostback burn—a meaningful improvement over Flight 12, which ran into trouble during its own return sequence.
Then the flight divided into two very different stories.
The booster came back—but it did not stick the landing
Super Heavy was supposed to perform a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. This was not a tower-catch attempt, and SpaceX never intended to recover the booster. The goal was to prove the return profile and bring it down softly over water.
That did not happen.
The booster descended toward its target, but not enough of the planned engines relit for the landing burn. It struck the Gulf at high speed.
Calling that portion of the test successful would be dishonest. SpaceX still has a booster relight and landing-burn reliability problem to solve, and it is an important one. Rapid reusability depends on bringing Super Heavy back predictably—not merely getting it close to the landing zone.
Still, the booster completed launch, separation, its flip, and boostback before the failed landing phase. That gave SpaceX more useful data than a failure earlier in flight would have provided.
The fairest assessment is straightforward: the booster’s ascent and return setup improved, but its landing failed.
Then Starship became a real satellite deployer
The upper stage kept going—and this is where Flight 13 became historic.
Starship carried 20 Starlink V3 satellites to space and deployed every one of them through the vehicle’s side payload slot, a mechanism often compared to a giant Pez dispenser.
This was not the first time Starship had pushed objects through that door. Earlier tests used Starlink mass simulators. Flight 13 was different: these were the first real Starlink V3 spacecraft carried and deployed by Starship.
The distinction is huge.
Starship has always been presented as a vehicle that could eventually place enormous quantities of hardware into orbit. On Flight 13, it finally behaved like an actual satellite launcher rather than only a flying development vehicle.
The scale of the planned system is enormous. SpaceX says this Version 3 ship can eventually deploy up to 60 V3 satellites. Each spacecraft is designed to provide as much as one terabit per second of downlink capacity, and a full Starship V3 launch is expected to add roughly 20 times the constellation capacity of a Falcon 9 carrying V2 satellites.
For Flight 13, the Starlink team had only a short test window. The satellites were expected to extend solar arrays and antennas, activate communications, connect with ground stations, and attempt links with the existing constellation before reentry. Six carried modified engineering cameras intended to look back at Starship and scan its heat shield before the ship began its return.
These satellites were placed on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship. They were not left in permanent orbit; the plan called for them to reenter and burn up roughly 20 minutes after deployment. Flight 13 was a deployment and communications test, not an operational constellation launch.
Even with that limitation, watching satellite after satellite emerge into orbital darkness was one of the clearest demonstrations yet of what Starship could become. The ship itself was nearly invisible, but its illuminated interior made the narrow Pez-style payload opening appear as a sliver of light while the V3 spacecraft moved away.
A Raptor restarted in space
After deployment, Starship successfully relit one of its Raptor engines while coasting through space.
It was a brief test with enormous implications.
An operational spacecraft must be able to start its engines away from the launch pad. Starship will need reliable in-space ignition to adjust or leave orbit, perform controlled deorbit burns, support propellant-transfer missions, and eventually operate around the Moon or Mars.
Flight 13 demonstrated that capability while the vehicle was actually in flight.
It was not as visually dramatic as liftoff or splashdown, but technically it may prove to be one of the mission’s most valuable achievements.
The best Starship reentry footage yet
Then came the part of the broadcast that felt almost unreal.
Starship began reentry while continuing to send back live video and telemetry through the Starlink network. The broadcast team said the ship could move roughly 240 megabits per second—an extraordinary data rate for an experimental spacecraft carrying dozens of cameras and real-time system telemetry. Plasma wrapped around the vehicle, and the heat shield endured peak heating and reentry’s maximum aerodynamic pressure.
The result was not simply useful engineering footage. It was some of the most compelling live spaceflight video SpaceX has produced.
The combination of onboard views, external cameras, uninterrupted data, and the mission-control audio made the final minutes feel unusually immediate. Viewers were not waiting for a delayed animation or a later recovery image. They were watching the vehicle fight its way through the atmosphere in real time.
That matters because the heat shield remains one of the biggest technical barriers between Starship’s current test program and a rapidly reusable spacecraft. SpaceX deliberately varied some tiles and instrumented the shield to learn how it behaved under greater stress.
Flight 13 delivered the data—and then delivered the vehicle to the ocean intact.
No explosion. Just Starship floating in the Indian Ocean
Ship 40 passed through peak heating, performed its landing flip, slowed under engine power, and descended vertically toward the Indian Ocean west of Australia.
It touched the water softly.
Then it tipped over and floated.
That quiet ending was almost more striking than an explosion would have been. Starship test flights have trained viewers to expect fireballs, breakups, lost telemetry, or a vehicle exploding as it meets the ocean. Flight 13 ended with the spacecraft visibly intact and bobbing in the water.
SpaceX described it as the program’s softest Starship splashdown so far. That assessment matches what the broadcast showed.
It was not recovery, reuse, or a return to the launch tower. But it was a major demonstration of control from liftoff through reentry and landing.
Why Flight 13 matters
Starship did not reach orbit on this flight, and neither stage was meant to be recovered. The booster missed its soft-splashdown objective. Those limitations should not be glossed over.
But the upper stage completed a sequence that looked much closer to the work expected from an operational spacecraft:
- It launched cleanly on top of the world’s most powerful rocket.
- It deployed 20 real next-generation communications satellites.
- It supported rapid satellite communications, deployment, and external heat-shield imaging tests.
- It relit a Raptor engine in space.
- It survived peak reentry heating.
- It maintained spectacular live video through much of the descent.
- It completed a controlled ocean landing without exploding.
The practical shift is simple: Starship is no longer demonstrating only that it can fly. It is beginning to demonstrate that it can do useful work while it flies.
That is the transition SpaceX needs before Starship can carry operational payloads to orbit, launch larger groups of Starlink satellites, support NASA’s lunar plans, or begin proving the refuelling and reuse architecture behind its longer-term ambitions.
The honest review
Flight 13 was not flawless, and calling it flawless would undersell the engineering work still ahead.
Super Heavy failed its landing objective. SpaceX needs to understand why the expected landing engines did not relight and prove that the booster can repeat a controlled return reliably. Starship still needs to reach a stable orbit, deorbit safely, return to land, and eventually fly again.
But the Starship upper stage was exceptional.
It deployed real satellites for the first time. It restarted an engine in space. It produced breathtaking live imagery through reentry. And it finished by settling into the ocean so gently that the final image was not wreckage or a fireball—it was the ship floating.
Flight 13 showed both sides of SpaceX’s development philosophy in a single mission: one stage can fail an important objective while the other takes a giant step forward.
The booster gave SpaceX another problem to solve.
Starship gave everyone watching a glimpse of the future.
