The first launch attempt for SpaceX’s 13th flight of its Starship megarocket has ended before it truly began. Automated safety features suspended the launch at T–0 minutes, at about 6:45 P.M. EDT, just as Starship’s first-stage Super Heavy V3 booster began to fire its Raptor engines. The abort left Starship upright and intact on Pad 2 of SpaceX’s Starbase launch complex in Texas as SpaceX personnel began the process of off-loading propellant from the vehicle.
“We got all the way down to start-up, triggered a hold on the booster, and that shut down the engines right as they were starting to ignite,” said SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot during the company’s livestream of the launch attempt. “No Starship launch today. We’ll dig in with the teams and figure out when our next attempt is going to be.”
In subsequent social media posts, SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk said the abort occurred because some of the rocket’s engines had not started as planned. Two Raptor engines would be removed and replaced “to be confident of a good flight,” he said, with the next launch attempt most likely occurring early next week.
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This flight was meant to follow much the same profile as its predecessor, Flight 12, sending Starship into space but not into orbit. (Flight 12 also started with an initial scrub.) For Flight 13, after separating from Starship high above Earth, the Super Heavy V3 would fly back to perform a pinpoint splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico—a landing that the booster failed to stick during Flight 12.
Meanwhile Starship would continue on its suborbital trajectory, deploying a payload of 20 Starlink V3 satellites once it was in space. The satellites would only survive about 20 minutes before they would ultimately plunge to their fiery doom as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere. That would be enough time, however, for some of them to capture images of Starship’s heat shield and then transmit those images to mission controllers on the ground via SpaceX’s Starlink network.
This flight’s Starship itself is also a “V3” and features a host of design improvements over its two previous iterations; Flight 12 was the first test flight of Starship V3. After deploying its Starlink satellites, Flight 13’s Starship would then attempt something that was originally intended for Flight 12: reigniting one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn. That feat had been called off for Flight 12 because of a premature shutdown of one of the Raptor engines.
Whenever it actually launches, Flight 13 is planned to end about an hour after lift-off, with Starship splashing down in a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean north of Australia.
Ultimately, SpaceX wants to use Starship as its mainstay rocket, replacing the company’s current workhorse, Falcon 9. With the ability to carry 100 metric tons of cargo to orbit, Starship will be able to loft many more Starlinks at a time than the Falcon 9 can. Others are counting on Starship’s success, too—and NASA is chief among them.
As part of its Artemis program, the space agency hopes to use a lunar-lander variant of the vehicle to send astronauts to the surface of the moon as soon as 2028—provided, that is, that Starship can not only get off the ground but also reach orbit and then return safely to Earth.
And the vehicle would need to do so not only once but multiple times in rapid succession. The Artemis IV mission that would put American bootprints on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years would require several Starship launches to transport sufficient propellant into orbit to allow the round-trip lunar voyage to take place.
A watchdog report published in March found that SpaceX was lagging behind NASA’s aggressive lunar timeline, and the space agency is also funding development of a Blue Origin lunar lander for Artemis missions.
The clock is ticking for both companies: NASA’s Artemis III, a crewed mission to test key capabilities for both vehicles in low-Earth orbit, is targeted for launch before the end of next year. SpaceX’s part of that current plan involves docking Starship with NASA’s crew capsule Orion—but the company still needs to show its crown jewel vehicle can get to orbit at all.
That means many more test flights, if nothing else.