<\/p>\n In an unexpected first, Ship survived that homecoming, staying in one piece<\/a> even after toppling over and hitting the waves. It remains intact still, and SpaceX is towing it toward shore in Western Australia to get a better look. But the ambitious effort is unlikely to succeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk<\/a> told us today (Aug. 7).<\/p>\n “Unfortunately, ship recovery is not looking good right now. Nonetheless, we were able to obtain close-up photos of critical regions of the heat shield and engines for future upgrades,” Musk wrote this afternoon via X<\/a>, the social media site he owns.<\/p>\n He was responding to a SpaceX post<\/a> from an hour or so earlier, which provided an update about the recovery effort and shared two photos and a video of the activities.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n The recovery team has “been overcoming challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas as they attempt to guide the 52m long spacecraft to port,” SpaceX wrote in the post.<\/p>\n The SpaceX Recovery team is still working to recover Flight 13\u2019s Starship from the Indian Ocean. They\u2019ve been overcoming challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas as they attempt to guide the 52m long spacecraft to port pic.twitter.com\/ECT5FyCvr7August 7, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall when stacked. Both of its stages \u2014 Ship and the Super Heavy booster \u2014 are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will revolutionize spaceflight.<\/p>\n A key enabler of rapid reuse is Ship’s heat shield, which protects the vehicle during its downward trips through Earth’s atmosphere<\/a>. Musk has described heat shield development as perhaps the biggest challenge on Starship’s road to operational flight \u2014 but that challenge may now be in the rearview mirror.<\/p>\n “I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I think I’d consider the heat shield problem solved at this point,” Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4), during SpaceX’s first-ever quarterly earnings call.<\/a><\/p>\n It’s no surprise that Starship and Flight 13 came up in that call. The megarocket is key to SpaceX’s ambitious future plans, which include assembling and operating a million-satellite AI constellation<\/a> in Earth orbit.<\/p>\n Flight 13 was similar to previous Starship test missions; it was a suborbital jaunt that ended with Super Heavy coming down in the Gulf of Mexico and Ship landing in the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n There was a big milestone, however, in addition to Ship’s unexpected transition to seagoing vessel: During its time in space, the upper stage deployed 20 functional Starlink V3 satellites, the bigger, next-gen variant of SpaceX’s broadband spacecraft.<\/p>\n These satellites quickly came back down to Earth on July 24, but Flight 13 was a vision of the future nonetheless. SpaceX wants to operate a constellation of 100,000 or so Starlink V3s<\/a>, and this network will be lofted by Starship.<\/p>\n![\"Space\"](\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/media\/img\/spc-logo-w.svg\"){kind=logo}
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