{"id":559763,"date":"2026-07-20T23:04:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T23:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/559763\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T23:04:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T23:04:09","slug":"spacex-targets-july-23-for-crucial-starship-flight-13-test-launch-after-abort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/559763\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX targets July 23 for crucial Starship Flight 13 test launch after abort"},"content":{"rendered":"

SpaceX has pushed the next launch of its Starship megarocket back a few more days.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk<\/a>‘s company is now targeting Thursday (July 23) for Flight 13 of Starship,<\/a> the giant, fully reusable vehicle it’s developing to help get people to the moon and Mars, among other spaceflight tasks.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If all goes to plan, the 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship will lift off from SpaceX<\/a>‘s Starbase site in South Texas on Thursday during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch the action live here at Space.com<\/a>, courtesy of SpaceX.<\/p>\n

It will be the second launch attempt for Starship Flight 13<\/a>. The first came last Thursday (July 16) and ended in an abort<\/a>, which occurred just as the giant rocket’s 33 first-stage Raptor engines were firing up.<\/p>\n

“To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week,” Musk said on July 16 via X<\/a>, the social media platform he owns.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

SpaceX first targeted today (July 20) for Flight 13’s second try. On Sunday (July 19), however, the company announced<\/a> that it had pushed that date back to no earlier than Thursday.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Flight 13 will be the second launch of Starship Version 3 (V3), the latest, most advanced iteration of the megarocket. V3 is the variant that will land astronauts on the moon for NASA’s Artemis program<\/a> and fly SpaceX’s first Mars missions, if all goes to plan.<\/p>\n

\"Space\"<\/p>\n

The plan for the upcoming suborbital launch is similar to that of Flight 12<\/a>, which lifted off on May 22. Starship’s Super Heavy first stage will aim to steer itself back to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Ship upper stage will do the same halfway around the world, off the coast of Western Australia.<\/p>\n

SpaceX accomplished the latter objective on Flight 12 but not the former; Super Heavy suffered engine issues during its return to Earth and ended up hitting the Gulf waters hard.<\/p>\n

Flight 13 will do a few new things, however. For example, it will carry 20 of SpaceX’s next-gen Starlink<\/a> V3 internet satellites, which have never flown to space before. SpaceX plans to build a constellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 spacecraft<\/a> in low Earth orbit<\/a> over the coming years, and Starship will do all of the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

These 20 Starlinks won’t stay aloft for long, however. Since Ship is flying on a suborbital trajectory, the satellites will come back to Earth relatively quickly \u2014 about 20 minutes after deployment, according to SpaceX’s Flight 13 mission description<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Starship debuted in April 2023. All of its test flights to date have been suborbital.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX has pushed the next launch of its Starship megarocket back a few more days. Elon Musk‘s company…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-559763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}