SpaceX’s Starship roared off the pad on all 33 engines after an aborted launch weeks earlier

SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, climbed off its launch mount at Starbase in South Texas on July 24, 2026, with every one of its 33 booster engines firing in unison. The clean liftoff was a pointed contrast to the previous attempt eight days earlier, when the vehicle’s own flight computer slammed the brakes at the final second and refused to fly.

The thirteenth full flight test of the Starship system carried more than symbolic weight. It was only the second launch of the taller, upgraded version of the vehicle, and the first to attempt deploying the next generation of Starlink internet satellites, a payload that hints at how SpaceX intends to eventually make the giant rocket pay for itself.

All 33 Raptor engines lit on the July 24 climb

The heart of the launch was the Super Heavy booster, which ignited all 33 of its Raptor engines and lifted the stack off the pad, according to SpaceX’s flight-test program updates. Getting every engine to light and stay lit through the high-thrust portion of ascent is not a given for a booster this size, and it is the metric the company and outside observers watched most closely after earlier flights had been marred by engine trouble. The booster then went on to complete the high-thrust part of its boostback burn on all 33 engines, a first for this upgraded design, before beginning its descent toward the Gulf.

The July 16 abort that came first

The path to a clean launch ran through a dramatic near-miss. On July 16, SpaceX counted down to what should have been liftoff, only for the vehicle’s automated flight software to trigger an abort at T-0, moments before the hold-down clamps would have released, as Spaceflight Now documented during the return-to-flight campaign. Several Raptor engines had failed to reach their required performance during the ignition sequence, and the software correctly judged that the vehicle was not fit to fly. The automatic cutoff protected both the rocket and the launch pad from a potentially catastrophic failure. SpaceX then spent the following days on engine work, weathered an additional scrub for poor conditions on July 23, and returned the next day for the successful attempt. The episode was a reminder that on a vehicle this complex, an abort at the last second is a system working as designed rather than an outright loss.

Deploying the first next-generation Starlink satellites

Once in space, the upper stage opened its payload bay and released 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, several of them fitted with cameras, marking the first time Starship had deployed operational-class hardware of this kind. The larger V3 satellites are central to SpaceX’s plan to expand the capacity of its broadband network, and they are heavy and bulky enough that Starship, rather than the workhorse Falcon 9, is the vehicle designed to loft them in volume. Reference documentation on the mission, including the public record of Starship flight test 13, notes that the flight was the second outing for the upgraded vehicle version and that the ship also performed an in-space engine relight, a maneuver needed for future missions that must maneuver or deorbit precisely.

A booster lost on splashdown, a ship that came home whole

The flight was a success where it counted most, but it was not flawless. As the booster came down for its planned water landing, it attempted to relight its inner ring of engines and managed only 10 of 13, with several shutting down seconds after ignition. The result was a harder-than-intended splashdown and the loss of the booster. The upper stage fared far better, relighting its landing engines and settling intact onto the ocean surface in a controlled splashdown, a performance described as among the softest the program had achieved. That intact return also gave SpaceX its first clear look at an undamaged heat shield after a full flight, valuable data for a company whose entire business case rests on making both stages fully and rapidly reusable.

What a clean Flight 13 sets up next

Test flights like this one are graded on progress rather than perfection, and by that standard Flight 13 advanced the program on several fronts at once: a full-power liftoff, a first-of-its-kind boostback on the upgraded booster, an operational satellite deployment, an in-space relight and a soft return of the upper stage. The lingering weakness was the booster’s landing burn, the same broad challenge SpaceX must eventually master to catch a returning Super Heavy with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, as it has done on earlier hardware. The company’s stated ambition is to fly this system often enough, and recover it reliably enough, to drive launch costs down by orders of magnitude, the foundation for both a denser Starlink network and NASA’s plans to use a version of Starship as a crewed lunar lander. Flight 13 did not settle those questions, but it moved the largest rocket ever built another step closer to routine flight.

This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by the Morning Overview editorial team.

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