Congrats to the SpaceX boffins! Much progress made on this flight, and no doubt more on the next. Plus some stunning images from the onboard cameras. Won't be long now before Starship is operational.
SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13
The 13th flight of SpaceX’s Starship made it off the launchpad on Friday and ticked off just about everything on the company’s to-do list. After delays and engine replacements, Elon Musk’s colosso-launcher took to the skies at beer-o’clock on Friday evening – 5:51PM Texas time. One hour, five minutes and 21 seconds later, …
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 21:11 GMT intrigid
Yeah, people think the crash from the IPO highs is bad for SpaceX, actually quite the opposite. They got maximum capital infusion while giving up a minimal percentage of their company. Basically, whale investors mostly donated $85 billion of venture capital to the company. Now small retail investors will be able to invest on the cheap into a much healthier capital-rich company if they choose to.
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Friday 31st July 2026 19:20 GMT MachDiamond
"Basically, whale investors mostly donated $85 billion of venture capital to the company."
Much of that was used to pay off liabilities which is good, but stock in large companies can be used as currency so if it's devalued, it reduces its buying power. If a big company approaches me and wants to buy my company in a pure stock trade, I may not want to do that or could want a heavy premium if that company's stock is on the decline. If it's going up and there's the possibilities of good things happening in the not to distant future, I could be happy to take their stock as payment and maybe even at a discount if I can see they'll have a good chance at taking my technology and being able to run with it better than I can.
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Monday 27th July 2026 08:04 GMT James 51
Re: You can say what you like about Elon...
Only if you don't count all the other launched that were canceled and abandoned or just straight blew up to get this far. It it also worth pointing out, that Musk probably has the least input into technical aspect of the operation out of all the companies he owns. I know he's credited as chief engineer, a claim with about as much credibility has his claim to being a gamer.
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Monday 27th July 2026 10:45 GMT FIA
Re: You can say what you like about Elon...
Only if you don't count all the other launched that were canceled and abandoned or just straight blew up to get this far.
Eh? If you didn't count those what they've done would be miraculous.
It's not, they iteratively build and test stuff.
When you do this with rockets that means things occasionally blow up.
The alternative is the NASA/Blue Origin approach where you design, refine and test each bit and then hope (with fairly good confidence) that the final thing will just work.
Both approaches work, one is more spectacular. (and probably a lot cheaper).
Remember the SLS/Orion combo was supposed to fly first in 2017. It was delayed by 5 years, at a cost of around $20 billion. The first crewed flight has a similar delay.
The Apollo programme cost just shy of $250 billion in 2025 money. (Without any of the ground facilities). I'd be very very surprised if SpaceX has spent anywhere near that on Starship/Super heavy.
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Monday 27th July 2026 11:22 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: Starship cost
Project cost is currently around $15B but that includes one complete and three partial launch sites, one huge manufacturing site and two bigger ones nearing completion, engine manufacture at Hawthorne and engine testing at McGregor. Starship has taken a large amount of time and money compared to Falcon 1, 9 an heavy but the cadence ramp up should be fast compered to other new rockets.
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Monday 27th July 2026 13:12 GMT Ochib
Re: You can say what you like about Elon...
Based on SpaceX's confidential IPO registration (reviewed by Reuters), the company has disclosed spending over $15 billion developing Starship/Super Heavy to date
This doesn't include capital expenditure which is running at about $5bn - $20 per year
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Monday 27th July 2026 13:44 GMT Sproggit
Re: You can say what you like about Elon...
One of the key differentiators that we've seen from SpaceX since the early F9 flights has been their willingness to learn iteratively.
SpaceX recognized that the hardest part of what they were attempting to do was to re-land their first stage boosters so that they could be re-used... But, the moment they got to the point where they were confident they could get a payload to orbit, they started to put commercial loads in space. This not only meant that they were funding the cost of the R&D needed to accomplish the much more difficult landings, but that they could leverage every single paid-for launch as an experimental landing.
So what if an F9 booster had a RUD on the landing pad? They got critically important data.
If there has been a single defining piece of genius innovation from SpaceX, then that was it. Whether you're looking at ULA or Blue Origin, they have stuck with the traditional approaches... and they are a long way behind. A long way? Yes - in 2025, SpaceX accounted for more than half of all commercial launches to space, *worldwide*.
It's abundantly clear that lessons learned from F9 haven't scaled smoothly up to starship - the complexity of the vehicle, the kinetic energy and forces involved, all of these things will take significant effort to overcome. It's also worth noting that one critical piece in the Starship/Super Heavy infrastructure is brand new - and that's because SpaceX never attempted to recover any F9 second stage. With Starship and "100%" re-use SpaceX are in "undiscovered country".
The fact that this most recent launch included actual working Starlink satellites suggests a level of confidence with the portion of the test profile that includes getting starship to an orbit suitable for satellite release - and *that*, I suspect, might herald a tipping point. If SpaceX can demonstrate the reliability of that part of the mission profile a few more times, I think they will be in a position to attract paying customers for the launch process ... That, in turn, would mean that Starship/Super-Heavy starts to self-fund, rather than each launch being a $100Million+ expense on the company's bottom line.
We'd be crazy to try and predict the outcome of future launches, but if history is anything to go by, getting Starship to the point where paying customers will be confident in using it might be the biggest leap forward of all...
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 14:32 GMT MachDiamond
Re: You can say what you like about Elon...
"SpaceX recognized that the hardest part of what they were attempting to do was to re-land their first stage boosters so that they could be re-used."
That's something that's been done for decades. It was harder to avoid he temptation to cut corners and work on optimizing production while simultaneously increasing quality. It's far different than any other manufacturing endeavor.
"Yes - in 2025, SpaceX accounted for more than half of all commercial launches to space, *worldwide*."
The majority of those were for Starlink, their own division.
"It's abundantly clear that lessons learned from F9 haven't scaled smoothly up to starship "
They haven't been scaling up Falcon. Elon wanted a new design with more of a Buck Rogers look.
"The fact that this most recent launch included actual working Starlink satellites suggests a level of confidence with the portion of the test profile that includes getting starship to an orbit suitable for satellite release - and *that*, I suspect, might herald a tipping point."
They just pushed those satellites out of the slot to follow Starship into the Indian ocean. Flt 13 did not go into orbit and the satellites would not have been able to propel themselves to a stable orbit from that speed/position.
Getting Starship to the point where is has any commercial potential is still a long way off. It's being developed to spam bigger Starlink satellites into orbit and not the sorts of payloads that outside customers would pay to have launched. There's a tremendous amount of work needing to be done to fulfill the HLS contract they've been paid for. A lunar lander, orbital depot and a tanker along with proving that the system works.
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Monday 27th July 2026 20:29 GMT James 51
Re: You can say what you like about Elon...
Space X doesn't have to start from scratch with 1950s tech or deal with congress parceling out contracts all across the country to spread the largesse. Space X has room to fail, if NASA had the same results for the same price, it would be roasted alive for constantly failing and wasting tax payer dollars. It's also worth mentioning that Apollo is suppose to have generated 14x its budget in the wider economy.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 14:21 GMT MachDiamond
Re: You can say what you like about Elon...
"Both approaches work, one is more spectacular. (and probably a lot cheaper)."
The downside is that it hasn't been cheaper. The time delays are also adding cost to the Artemis program that you are worried is spending too much money.
The Blue Origin approach of going slower to go fast is paying off. Their big badda boom is suspected to be from faulty ground support equipment at this point and not the rocket. Blue has also had orbital launches and successful recovery of the booster. Blue Origin has been putting their back into reclamating the launch pad and is on the way to building a more conventional vertical integration and launch stand now that they've had a go with a horizontal one.
The delays in the Artemis program aren't even a factor as the outside components haven't been and still aren't ready for a lunar landing.
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Monday 27th July 2026 08:15 GMT werdsmith
SpaceX boss Elon Musk said he hopes the next Starship test flight will see the Super Heavy booster caught by robot arms at Starbase,
This is the only part of the mission that failed and has never been proven on version 3. So will be an increased risk to ground facilites to attempt it on flight 14.
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Monday 27th July 2026 10:58 GMT FIA
SpaceX boss Elon Musk said he hopes the next Starship test flight will see the Super Heavy booster caught by robot arms at Starbase,
This is the only part of the mission that failed and has never been proven on version 3. So will be an increased risk to ground facilites to attempt it on flight 14.
That's a misquote, he suggested they would try and catch the ship next, not the booster.
“Unless we discover problems after mission data review, SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on next flight,”
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Monday 27th July 2026 15:01 GMT Decay
I am honestly a little surprised to see so much of this attitude here. The readership of this site is largely made up of people either engaged in the trench warfare of IT or standing close enough to hear the swearing. Anyone who has spent time in those trenches knows how much planning, discovery, testing, rework and plain hard graft sits behind a successful result.
They also know how they would feel if, after months or years of work, some passing sage wandered in to ask, “I can’t believe you haven’t finished yet,” or, “What do you mean the milestone is amber?” Then, once the project finally succeeded, the same person waved away the entire effort as luck.
Most people here would be rightly incandescent if it were their project being dismissed like that. It is odd how readily some forget this when the engineers happen to be working on rockets rather than databases.
The comments put me in mind of a certain class of IT manager: the sort who is missing whenever a difficult decision is required, then turns up at the final project meeting to ask, “How hard can it be? Sure, it’s only an upgrade.”
The breed is not rare. It flourishes in air-conditioned meeting rooms where the coffee is free and every awkward action can be assigned to somebody who is not present. It feeds on status reports, breeds in steering committees and has an uncanny instinct for joining successful projects shortly before the photographs are taken.
Its natural counterpart is the armchair expert, who arrives after the difficult work has been done, explains that the answer was obvious all along, and takes the absence of disaster as proof that none of the planning was necessary.
In this world, complex engineering consists of pressing the large green **Upgrade** button, waiting for the cheerful bong and going for lunch. If no such button exists, it is probably because the engineers have hidden it to make themselves look busy.
Architecture, technical discovery, design, prototyping, testing, failure analysis, project management, risk management, vendor coordination and the actual business of building the thing are apparently just padding. Fussy little details invented by people who lack the clear strategic vision that comes from knowing bugger all about the subject.
There is no problem so complicated that it cannot be made simple by someone who has misunderstood it entirely.
A failed test is not necessarily evidence of incompetence. In experimental engineering, finding out precisely how and where something fails is often the point. You build it, test it, break it, inspect the remains, alter the design and have another go.
This is known as engineering. To the confidently uninformed it can look disappointingly unlike magic. Magic requires no project plan, produces no telemetry and has the great managerial advantage that nobody asks the wizard for a root-cause analysis.
A little historical perspective would not go amiss either.
NASA began developing Saturn V in 1962. Its first complete flight was in November 1967, nearly six years later, and Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July 1969. That followed the Saturn I and Saturn IB programmes, years of ground testing and the expenditure of an enormous amount of money, effort and brainpower.
The Space Shuttle was approved in 1972 and did not fly to orbit until 1981. NASA and its contractors carried out more than 650 test firings of the main engines before STS-1.
Presumably nobody had yet told them it was only a reusable rocket. Had a sufficiently senior manager with no relevant knowledge been available, the entire business could have been wrapped up by Thursday afternoon after a workshop called **Simplifying Delivery**.
Starship’s first integrated flight in April 2023 reached about 39 kilometres, lost engines, tumbled and was destroyed. Eighteen months later, SpaceX caught a returning Super Heavy booster with the launch tower while the upper stage completed a controlled re-entry and splashdown.
Since then they have flown new versions of the booster, ship, engines and launch pad, reflown hardware, deployed test payloads and brought Starship back through re-entry in increasingly good condition. Flight 13 deployed 20 working Starlink V3 satellites and completed an intact upright splashdown.
The booster return did not go properly, because reality remains stubbornly unimpressed by the PowerPoint deck. Physics has attended every steering committee, accepted none of the actions and continued doing exactly as it pleases.
Starship is not finished. Routine orbital service, upper-stage recovery, orbital refuelling and rapid full reuse still have to be demonstrated. SpaceX also has the benefit of seventy years of accumulated rocket knowledge and its own experience with Falcon.
Even allowing for all that, the rate of progress is remarkable. In a little over three years they have gone from a full stack that could not complete staging to catching and reflighting boosters, deploying payloads and returning the largest spacecraft ever flown through near-orbital re-entry intact.
The armchair expert sees thirteen flights and counts explosions. The engineer sees thirteen increasingly ambitious tests, thirteen sets of telemetry and a machine that can now do things it plainly could not do three years ago.
One is looking at the evidence. The other has found the comment box, a marvellous little device that dispenses unlimited certainty without requiring the user to insert any knowledge first.
Criticise Musk all you like. There is no shortage of material. But dismissing the work of thousands of engineers as “luck” is the intellectual equivalent of arriving on the Monday after a two-year system migration, discovering that everyone can log in, and asking what took so long.
The great gift of the armchair expert is that no problem seems difficult once somebody else has solved it.
Good engineering makes the result look obvious. Eejits then confuse “obvious afterwards” with “easy all along” and generously explain this to the people who did the work, generally from somewhere well outside the blast radius.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 14:45 GMT MachDiamond
"A failed test is not necessarily evidence of incompetence. In experimental engineering, finding out precisely how and where something fails is often the point. You build it, test it, break it, inspect the remains, alter the design and have another go."
Each Starship test flight is usually claimed to have some aspect that is there to push the boundaries of something or another. In a more rational company, you'd start with nailing a nominal mission. After 13 test flights, Starship hasn't done that.
Catching the rocket isn't as huge as people think. It looks damn impressive, though. It's a precision landing where the rocket "lands" on a protrusion(s) higher up rather than on its feet. Inertial Management Units (IMU's) are very good these days. Even a cheap as drone can hover in one spot with pretty good accuracy via an IMU on a chip. What doing that allows is a big mass savings by not having those huge landing legs and mechanisms. The downside is that missing by just a bit is really bad on a catch and not a big deal on legs (as long as all feet are on the pad). The system the Chinese just demonstrated where they used a cable system that cinches up gives them a lot more wiggle room. Having it on a ship also lets the booster go much further down range.
No armchair here. Been there, done that, got the NASA prize.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 16:07 GMT Andy 73
I'm going to decide if "the progress rate is remarkable" when they have a working commercial service.
SpaceX guys are smart, certainly, but there's a whole load of organisational and architectural stuff in this project that is either radically new, or imposed by outside forces.
That's where you have to accept that Musk's dependency on government support, and tendency to gamble big may outweigh any technical expertise within the company. History may well overtake them, even as they're doing their best to deliver his slightly distorted vision.
Some of us are watching this with cynical hats on, not because we underestimate the complexity of the project, or the excellence of the engineering, but because we understand that SpaceX are having to sustain a high wire act for far longer than many companies have endured.
And more importantly, with Musk, we've seen this before. Self driving cars have been "nearly there" for over a decade. Smart solar roof tiles were ready to be delivered. Hyperloop was going to revolutionise cities. The electric semi was going to transform transport. Grok was... I don't know what Grok was meant to do, but I'm sure it was world changing.
The current huge shift in space has occurred because private companies have suddenly become economically viable without total government subsidy. SpaceX is leading the way, but it's now one of many, and still has a lot of work to do. The attitude on here comes from the fact that we've spent a very long time being told Musk was the golden boy, and this and other of his projects are allowing us to judge just how much of that is hype and how much is true. If that judgement sometimes seems harsh, maybe look to what the boss is doing to see why people are giving his companies a hard time.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 17:30 GMT Decay
That is fair, and I do not dispute that Musk himself is a genuine risk to the programme. His timelines are largely works of fiction, his management style appears brutal and erratic, and SpaceX has benefited enormously from government support and government contracts.
He may be a modern-day Henry Ford or Howard Hughes, take your pick: a transformative industrialist who is also personally objectionable, dreadful to work for and quite capable of becoming a liability to his own companies.
What irks me is the evident pleasure some people take in every failure, as though a rocket exploding proves not only that Musk is a charlatan, but that the people working for him are incompetent and that no progress has been made.
That is a peculiar way to judge an experimental development programme. A failed test may expose a serious design problem, but it can also prove that several earlier problems have been solved and allow the programme to move on to the next one. Failure and progress are not opposites in this kind of engineering. Quite often, the failure is how the progress is made.
Where I also disagree is with making a working commercial service the test of whether the rate of progress has been remarkable. Those are two different judgements.
Starship may yet fail commercially. It may prove too complicated, too expensive or too dependent on government and Starlink money. Orbital refuelling, rapid reuse, reliable payload delivery and upper-stage recovery remain unproven. None of that changes what the vehicle can demonstrably do today compared with what it could do three years ago.
Government support does not erase that progress either. NASA was plainly essential to SpaceX’s development, but there is a distinction between public support, milestone-based development funding and paying a company to deliver an actual service. SpaceX eventually converted that support into working Falcon and Dragon systems carrying cargo and crews. Starship has not crossed that line yet, but SpaceX has at least demonstrated that it is capable of doing so.
“We have seen this before” also cuts both ways. We have seen Musk promise self-driving cars, solar roofs and Hyperloop revolutions that never arrived on anything resembling his timetable. We have also seen SpaceX take booster recovery from an implausible ambition to routine operation.
My objection is not to scepticism about Musk or Starship’s commercial prospects. Both are entirely reasonable. It is to the almost gleeful assumption that every setback vindicates a pre-existing view of Musk and, by extension, dismisses the competence and achievements of thousands of people working beneath him.
Judge commercial success when they have a commercial service. Judge Musk’s predictions with all the cynicism they deserve. But judge the engineering progress by what the machine can do now compared with what it could do before.
An explosion may prove that the vehicle is not ready. It does not automatically prove that nothing has been achieved.
