Update July 16, 7:10 PM EDT (2310 UTC): SpaceX aborted the mission after an apparent engine problem.
SpaceX will have to wait to launch its long-promised Starlink Version 3 satellites after an apparent engine problem forced the cancellation of a suborbital test mission last fall.
The Starship Flight 13 mission will be the second launch of the third-generation Starship-Super Heavy launch vehicle and the program’s second mission this year.
SpaceX reached ignition of the Super Heavy booster at Pad 2 of SpaceX’s Starbase facilities in southern Texas at 5:45 p.m. CDT (6:45 p.m. EDT/2245 UTC), but on-screen telemetry data showed four engines that apparently did not ignite as anticipated.
“Some engines did not fire, aborting the automated launch,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on his social media site, X, about 10 minutes after the abort. “The next launch attempt is expected to take place within a few days.”
When it lifts off, SpaceX will launch the mission using Booster 20 and the Ship40 upper stage. Both stages are flying for the first time and SpaceX will not attempt to recover them for reuse.
The biggest difference between Flight 13 and Flight 12, which launched in May, is that this time, SpaceX will deploy 20 production Starlink V3 satellites. Although they aren’t going into orbit, SpaceX intends to briefly connect them to a broader network in low Earth orbit.
“As part of this initial test, Starship plans to deploy 20 satellites that will extend the solar array and antennas and attempt to connect to the larger Starlink constellation via high-powered lasers,” SpaceX wrote ahead of launch. “The Starlink satellites will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are expected to disintegrate upon re-entry approximately 20 minutes after deployment.”
Other mission objectives are largely the same as those demonstrated by Flight 12. These included restarting the Raptor engines on the upper stage during the coast phase and performing a controlled landing of the booster in the Gulf of Mexico. None of these objectives could be accomplished in May.
SpaceX said that the startup sequence of the engines on Ship 39 caused “the directional flip of the booster to be off by approximately 90 degrees.” This, combined with issues with five of the 33 sea-level engines on the booster, prevented a nominal boostback burn and resulted in Booster 19 premature failure.
“This upcoming flight features engine alarms in the Super Heavy and updates to match conditions seen in a multi-engine flight environment, as well as hardware modifications to improve re-light reliability,” the company wrote.
Between these two flights of Starship Version 3, SpaceX said it also made “numerous hardware and operational modifications” to address issues that caused one of the three Raptor vacuum engines to go offline less than a minute after stage separation.
SpaceX is also continuing its heat shield iterative work to produce a protective system that will eventually allow rapid reuse of the upper stage.
“The heat shield covering the aft skirt will have modified tiles and attachment mechanisms, as well as multiple tiles attached to the metal side of Starship’s aft flap to collect flight data on various attachment options,” SpaceX said. “Finally, Starship’s heat shield will have load sensing tiles to take measurements as the vehicle experiences higher dynamic pressure on ascent than in previous flights, placing additional stress on the tile attachments in exchange for increased payload in orbit capability.”
SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC in an interview in June that the company may attempt an orbital launch soon after Flight 14, depending on how this next mission goes. He said a monthly launch cadence is the company’s goal.
Learning fast will be important as NASA relies on SpaceX to get Starship into orbit as quickly as possible. A modified version of the Starship Version 3 rocket with a docking adapter is scheduled to fly as part of the Artemis 3 mission next year.
Unlike Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 Alpha spacecraft, the Artemis 3 crew will not enter the Starship on that flight, instead NASA and SpaceX will focus on testing the interaction of these two vehicles while docked.
“Software testing between the spacecraft will help demonstrate that the Commercial Human Landing System prototype and Orion can meet at a precise time and location in space,” NASA said in a press release Wednesday. “When Orion docks with the Blue Moon test lander, the Orion spacecraft’s software will control the docked spacecraft. Meanwhile, the SpaceX test article will control the docked spacecraft for the second part of the mission.”
Flight 13 is also SpaceX’s first mission for the Starship program since becoming a publicly traded company on Nasdaq. The company’s new investors will be keenly watching the performance of the launcher and launch infrastructure as SpaceX hopes to begin deploying orbital payloads later this year.
