The thirteenth flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket is scheduled for July 17: here are the updates
In recent weeks, we reported on the successful static fire of Super Heavy Booster 20 at Pad 2 of Starbase in preparation for the thirteenth launch of SpaceX's Starship rocket. Soon after, the company officially announced the date and time for the upcoming launch window of the fully reusable heavy-lift vehicle, still in prototype phase.
According to reports, Flight 13 is currently scheduled for 12:45 AM on July 17 (Italian time). Compared to the twelfth launch, which took place in the second half of May, the updates will be limited but still significant. SpaceX aims to address the issues that affected the third-generation hardware (such as the re-entry of Super Heavy and the ignition of Ship's engines) before proceeding with further experimentation. This is what we know.
The thirteenth flight test of SpaceX Starship will take place on July 17. Like the previous flight, the launch will be from Pad 2 of Starbase (while Pad 1 is being upgraded and two pads in Florida are nearing completion). As always with development tests, the schedule is subject to last-minute changes, but the company has already announced that it will stream the event live starting about half an hour before liftoff, both on its website and on its X profile.
As mentioned, there won't be a major overhaul of the mission, but Flight 13 of Starship will see the transportation of third-generation Starlink satellites for the first time. According to reports, there will be 20 units on board (no longer mockups), of which 6 will be equipped with cameras to monitor the thermal shield's condition during the release phase (some tiles have been painted white to enhance their identification). Being released during a suborbital flight, these satellites will re-enter the atmosphere shortly after, disintegrating. These Starlink V3 satellites will also try to connect to ground stations in South Africa and to the constellation through optical laser connections.
Regarding Super Heavy Booster 20, the primary objective remains the complete execution of the launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback maneuver, and braking ignition for a landing offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket arrives at this event with various hardware and software modifications designed to address the issues that emerged in the previous flight: during the twelfth test, small differences in the ignition of the upper stage engines had caused an incorrect rotation of the booster by about 90° compared to expectations. The startup sequence has therefore been made more robust against timing variations. Additionally, in the same flight, five of the 33 Super Heavy engines had issues during the re-ignition phase, prematurely interrupting the boostback maneuver; for this reason, hardware upgrades and new alarm and abort thresholds more suited to actual multi-engine environment conditions have been introduced.
On the upper stage front (Ship 40), the main objectives of the flight include, as previously mentioned, the release of 20 Starlink V3 satellites, the re-ignition of a single Raptor engine in space, and a new controlled re-entry with a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Here, modifications have also been made to the propulsion system, after Ship had lost one of its three optimized vacuum Raptor engines (RVac) about 40 seconds after stage separation in the previous test. The vehicle, however, managed to demonstrate its capability to continue the mission with one less engine, reaching the expected suborbital trajectory.
Ship 40 includes numerous updates to the thermal shield (one of the most complex items), aiming for an increasingly reusable design: tiles applied to the metal parts of the rear fins, new attachment systems in the lower area, and integrated load sensors in the tiles themselves to measure the stresses they are subjected to during ascent at higher dynamic pressures than previous flights, in exchange for greater payload capacity in orbit.