Watching today’s 13th orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy
The thirteenth test flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket is presently scheduled for 6:45 pm (Eastern) tonight, with a 90 minute launch window.
UPDATE: I have now embedded the SpaceX its live stream on X. Below I have embedded the live streams being provided from others.
Watch Starship's thirteenth flight test https://t.co/wYoNPiNMz8
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 16, 2026
The NASASpaceFlight feed, live at about 3 pm (Eastern):
The Everyday Astronaut feed, live at about 4 pm (Eastern):
The Space Affairs feed, which is simply the SpaceX feed with no additional commentary:
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Russian feed
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uaKSYbadar0
Go SpacsX. Go USA
Scrub. Four engines did not light. 🤨
maybe SpaceX can revert to frequent short hop flights, just to get to a point that launching with methalox fuel and raptor 3 engines is routine. The fact that Falcon 9 never/rarely has an abort or engine out is in sharp contrast to Starship.
You obviously do not understand the difference between development program and a rocket that has been in routine operation for more than a decade.
You also do not remember the first five years of Falcon 9, from 2010 to 2015. Many launch aborts and launch scrubs. It took several years of repeated operations and several dozen launches to finally get the kinks out.
Starship has only launched 12 times, and only once using the present version 3, which is radically advanced from its earlier versions. To get it to work, they need to fly it, multiple times.
The last thing they should do is what you suggest, retreat to a less capable version and flight path out of caution. It would only slow things down.
In this case, multiple static fires would have revealed this problem?
They routinely do static fire tests prior to every launch. The tests prior to this one worked fine.
Note also that it takes time to do static fire tests. You cannot do ten in a day. In fact, with this rocket, you only can do one each day, at best, and even that is questionable. And if the test is good (as it was prior to this flight), you won’t learn anything by doing another.
To make this rocket reliable they need to fly it. Caution will get them nowhere.
RZ says: “To make this rocket reliable they need to fly it. Caution will get them nowhere.”
Caution will them the shuttle, which never flew often enough to figure out how to turn sorties or do block upgrades.
The V3 Starship is the 3rd version. Even the Raptors are V3 engines. The new stack flew a single time.
They are sufficiently confident that 20 Starlink 3 satellites are loaded, which may be a bit misleading, as they are reportedly up to their ears in the V3 satellites. Cheers –
No launch today. The booster’s engines shut down at T – 0 just as the ignition sequence began. No word yet of when SpaceX will try again. (July 20 would be an appropriate day for it–not only is it the anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing, but it’ll be 50 years since Viking 1 touched down on Mars.)
It reminded me of what happened with the second attempt to launch Gemini 6. (The first one was scrubbed because the Agena target vehicle which Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford were supposed to dock with exploded before achieving orbit.)
About 2 months later, they tried again, but the Titan’s engines shut down at ignition. Schirra decided not to pull the ring to fire the Gemini’s ejection seats. It turned out that a plug had been mistaken left inside a line in the Titan, and that cut off the fuel supply to the engines.
Three days later, Schirra and Stafford lifted off and rendezvoused with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell on Gemini 7.
Early word is that 4 Raptors didn’t light. Musk is thinking a few days which will move the next attempt into early next week. Cheers –