SpaceX is targeting this week for the next launch of its massive Starship vehicle.

Following engine tests on both Starship stages in the last two weeks — igniting all six Raptor 3s on the "Ship" upper stage and all 33 Raptor 3s on the "Super Heavy" first stage — SpaceX is proceeding with the launch of Starship Flight 13, which is scheduled for no earlier than Thursday (July 16), according to a July 11 SpaceX social media post.

It will be the second launch for Starship "Version 3" (V3), a bigger, more powerful upgrade from previous Starship designs, and will come a little less than two months after V3's debut on Flight 12. To validate those upgrades, SpaceX didn't add any major objectives to Starship Flight 12 that hadn't already been proven on the spacecraft's previous V2 configuration. But the new design didn't quite check all the necessary boxes last time around, so Flight 13 will largely attempt an improved outcome of the same mission.

Though still in its development phase, Starship is designed for full reusability. Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9 first-stage booster, which is equipped with legs capable of touching the rocket down on coastal landing zones or one of the company's droneships at sea, both Ship and Super Heavy are designed for a return directly to the launch site, where chopstick-like arms on the "Mechazilla" tower catch the stages out of mid-air.

SpaceX has yet to attempt such a recovery with Ship but has succeeded in doing so with Super Heavy three times so far. Two of those caught boosters were then reflown on subsequent launches. When flying the new V3 hardware during Flight 12, though, SpaceX opted for Super Heavy to perform a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, rather than risk launch pad infrastructure on an unproven vehicle, but Super Heavy didn't make it to the planned touchdown zone.

According to a new SpaceX analysis, a sequence change in Ship's engines, which ignite before the two rocket halves physically detach in a maneuver known as "hot staging," led to a 90-degree error in Super Heavy's orientation after separation. Super Heavy's boostback burn was also cut short when five of its 33 engines failed to relight. SpaceX says it has introduced a modified startup sequence for Ship and hardware updates to Super Heavy to address the orientation anomaly and ignition issues, respectively, "along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment."

Ship ran into a bit of trouble during Flight 12 but also managed to pull off some firsts. One of the spacecraft's three vacuum-optimized Raptors was lost 40 seconds after stage separation, but it still reached its designated suborbital trajectory, demonstrating its "engine out" capabilities, according to the SpaceX update. The loss did, however, prevent Ship's in-space engine relight attempt. SpaceX traced the failure to "interconnected causes" and has introduced a number of fixes for the upcoming Flight 13, "with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine."

Flight 12 also featured the first deployment of two of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites equipped with cameras for inspecting Ship's heatshield tiles and exterior conditions while in space. They were deployed with several Starlink V3 mass simulators, a payload that's getting an upgrade of its own for Flight 13.

Stowed inside Ship's payload bay for Flight 13 are the first functional Starlink V3 satellites that Starship will deliver to space. SpaceX plans to eventually launch perhaps 100,000 of the upgraded version of its internet satellite constellation spacecraft, which it says will increase the capacity and speed of its wireless network services. SpaceX is including 20 Starlink V3 satellites aboard Flight 13, which will be released for functionality testing while in space. Six of those will be outfitted with cameras for the same type of heatshield inspection performed during Flight 12. Ultimately, due to Starship's suborbital trajectory on this launch, all of these satellites are expected to burn up in Earth's atmosphere about 20 minutes after they are deployed.

For Flight 13, Super Heavy's main objectives will be the successful launch and separation from the Ship upper stage, a complete boostback burn and a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the deployment of Ship's 20 Starlink V3 payloads, SpaceX is also planning the in-space relight of one of the spacecraft's Raptor engines, followed by the successful descent and soft splashdown of the stage in the Indian Ocean.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the closure of its investigation into SpaceX's Flight 12 mishaps this morning (July 13), approving the compnay's corrective actions and clearing the way for Flight 13.

SpaceX is targeting the launch of Flight 13 during a 90-minute window beginning on Thursday at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT). A livestream of the mission will begin about 30 minutes prior to liftoff and stream on the company's mission page, profile on X and here on Space.com.

If everything goes smoothly, it's very likely that SpaceX will attempt the first Starship V3 recovery back at its Starbase, Texas, launch site for either Super Heavy or both stages on the following mission, Flight 14, but there are a number of other technical achievements Starship has left on its checklist before the vehicle can become fully operational. Those include launching into a stable orbit, demonstrating successful rendezvous and docking with other spacecraft, and conquering the technological hurdle of transferring and maintaining cryogenic fuels for long-term use in zero-g.

SpaceX is hoping to accomplish all that within the year — quite a tight timeline. NASA has contracted Starship as one of two lunar lander vehicles to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on the agency's Artemis program missions and is expecting a crew-capable version to be ready by 2028 for Artemis IV. The company plans to fly a boilerplate Starship V3 equipped with a docking adapter for NASA's Artemis III mission in 2027, which will launch astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft for rendezvous operations demonstrations with Starship, as well as Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, in low Earth orbit.

It looks like SpaceX's next Starship flight is on the horizon, and it may lift off sooner than you might think.

SpaceX today (July 10) completed a brief static fire of the Starship Super Heavy booster tapped to launch the 13th test flight of the massive, mega-lift vehicle.

Booster 20 — the latest Super Heavy to roll off the assembly line — was transported to the pad at SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, facility yesterday (July 9) and hoisted onto its support stand using the launch tower's stalwart "Mechazilla" chopstick arms. By early Friday, SpaceX began preparations leading up to the prelaunch engine test, including closing Boca Chica beach around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) and transferring fuel to the pad's tank farm ahead of loading propellant onto the vehicle.

This is the second "Version 3" (V3) booster to reach the pad at Starbase for testing, and is equipped with 33 of SpaceX's upgraded Raptor 3 engines. Those engines ignited in a blazing heat on Friday just before 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), and underwent a roughly 25-second burn simulating on the launch stand the duration and flight conditions for an actual launch.

The successful completion of Booster 20's static test fire paves the way for Starship's upcoming test launch, Flight 13. That could launch as early as Wednesday (July 15), according to a notice from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Compared to Version 2 (V2), Starship V3 packs a much stronger punch. The rocket was upgraded with enhanced avionics to reduce mass and increase launch capacity, a taller fuel tank with a larger volume, and equipment for transferring propellant between spacecraft, which will be needed to fulfill many of the missions Starship is being designed to carry out.

A handful of those missions will be for NASA's Artemis program, and the agency's plans to return to the moon. Starship is one of two lunar landers currently contracted to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface, so, its success and timely demonstration of the technologies needed to do so are coming under a microscope as the timeline for those missions shrinks.

Flight 13 will follow the same basic timeline as Flight 12, which lifted off in May with mixed success. Flight 12 was the first launch of Starship V3, and prompted SpaceX to fly a slightly more conservative mission than many previous tests, which have built on previous successes with increasingly expanding goals. Starship's last flight sent the vehicle's upper stage, Ship, on a suborbital trajectory with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX ran into some issues, though, when the rocket's Super Heavy booster (Booster 19) failed to maneuver itself for a soft ocean splashdown of its own. Ship (Ship 39) also ran into an engine anomaly that caused SpaceX to forgo the stage's in-space engine relight demonstration.

Ship 40 and Booster 20, the Starship vehicles that will fly on Flight 13, will follow the same set of mission objectives to shake out the remainder of kinks in Starship V3. Spacex hopes the mission will pave the way for further technology demonstration tests the vehicle needs to complete before reaching full operational status. That includes the retrieval of both stages back at their Starbase launch pad, for refurbishment and reuse on future flights.

Starship is designed to be fully reusable, and capable of delivering over 100 tons to low Earth orbit. Once the rocket begins regularly delivering payloads, Ship and Super Heavy will be able to both return to Starbase to be caught by the Mechazilla arms on both of the site's two launch towers. SpaceX has succeeded in a handful of V2 Super Heavy catches during its previous flight tests, and managed to launch two of those recovered boosters on subsequent missions, but has not yet attempted to do the same with a Ship upper stage.

That's because landing Ship is much different than landing Super Heavy. SpaceX has a lot of practice landing and reflying rocket boosters. The company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launches several times a month, and is routinely recovered, refurbished and reflown within a short few weeks. A batch of Starlink satellites recently launched on one of SpaceX's most-flown Falcon 9 boosters, which broke a reflight record as it touched down for the 36th time after delivering its payloads to orbit. Though it lacks the landing legs of Falcon 9, Super Heavy's descent back to Earth is very similar to a Falcon 9 booster, and therefore less complex an engineering question to have to solve compared to Starship's upper stage.

Ship drops through the atmosphere belly-first, allowing the black, hexagonal heat shield tiles that cover half the vehicle to absorb the blazing temperatures of reentry. Fins near the spacecraft's nose and base control its orientation and attitude, which remains mostly horizontal during its freefall. To an extent, Ship's descent profile is not very unlike the space shuttles, except for its actual touchdown, which differs significantly.

As Ship's altitude decreases toward sea level, the vehicle performs a "flip and burn" maneuver that swings the whole stage upright and arrests its descent for a soft touchdown — eventually back at the Starbase pad on future launches, but once again in the Indian Ocean for Starship's upcoming mission.

Flight 13 will give SpaceX a chance to demonstrate that descent profile again using Ship 40, while also working through the booster and engine issues encountered during Flight 12. If all goes according to plan, the launch will bring Starship V3 closer to more ambitious tests, including orbital insertion, propellant transfer and the recovery of both stages back at Starbase.

SpaceX is nothing if not ambitious.

Elon Musk's company just filed an application with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate a 100,000-member constellation of "Gen3" satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).

This will presumably be an updated version of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who reported the news via X today (July 9).

The new plan would dramatically expand Starlink's already extensive orbital footprint. SpaceX currently operates nearly 10,800 of the internet spacecraft in LEO and has FCC approval for about 4,000 more.

And each individual Gen3 satellite will be considerably larger than its predecessors. According to McDowell, SpaceX's FCC application states that each one will weigh 4,400 to 5,500 pounds (2,000 to 2,500 kilograms) and cover an area of 3,230 to 4,300 square feet (300 to 400 square meters) with its solar arrays extended.

For perspective: The Starlink satellite version that SpaceX is launching these days, known as the V2 Mini, weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kg) and covers about 1,250 square feet (116 square meters), according to SpaceflightNow.

SpaceX launches V2 Minis aboard its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, generally in fleets of 29 satellites apiece. The Gen3 is so big, however, that it will probably need to fly on Starship, the giant, super-heavy-lift rocket that SpaceX is developing to help get people to the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

Starlink Gen3 isn't even the biggest satellite assemblage that SpaceX is cooking up: The company also aims to build a million-strong AI megaconstellation called Starmind.

"Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the sun's full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future," Musk wrote in a February 2026 update about the planned AI constellation.

A number of other companies, including Amazon and Blue Origin, are also building out large constellations in LEO, or plan to do so in the near future.

A variety of people and organizations have objected to how crowded Earth orbit is becoming, voicing concerns about the effects on astronomical observations, wildlife, Earth's atmosphere and humanity's enjoyment of the night sky, among other issues.

ispace is expanding its already extensive moon plans to include SpaceX's Starship megarocket.

The Tokyo-based company announced today (July 8) that it has booked 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of cargo capacity on Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, for a moon mission that could launch as soon as 2030. The deal is worth $50 million, according to Tokyo Brief.

"We are very pleased to be able to offer the new Lunar Access Integration service utilizing Starship's payload space through our collaboration with SpaceX," ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in a statement today. "High-capacity, relatively low-cost lunar transport, such as that provided by Starship, is essential to realizing the sustainable lunar economy that ispace aims to create."

As that quote suggests, ispace may become a regular Starship customer over the years, using the giant vehicle to carry its new "Mobile Cargo System" to the lunar surface. The MCS is a pallet-like flat rover capable of transporting up to 1,100 pounds (500 kg) across the lunar terrain.

The newly announced Mobile Cargo System moon mission aboard Starship will launch no earlier than 2030, according to ispace. The timeline will depend largely on SpaceX's ability to progress Starship into an operational vehicle. (Starship has flown 12 test flights to date, all of them suborbital.)

ispace has flown with SpaceX before; Falcon 9 rockets launched the Japanese company's robotic HAKUTO-R moon rover in both 2022 and 2025. Both times, HAKUTO-R reached lunar orbit successfully but crashed during its landing attempt.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy-lift launch vehicle, which is designed for full reusability and capable of launching up to 150 tons (136 metric tons) to low Earth orbit. The rocket has been in development for a while; SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk first announced the vehicle during the International Astronomical Congress in Mexico in 2016. Expectations for its operational readiness have been an ever-moving goal post.

In 2021, for example, SpaceX was targeting sometime "before 2024" for the spacecraft's first mission to the moon, but development delays have continually pushed that date back. 2024 was also the year NASA originally targeted for the first crewed lunar landing mission of the agency's Artemis program, though that's no longer the plan.

NASA contracted Starship as the lunar lander for that touchdown, which is now slated to take place during Artemis IV in late 2028. Agency officials have cited Starship as part of the reason that Artemis' schedules have slipped.

NASA and ispace aren't the only customers that have signed up for a Starship ride to the moon. For example, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced the #dearMoon project in 2018, booking Starship to fly himself and a handful of artists on what would have been the spacecraft's first crewed mission around the moon. As Starship delays continued to mount, though, Maezawa canceled the flight in 2024.

But momentum is building for Starship moon missions. After all, NASA now has two successful Artemis missions in the books — the uncrewed Artemis I to lunar orbit in late 2022 and the four-person Artemis II flight around the moon this past April. The agency is gearing up for Artemis III, which will test rendezvous and docking operations with NASA's Orion capsule and two crewed lunar landers — Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon — in Earth orbit in mid-2027, if all goes to plan.

So ispace is positioning itself to be a key player in a possible lunar goldrush.

"The emergence of rockets with the capability of transporting large-scale payloads to the moon is expected to accelerate deployment of lunar infrastructure, including power, communications, construction, data and mobility," ispace said in today's statement.

"The establishment of this core infrastructure on the lunar surface will reduce barriers hindering subsequent infrastructure projects, leading to a rapid expansion in the transport of relatively small lunar payloads for purposes such as technology validation, exploration and business development," the company wrote, adding that, as mission demand grows, so too will the payload capacity of its Mobile Cargo System units.

In addition to the new Mobile Cargo System design, ispace is also planning three lunar landing missions with its ULTRA Lander vehicle, which are scheduled for 2028, 2029 and 2030.

Less than a week after its last test, SpaceX's latest Starship spacecraft went back to the stand for engine checkouts ahead of a coming test flight.

The upper stage for SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, referred to simply as "Ship" — Ship 40, in this case — underwent a static-fire test of all six of its Raptor engines at the company's Massey site in Starbase, Texas. Ship 40 is in line for the 13th test flight of a fully stacked Starship, which is expected within the next month or so.

SpaceX posted a video of the engine test to its X account on Thursday (July 2), showing several angles of the ignition sequence and all six engines (Ship is equipped with three sea-level and three vacuum-optimized Raptors) firing to simulate flight-like conditions on the vehicle.

Ship 40 conducted its first-ever static fire last week, lighting a single Raptor for about 15 seconds. This more recent test involved all six Raptors and lasted a full minute, according to SpaceX.

Ship 40 will take part in the second "Version 3" (V3) Starship launch; SpaceX debuted the updated rocket prototype during a test flight on May 22. That mission went smoothly, for the most part, but it wasn't a complete success; the rocket's Super Heavy booster failed to maneuver its way to a soft ocean splashdown as planned. So the upcoming Flight 13 will likely mirror much of the flight path and mission objectives as Flight 12, including relighting one of Ship's Raptor engines in space.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy lift rocket, designed for seamless landing and reuse. The more capable V3 stands 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall — about 5 feet (1.5 m) taller than V2 — and is the biggest, most powerful rocket ever to fly.

Once development is complete and the vehicle is fully operational, SpaceX has big plans for the rocket, including the expansion of its Starlink satellite-internet network in low Earth orbit and landing NASA astronauts on the moon as a part of the Artemis program. The spacecraft will also be capable of delivering heavier payloads to orbit than any other rocket in history.

The success of this most recent engine test puts SpaceX one step closer to Starship Flight 13. Next steps ahead of that launch will include rolling the mission's Super Heavy booster to the pad at Starbase for engine tests of its own. Super Heavy sports 33 Raptor engines at its business end, which produce nearly 20 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Should Super Heavy's static fire tests go smoothly, Flight 13 could happen as early as August.

About a month has passed since the first launch of SpaceX's "Version 3" Starship rocket, and the spaceflight company has already begun testing on its next such vehicle.

SpaceX recently transported Ship 40, the upper stage in line to launch Starship's upcoming Flight 13 demonstration mission, to the Massey test site at its facilities in Starbase, Texas. Secured at its base, Starship performed a full-duration burn of one of its central Raptor 3 engines that lasted about 15 seconds.

The test, called a static fire, is meant to confirm that the spacecraft's engines are in working order ahead of an actual launch. SpaceX posted a video of the test on X today (June 26). The Ship upper stage is equipped with six Raptor 3 engines — three sea-level engines, and three configured for optimized flight in the vacuum of space. The vehicle uses all six during ascent, but only a single sea-level engine during the final phase of its landing burn.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy lift rocket, designed to be completely reusable. Its most recent test flight launched on May 22, completing a mostly successful demonstration of the vehicle's upgraded V3 hardware. At 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, Starship V3 is the biggest, most powerful iteration of the launch vehicle to date, and is the first to sport SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engines.

Despite a few malfunctions during the V3 debut last month, including failure of the rocket's Super Heavy booster to maneuver its way to a soft ocean splashdown as planned, SpaceX deemed the launch a successful test of the upgraded vehicle's new systems. In addition to the full outfit of Raptor 3s, V3 is equipped with enhanced aerodynamic grid fins, refined thermal protections, an increased fuel capacity and docking nodes to facilitate propellant transfer in space.

That last capability is especially critical for Starship's success. Ship is capable of reaching low Earth orbit (LEO) using its onboard fuel, after Super Heavy lofts the stage through Earth's atmosphere, but once there, it can't fly much farther. (Note: Starship hasn't actually reached orbit yet. All of its launches to date have been suborbital.) To fly beyond LEO, Ship requires refueling from additional Starship launches designed to top off its tanks, a critical function of the giant spacecraft that SpaceX has yet to demonstrate, but that's expected to change this year.

SpaceX has been contracted by NASA to provide Ship as the lander to deliver astronauts to the moon as a part of the agency's Artemis program. To get there, NASA says the spacecraft will require at least 15 refueling flights. The first of those landing missions, Artemis 4, is scheduled for late 2028. Ship is also scheduled to launch as part of Artemis 3, during which astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft will dock with the lander to practice maneuvers with the mated vehicles, but is not expected to require refueling flights for that mission.

The recent static fire with Ship 40 means SpaceX is progressing toward Starship's next full flight campaign, which will feature engine tests with all six of Ship 40's Raptors and all 33 of Super Heavy's. The company hasn't yet released any details about the upcoming Flight 13, but the company will likely attempt to launch the mission before the end of the summer.

Once again, SpaceX has looked to the stars for naming inspiration.

Elon Musk confirmed on Tuesday (June 23) that SpaceX will call its planned AI satellite megaconstellation "Starmind".

The choice should come as no surprise, as it continues the company's long-running stellar naming theme. Here's a rundown:

• Starship: SpaceX's next-generation launch vehicle, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that Musk thinks will make Mars settlement economically feasible
• Starbase: The company's facility in South Texas, which serves as Starship's manufacturing and launch hub. In May 2025, Starbase became an incorporated city.
• Starlink: SpaceX's broadband network in low Earth orbit. Starlink is by far the biggest satellite constellation ever assembled; it currently consists of nearly 10,700 active units, and the number is growing all the time.
• Stargaze: SpaceX's space situational awareness system, which uses Starlink satellites to monitor traffic in low Earth orbit.
• Starshield: A modified version of the Starlink satellite that flies national security missions for the U.S. government, focusing on Earth observation, communications and payload-hosting tasks.
• Starfall: SpaceX's newly unveiled uncrewed return capsule, which is designed to carry materials from orbit safely down to Earth.
• Starfactory: The huge Starship production facility at Starbase, which covers about 1 million square feet (93,000 square meters).

Starmind is perhaps the most ambitious of all of these stellar projects. If everything goes according to plan, the megaconstellation will be about 100 times bigger than the current version of Starlink.

"By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute," Musk wrote in a February 2026 update about the company's planned AI network.

"It's always sunny in space!" he added. "Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the sun's full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future."

The "star" theme has apparently supplanted a previous SpaceX nomenclature convention. The company named its original rocket line "Falcon" after the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo's ship in the "Star Wars" universe, then followed this same birds-of-prey theme for the vehicles' engines ("Merlin" and "Kestrel"). The company's next-gen engine, the one that gets Starship off the ground, still follows this older custom: it's called "Raptor."

For better or for worse, the world has its first trillionaire: Elon Musk.

On Friday (June 12), Musk's rocket company SpaceX made its debut on the Nasdaq, marking the largest IPO in history. With a staggering $1.78 trillion dollar valuation, it made Musk the first-ever trillionaire during the first 20 minutes or so of trading.

And to mark the occasion, SpaceX's giant Starship rocket was broadcast on the side of a skyscraper in New York City. On another skyscraper just to the left, Musk himself was featured.

What is it?

SpaceX's tremendous IPO started trading at around $150 a share on opening day, ultimately closing that same day at $160.95 a share. It has since been a big topic of discussion among financial experts and amateur traders alike.

The 19.2% gain that SpaceX's stock (trading under the ticker symbol SPCX) experienced on opening day took the company to a $2.1 trillion market capitalization, according to Yahoo Finance.

SpaceX, however, isn't alone in getting past a trillion in market cap this year. Also according to Yahoo Finance, Walmart (WMT) did the same on Feb. 3, as did Micron Technology (MU) on May 26. Meanwhile, Apple (AAPL) was the first company ever to top a trillion in market cap, doing so in August of 2018.

Still, Musk is the first person to have a net worth above a trillion (though, to be clear, most of that money remains in his stock holdings).

Why is it noteworthy?

It's fitting that Starship was the chosen vehicle to be broadcast in celebration of the SpaceX IPO instead of, perhaps, the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has sent astronauts to the International Space Station time and again.

Starship is analogous to the larger-than-life dreams of Musk, and it's key to SpaceX's future. Unlike the tried-and-trusted Falcon 9, the 408-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship is still in development. It's being built to bring humans to the moon — no, the pun isn't lost on me — and Mars someday. Settling Mars has been a longtime goal of Musk, with the entrepreneur even suggesting he'd like to die on the Red Planet one day.

SpaceX has been continually building and flying iterations of Starship while unafraid of failure, in keeping with the company's philosophy. The idea is to find and fix issues via flight testing, a strategy that SpaceX thinks works well over the long haul. This method has led to some stunning images and also some environmental hazards. To illustrate his grandiose thinking, a few years ago, Musk said he hopes to send fleets of 1,000 Starships to Mars every 26 months. More recently, he said he hopes to put up to one million AI satellites in Earth orbit.

"It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever," Musk said during an opening ceremony broadcast by Nasdaq on the day of the IPO. "I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear."

With the launch of SpaceX into the IPO frontier today, the space industry has its newest publicly traded juggernaut.

SpaceX's initial public offering, or IPO, went live for trading on the Nasdaq today (June 12), riding on what you could call the "Elon factor" — the high anticipation to grab stock in a company that once aimed for Mars, but now seems to be aiming at everything else, too.

Last May, SpaceX filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission key documentation that signaled an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. Talk of SpaceX, which billionaire Elon Musk founded in 2002 to find a way to Mars, going public had been rampant since late 2025, when the first hints arose of its possibility.

And this week, the long-anticipated IPO hit the streets, becoming the largest IPO in history, a $1.77 trillion dollar valuation. SpaceX anticipated a $75 billion initial offering, with shares valued at $135 each, a dollar number that SpaceX can modify on its own.

But today, as the NASDAQ trading began, SpaceX stock began trading at $155 a share, ultimately closing at just above $161 a share. Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire in the first 20 minutes of trading, according to the New York Times.

Musk was not in New York City as trading began, choosing to celebrate at the company's Starbase, Texas facility with around 5,000 supporters.

"It is certainly hard to believe that little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever," Musk said during an opening ceremony broadcast by Nasdaq. "I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear."

SpaceX transitioning to a publicly traded company is a big deal, not only cash wise but may well power the future and potency of commercial space overall.

Market appetite

Shaun Davies is an associate professor of finance at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. He thinks the SpaceX IPO will absolutely provide investors, entrepreneurs, and bankers with valuable information about the market's appetite for space-related companies.

"That said, I would be careful about viewing SpaceX as a pure test of the space startup sector," Davies told Space.com.

SpaceX today, Davies said, is much more than a launch company. Investors are evaluating a combination of commercial space operations, Starlink's global broadband network, and increasingly its artificial intelligence (AI) related ambitions through xAI, founded by Musk in 2023.

In many ways, SpaceX resembles a diversified technology and infrastructure company as much as a traditional aerospace company, Davies said.

"If the IPO is successful, I do think it could create momentum for other aerospace and advanced transportation companies. Firms pursuing next-generation aviation technologies, including companies such as Boom Supersonic, could benefit from increased investor interest in frontier transportation and aerospace businesses," he added. "However, many of those companies are still several years away from being public-market ready."

As for the big picture, if SpaceX raises approximately $75 billion as currently expected, Davies said it would comfortably be the largest IPO in history and would raise more capital than all U.S. IPOs raised during the peak year of the dot-com boom.

"That's a remarkable milestone in itself," Davies said, observing that the IPO raise is different from the value of the SpaceX, which is roughly $2 trillion. “What's perhaps even more interesting is that SpaceX may not hold the record for very long.”

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell in at Nasdaq's Marketsite in New York surrounded by supporters, friends and family. Confetti rained down as trading began.

"I am so proud of this team," Shotwell said as she recounted the company's successes from its first orbital launch to rocket reuse, to launching astronauts for NASA, developing its Starship megarocket and to expanding into artificial intelligence and more.

"Elon founded this company in 2002 initially to build rockets and spaceships that will take humans to Mars, the moon, and even beyond," Shotwell said. "We've not quite gotten to Mars, we're almost at the moon."

Before trading even began, SpaceX celebrated with a rocket launch, a Falcon 9 mission that sent 29 satellites into orbit. It may have been a risky move for some companies to launch on IPO day, but Falcon 9 launches seem routine now, flying multiple times a week (there was one yesterday, too).

"What company would do such a thing on the day that they open in the public market?" Shotwell asked. "SpaceX, right?"

New wave of IPOs?

Davies said that investors are already looking ahead to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have achieved extraordinary private-market valuations. It is certainly possible that one or both could eventually pursue offerings that rival or even exceed the size of the SpaceX transaction, he said.

"More broadly, this could mark the beginning of a new wave of large-scale technology IPOs. For years, many of the most valuable technology companies stayed private longer than ever before," Davies said."We may now be entering a period where some of those companies finally access public markets."

All this said, market conditions still matter, he added.

Over the past several trading sessions there has been some reassessment of valuations among high-flying technology stocks, including a recent sharp pullback in the NASDAQ, the marketplace where investors can buy and sell shares of publicly traded companies

"If investors become more cautious toward growth-oriented companies, that could make it more challenging for future IPO candidates," Davies said. "The opportunity is clearly there, but the market still has to be willing to support these valuations."

Watershed moment

"SpaceX’s IPO is a watershed moment for both the industry and the financial markets," said Jeffrey Manber, special representative to the chairman and CEO of Voyager Technologies, a defense and space technology firm.

"Though the public SpaceX is far more than a rocket company and far more than a space company, it nonetheless is as impactful a moment as what Microsoft was to software and Google to the internet," Manber said.

Manber seemed struck on how far private space endeavors have come.

"One of my favorite expressions in the early 90s was 'remember, no one has gotten rich from commercial space,'" he told Space.com.

Scaling to cosmic heights

What makes Manber most optimistic is that there is a straight line from the 2008 NASA cargo contract to the International Space Station and the SpaceX Starlink internet satellite constellation.

"But at the time doubters kept saying there is no demand for low Earth orbit transportation and that SpaceX would remain dependent on NASA funding forever." Manber said. What Elon Musk did, he added, was show that, with the government as a customer, the commercial markets are scalable to incredible heights.

"So, too, we'll see this again with the commercial [low Earth orbit] destinations space station marketplace," Manber added. "The killer market demand will emerge once we have commercially run orbiting platforms."

Prediction and a revisit of history

According to Manber, space is now its own asset class.

There are specialized investment vehicles just for commercial space services. Investors can support companies focused on everything from launch services to Earth observation to lunar services, and even to new spaceports, he said.

And the mind-boggling amount of wealth created by the SpaceX IPO — about 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires, according to the New York Times — has led Manber to make a pretty safe prediction.

"One of the unanticipated impacts of the SpaceX IPO will be the literally dozens and dozens of newly minted commercial space entrepreneurs who will self-fund their own companies," he said. "A true explosion in commercial space services is about to be realized, thanks to the transfer of wealth to hundreds of SpaceX employees."

The moment reminded Manber of another key IPO in history.

"I'm reminded that the world's first IPO was for the Dutch East India Company in 1602 to pay for their spice trading voyagers which were both years in the making and technically difficult to achieve," Manber said. "This time investors are supporting what could be the first voyagers to the planet Mars. Never underestimate the power of the commercial marketplace and its role in commercial exploration."

While SpaceX has evolved into more than just a space company over the last 24 years, Musk maintains that his long-term goal of making humanity a mutiplanetary species remains the same.

"That's what SpaceX is all about, is to take the fiction out of science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone," Musk said as trading began today. "We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system."

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:30 pm ET to include details of SpaceX's IPO success at the close of trading.

SpaceX's initial public offering (IPO) will launch the company into rarefied financial air.

The company revealed this week that it plans to sell shares at $135 apiece during the IPO, which will occur June 12 when SpaceX begins trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX.

That share price would give the company a valuation of $1.77 trillion, according to CNBC. Just six American companies are worth more: NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom.

SpaceX aims to sell 555.6 million shares during the IPO, raising a total of $75 billion, CNBC reported. That would smash the IPO fundraise record of $21.8 billion, which was set back in 2014 by Chinese tech giant Alibaba.

The cash infusion will help SpaceX reach truly unprecedented heights, if all goes according to plan.

Elon Musk's company already dominates the global launch market, lofting 85% of all the satellites that went up in 2025. Most of those spacecraft were its own Starlink broadband craft, which constitute more than 75% of all active satellites in Earth orbit.

But the company is diversifying beyond launch and telecommunications — specifically, into artificial intelligence. SpaceX recently acquired xAI, the startup that Musk founded in 2023. xAI owns X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), built the generative AI chatbot Grok and operates Colossus, a supercomputer cluster in Tennessee.

And SpaceX intends to take AI into the final frontier: It plans to operate one million off-Earth AI data centers, which the company will launch aboard its Starship megarocket.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, and it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a combination that will be revolutionary, according to Musk. But the vehicle remains in the development phase; it flew its 12th-ever test flight (like all the others, a suborbital affair) on May 22.

The company's ambitions are obviously quite lofty — but SpaceX is dreaming even bigger than you probably think. According to paperwork that SpaceX filed ahead of its IPO, it's eyeing a "total addressable market" (TAM) over the long haul of $28.5 trillion.

For perspective: In 2025, the gross domestic product of the United States — the total value of all goods and services generated within the nation's borders — was about $30.8 trillion.

The vast majority of SpaceX's envisioned TAM — nearly $23 trillion — is in the area of "enterprise AI applications," according to a video the company released as part of its IPO package. The company thinks that target is attainable because of its launch dominance, among other factors.

"Why do we think we're going to win? I think it starts first and foremost with our global leadership position in orbital launch services," Bret Johnsen, SpaceX's longtime chief financial officer, says in the video.

"We have an unrivaled satellite and connectivity platform that really leverages vertical integration from design, manufacturing, deployment and operations, and now really truth-seeking AI models enhanced by real-time data from our X platform," he added. "That extreme vertical integration really enables high-velocity and superior cost efficiency at scale. And, really, the business models are incredibly difficult to replicate, because of the fact that, at the core, you first have to have that global leadership position in orbital launch."

SpaceX's next-gen Starship megarocket finally got off the ground last week.

On May 22, SpaceX's first Starship V3 ("Version 3") vehicle lifted off from a brand-new pad at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. It was the first Starship launch in more than seven months, a lag caused by the time it took to develop and incorporate V3's many upgrades over its predecessors. (The destruction of a V3 Super Heavy booster during testing in November didn't help, either.)

Though Starship V3 suffered a few engine glitches on May 22, and its Super Heavy booster didn't steer itself down for a soft ocean splashdown as planned, SpaceX heralded the suborbital test flight as a success. That's a big deal, because V3 is expected to carry a heavy load for the company, and for NASA, in the coming years.

Great expectations

The 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship V3 is the biggest and most powerful iteration of Starship yet. It's the first variant of the vehicle outfitted with SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engine, the sleekest, lightest and brawniest Raptor that the company has built.

V3 sports many other upgrades as well. For example, its Super Heavy first stage has an improved fuel-transfer system that allows the booster's 33 engines to fire more quickly, according to a May 12 SpaceX update.

The Ship upper stage, meanwhile, features a more efficient propulsion system, larger propellant tanks and docking ports that will enable meetups with refueling "tanker" vehicles in Earth orbit, among other modifications.

Those in-space meetups will be a big part of Starship missions in the future. Any Starship flight to the moon, Mars or another deep-space destination will require the launch of a dozen or more Ships to haul its required propellant to space, experts say. (The exact number of necessary tanker missions is hard to pin down.)

And the moon is indeed a target. In 2021, NASA selected Ship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of lunar exploration. SpaceX is currently working to get Ship ready for the next two Artemis missions — Artemis 3, a docking test with NASA's Orion crew capsule in low Earth orbit, and Artemis 4, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole. If all goes to plan, Artemis 3 will launch in mid-2027, and Artemis 4 will lift off in late 2028.

Ship isn't guaranteed to fly on either of these missions, however. NASA also picked Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft to be an Artemis lander, and both are still in the running for Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. (Both private landers could fly on Artemis 3, NASA officials have said, but only one will make the trip to the moon a year later.)

Next steps

SpaceX is working to get Starship V3 up and running in time for Artemis 3. And it needs to move quickly, for there's a lot still needs to be done.

The immediate priority is determining why Super Heavy failed to stick its landing during the May 22 test flight. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration declared that failure a mishap and has grounded Starship until SpaceX wraps up an investigation into the matter.

After Starship V3 has been cleared to fly again, it will need to notch some big milestones in the final frontier — notably, reaching Earth orbit and topping off its tanks there. And SpaceX has laid out how it plans to tick those boxes.

"It will start with a Starship launched from Starbase to spend an extended time on orbit, gathering data on vehicle propulsion and thermal behavior on an extended duration mission, including long duration propellant storage and boil-off characterization," the company wrote in an update on Oct. 30, about two weeks after Starship's 11th test flight. "A second Starship will then launch to rendezvous with the first to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer in Earth orbit."

SpaceX aims to launch both of those Starship flights this year, the company added. But we don't know if the next Starship launch will kick off the first leg of that refueling test; SpaceX hasn't announced details about Flight 13 (including its flight date).

We should expect Starship to launch again relatively soon, however, for SpaceX prioritizes flight-testing as the best way to develop and mature its hardware. And there's no shortage of hardware to fly at the moment: The company has built up a stockpile of Starship V3 vehicles, according to founder and CEO Elon Musk.

"The Starship production pipeline is full and will complete roughly 10 more ships and about half that number of boosters this year," Musk wrote on May 18 via X, the social media platform he owns.

SpaceX also needs to integrate a life-support system into Starship ahead of Artemis 4. That vital tech may not be necessary for Artemis 3, however; NASA is still defining the parameters of that docking test and has left open the possibility that the astronauts will not enter whichever private lander flies on Artemis 3.

SpaceX has been operating life-support systems in space since 2020, when it launched its first Crew Dragon astronaut mission to the International Space Station. And the company has been working on a Starship version of the tech as well.

In the October 2025 update, SpaceX wrote that it has completed "lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control system demonstrations, using a full-scale cabin module inhabited by multiple people to test the capability to inject oxygen and nitrogen into the cabin environment and accurately manage air distribution and sanitation, along with humidity and thermal control."

There's other vital gear to integrate as well — the elevator, for instance. Ship stands a whopping 171 feet (52 meters) tall, so the astronauts who fly on it to the moon will need a way to get from the vehicle's nose (where the cabin will be) down to the gray dirt.

SpaceX has already conducted a demonstration of Ship elevator and airlock tech, according to the October 2025 update. That test — performed with Axiom Space, which is building the Artemis program's spacesuits — occurred at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California in mid-2024.

Over the longer term, we can expect an accelerating cadence of increasingly ambitious test flights as SpaceX gets even more proficient at building and flying Starship hardware.

Perhaps the most important of these trials is an uncrewed test flight to the lunar surface, which both Ship and Blue Moon will need to ace before the private vehicles are certified to carry NASA astronauts.

There's no stated timeline for either of those landmark flights, though at least one of them will have to occur before late 2028 to keep Artemis 4 on schedule. (A robotic prototype of Blue Moon will launch on a lunar-landing mission this fall, if all goes to plan. But the mature, crew-capable variant of Blue Moon will still have to duplicate the feat before astronauts can climb aboard.)

What can we expect once Starship gets fully up and running? It's hard to say, but Musk has certainly set expectations high.

"Our goal is launching Starship >10k/year, which would be more than once an hour," the world's richest man wrote via X on May 23. "Probably over 200 tons of useful load to a useful orbit per flight by then."

Just five days after its debut flight, SpaceX's Starship V3 megarocket has been grounded.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) just declared the May 22 Starship V3 launch a mishap and is requiring an investigation before the huge vehicle can take to the skies again.

"A return to flight of the Starship-Super Heavy vehicle is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety," FAA officials wrote in an update today (May 27).

Starship consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or Ship for short.

SpaceX believes that Starship — the biggest and most powerful launcher ever built — will revolutionize spaceflight, making Mars settlement and other ambitious exploration feats economically feasible.

The new, 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) V3 ("Version 3") variant is a key part of that vision. It's the first Starship iteration capable of deep-space flight, according to SpaceX, and will carry astronauts to the lunar surface on NASA's Artemis 4 mission in late 2028, if all goes to plan.

So last week's suborbital test flight — the 12th overall for the Starship program — was a very big deal for the company. It went well in most respects. For example, Ship successfully deployed 20 dummy Starlink internet satellites, as well as two actual Starlinks equipped with cameras to image the vehicle's heat shield in space. And the upper stage survived its reentry to Earth's atmosphere in good shape, making a soft, controlled splashdown off the coast of Western Australia as planned.

Super Heavy was supposed to make a soft splashdown of its own, in the Gulf of Mexico. But the booster was unable to perform the engine burns needed for this controlled return and ended up "experiencing a hard splashdown" in the Gulf, as SpaceX wrote in a mission update.

The FAA deemed this result a mishap and is requiring the company to conduct an investigation into its cause.

"The FAA will oversee the SpaceX-led investigation, be involved in every step of the process, and approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions," agency officials wrote in today's update.

It's unclear how long this investigation will take. But don't bet on a significant delay, as SpaceX tends to work fast. For instance, an FAA grounding of the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket this past February lasted just four days.

The most powerful rocket in history just roared off its launch pad in a spectacular show of power and technology.

SpaceX launched the newest version of its giant Starship rocket Friday (May 22), from a recently completed second pad at its Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas. Liftoff occurred at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), sending the massive 408-foot-tall (124-meter) vehicle skyward on its 12th suborbital test flight.

It was the first Starship mission since October 2025, and the first-ever flight of Starship Version 3 (V3), a next-generation build of the rocket that features a complete design overhaul meant to evolve the vehicle toward operational missions. And today's suborbital Flight 12 was a significant step toward that ambitious goal, even if it was a day later than planned after a glitched thwarted a first launch try on Thursday.

"Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & landing!," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the launch. "You scored a goal for humanity."

There were some hiccups.

During liftoff, one of the 33 first-stage Raptor engines on Super Heavy shut down, and the booster missed a critical "boost back" manuever to control its return to Earth. Starship's Ship 39 upper stage also lost one of its six main engines during ascent, but managed to reach space on the remaining five.

"I wouldn't call it nominal orbital insertion, but we're in on a trajectory that we had analyzed, and it's within bounds," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said in live commentary. "So, teams continuing to work through it with that engine out there, working some through some steps on the engines."

Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper stage known as Starship, or simply Ship. The first notable event after the rocket cleared the tower this evening occurred about 2 minutes and 20 seconds into flight, when Super Heavy initiated "hot staging" and separation from Ship. (It's known as hot staging because Ship begins firing its engines before separating from Super Heavy.)

Unlike its V2 predecessor, which featured an interstage ring that fell away at separation, Starship V3 is built with similar hardware secured to the top of the booster, like a fence around the fuel tank's dome to give some breathing room to the upper stage engines' ignition and initial thrust away from the booster.

After stage separation, Super Heavy reoriented and attempted to perform a one-minute boostback burn toward Starbase. However, something went wrong and the burn didn't go as planned, Huot said.

SpaceX has performed booster recoveries at Starbase on previous Starship missions, catching the rocket's first stage using mechanical "chopstick" arms attached to the site's launch towers. On Flight 12, however, the company planed to return Super Heavy a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico rather than risk a recovery mishap that could damage the pad on the first flight of brand-new hardware.

Instead, the massive Super Heavy booster plummeted back to Earth and crashed into the Gulf, beaming live views of its fall from space until the screen went black.

"The booster didn't complete its full boost back," Huot said just after lifotff. "Its mission ended a little bit early, but landed in the clear area that we had set in advance."

SpaceX included 22 payloads for Ship to deploy during its suborbital jaunt today — 20 dummy versions of the company's Starlink broadband satellites and two actual Starlink spacecraft equipped with imaging sensors.

The payloads were deployed as planned over a 10-minute span, beginning roughly 17 minutes after launch, via Ship's "PEZ dispenser"-like door. The two modified Starlink satellites were tasked with scanning Starship's heat shield tiles, in a test meant to assess the ability to inspect them for possible damage prior to reentry.

Shortly after the final two Starlink simulators deployed (the ones with cameras that SpaceX nicknamed "Dodger Dogs" after the famed hotdogs at Dodger Stadium), SpaceX broadcast the spectactular video they captured as they flew away from Starship.

"That is a Starship in space," Huot said.

SpaceX initially planned for the Ship 39 upper stage to perform an in-space relight of one of its six Raptor engines in orbit— an important demonstration to prove the spacecraft can reliably execute maneuvers, as mixing and managing cryogenic fuels and reigniting an engine in zero-g is necessary to alter Ship's orbit, send it on to the moon or Mars, and bring it back to Earth for recovery and reuse. But because of the lost Raptor engine during launch, flight controllers skipped that test for Flight 12.

And so, the first Starship V3 spacecraft began its descent to Earth.

Ship began its reentry to Earth's atmosphere about 50 minutes into the flight, falling as its belly became engulfed in a bright plasma. During its descent, Ship 39 performed a series of exercises designed to stress parts of the vehicle to their structural limit. It also executed a novel banking maneuver for its landing burn meant to mimic the trajectory and orientation needed for a launch tower catch on a return to Starbase.

Huge cheers rang out at SpaceX's headquareters and Starbase facilities as the Ship 39 ignited two engines for a final landing burn. The manuever initially called for three engines, but that one shut down early at liftoff. After the landing, Starship toppled over into the ocean waters and exploded in a magnificent fireball (again, as planned) as SpaceX workers cheered.

Nothing Starship accomplished on Flight 12 was particularly groundbreaking for SpaceX; the mission goals and trajectories were broadly similar to those of the previous few test missions.

However, even successfully following a previously blazed trail was huge for Starship V3, given that it's a brand-new vehicle with a variety of modifications and upgrades over its predecessors. And V3's road to the launch pad was a bit rocky.

SpaceX ran into some issues during the testing of the new V3 build in November last year, resulting in the loss of the Super Heavy booster originally slated for the Flight 12 mission. Now, with more than half a year between Starship's last two launches, SpaceX has some catching up to do.

NASA is relying on Starship as one of the crewed lunar landers for its Artemis program, which aims to eventually establish a permanent human presence on the moon. The space agency has also contracted Blue Moon, a Blue Origin spacecraft, to land Artemis astronauts on the moon, and has indicated a willingness to fly with whichever private lander is ready when it's time for the missions to get off the ground.

The next of those missions is Artemis 3 — the follow-up to April's Artemis 2, which flew four astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft on a successful 10-day mission around the moon. NASA is targeting mid to late 2027 for Artemis 3, which will launch Orion to low Earth orbit (LEO) to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the private lunar landers, and late 2028 for the first lunar landing on Artemis 4.

As if to drive that fact home, NASA chief Jared Isaacman flew to Starbase to watch the launch personally.

"We're looking forward to seeing this thing fly, because hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we're gonna, we're gonna join up in an earth orbit," Isaacman said during the live comentary.

After the launch, Isaacman hailed the work of SpaceX's Starship team.

"Congrats SpaceX team and Elon Musk on a hell of a V3 Starship launch," Isaacman wrote on X. "One step closer to the Moon ... one step closer to Mars."

Starship has a number of boxes to check before NASA certifies the vehicle to fly astronauts, but V3 has been built with those goalposts in mind.

The new Starship V3 vehicle includes four passive connection ports on its back, or leeward, side (opposite the heat tiles on its belly), which are designed for docking and ship-to-ship fuel transfers.

In order to fly beyond LEO, Starship requires the assistance of additional Ships to meet up in orbit to top off its fuel tanks. This is especially important for its use as the Artemis moon lander; experts have estimated that each lunar Starship mission could require a dozen or more refueling launches to adequately supply enough propellant to get to the moon, land and launch back to lunar orbit.

Ship has yet to demonstrate in-space refueling, or even a launch that fully reaches Earth orbit. And there are other boxes it needs to tick as well.

For example, NASA is requiring both Starship and Blue Moon to demonstrate uncrewed lunar landings before they fly astronauts down to the lunar surface, putting SpaceX and Blue Origin on a short timeline to ready vehicles for the planned Artemis 4 landing in 2028.

Starship's launch today helps put it back on track toward meeting that goal, but SpaceX will have to pick up its launch cadence significantly. Just over a year ago, in March 2025, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that he expected to be launching V3 at a "rate of once a week in [about] 12 months."

While that cadence still seems a long way off at Starship's current state of development, the success of Flight 12 bodes well for the near future. And hopefully the near future features another Starship launch — a giant rocket getting off the ground in a matter of weeks, versus the seven months that separated today’s mission from the previous test flight.

We'll all have to wait at least one more day to see the most powerful rocket ever built take to the skies — even "Starships" singer Nicki Minaj.

SpaceX tried to launch its new Starship V3 megarocket for the first time ever this evening (May 21), from the company's Starbase site in South Texas. Technical issues cropped up late in the countdown, however, and SpaceX couldn't resolve them in time to get Starship V3 off the ground.

"We're learning about a lot about these systems as we execute them for the first time, and we're not able to basically troubleshoot all of these issues in those final seconds to get to launch," Dan Huot, of SpaceX communications, said during the company's launch webcast today.

"That essentially makes this a wet dress rehearsal," he added, referring to a common preflight fueling test. "We were able to fully load the vehicles, and we're going to take the time now, figure out what tripped us up before launch, and then actually get into a flight tomorrow."

As that comment indicates, the next opportunity for a liftoff is Friday evening (May 22), likely in the same window as today's try — 6:30 p.m. EDT to 8 p.m. EDT (2230 to 0000 GMT).

The scrub was doubtless disappointing for many space fans, including Minaj, who was on hand at Starbase for today's launch attempt.

"This is historic. This is a major moment, y'all," Minaj said during SpaceX's launch webcast, adding that she's never seen a launch in person before.

Minaj wore a SpaceX Starship T-shirt for the launch. "I love this shirt," she said. "And it's a great name — Starship!" (One of Minaj's most famous songs is "Starships," from the 2012 Album "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded.")

Starship is a fully reusable vehicle consisting of two stages — a giant booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity colonize the moon and Mars, finish deploying its Starlink megaconstellation in Earth orbit and do pretty much everything else the company wants to do in the final frontier.

The megarocket remains in the development phase, however. It debuted in April 2023 and has flown 10 more test flights since then, all of them suborbital. The next launch will be the 12th for the program overall but the first for Starship V3 ("Version 3"), a dramatic overhaul designed to take the vehicle a giant step closer to operational status. It will also be the first liftoff for Starbase's Pad 2, which features many upgrades over the site's original pad as well.

V3 is the first iteration of Starship capable of flying to the moon and Mars, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said. If all goes according to plan, it's the variant that will fly on NASA's Artemis 3 mission — a docking test in Earth orbit — in mid to late 2027. And it's the vehicle that will land astronauts on the moon on Artemis 4 in late 2028.

There's competition for those flights, however: NASA is also considering using Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, and will probably go with whichever vehicle is ready (though the agency has said both landers might fly on Artemis 3).

On Thursday, SpaceX even announced a more ambitious crewed test flight for Starship: The world's first private trip to Mars.

In a video, SpaceX announced that cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who financed a private polar spaceflight with SpaceX on a Dragon capsule called Fram2 in 2025, will lead a flyby around Mars sometime in the future.

"So it's going to be a flyby mission of Mars," Wang said. "A lot of people talk about Mars. We like Mars, we're gonna land on Mars. We're gonna do a city on Mars. But let's get it started with a flyby."

Liftoff seemed tantalizingly close multiple times today. The countdown clock reached its built-in hold at T-40 seconds, then rolled past that mark several times before an issue cropped up and caused a reset. One such issue concerned the water diverter under the launch pad, according to Huot.

SpaceX called the launch off today around 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT). There were still more than 20 minutes left in the launch window, but that wasn't the issue.

SpaceX can hold at T-40 seconds for just a few minutes; after that, propellant temperatures rise too much to ensure nominal liftoff conditions, Huot explained.

Update for May 22, 7:48 pm ET: SpaceX successfully launched its first next-generation Starship V3 megarocket on a test flight from Starbase, Texas on May 22. Our wrap story will be posted shortly.

The Ship upper stage lost one engine but performed most of its planned objectives and landed in the Indian Ocean as planned. The Super Heavy booster failed to perform its boost back burn correctly and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, but it also was not planned to be recovered. See our latest Starship V3 launch updates

There's a lot riding on the debut flight of SpaceX's Starship V3 megarocket — not the least of which are NASA's Artemis moon landing ambitions.

The Starship launch is scheduled to take place Friday (May 22) from SpaceX's Starbase test site in South Texas, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). An attempt the launch Starsip Flight 12 on Thursday was delayed by a stuck pad hydraulic pin. You can watch the launch here at Space.com when the time comes and see our latest Starship V3 launch updates for more.

The flight will be the 12th overall for Starship, and it will be broadly similar to previous efforts — a suborbital jaunt that ends with controlled ocean splashdowns of Starship's Super Heavy booster and its Ship upper stage. But the vehicle involved is quite new, and SpaceX expects a lot out of it.

A bigger (and better?) Starship megarocket

The 408-foot-tall (124 meters) V3 ("Version 3") is bigger and more powerful than previous Starship iterations, which were already the biggest and most powerful rockets ever built, and it sports a number of other important upgrades as well.

For starters, it's outfitted with the new V3 Raptor engine — 33 of them on Super Heavy and six on Ship — which provides more heft, and a far more streamlined design, than its predecessors.

The V3 Super Heavy also now has just three grid fins (which help it steer its way back to Earth for recovery and reuse) instead of four. And the "hot stage ring" — the structure that marks the meeting point of Super Heavy and Ship — is now attached to the booster, meaning it can be reused, whereas previously it had fallen away during flight. (Starship engages in "hot stage" separation, meaning Ship fires its engines before it has detached from Super Heavy.)

Super Heavy's fuel transfer tube, which funnels propellant from its main tank to all 33 Raptors, "has been completely redesigned and is now roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage," SpaceX wrote in an update last week. This change allows all 33 engines to start up simultaneously and will improve the speed and reliability of in-flight maneuvers, according to the company.

V3 of Ship, meanwhile, "incorporates a clean-sheet redesign of its propulsion systems," SpaceX wrote. "These changes enable a new Raptor startup method, increase propellant tank volume and improve the reaction control system used for steering while in flight. The propulsion updates also reduce contained volumes in the aft end of the vehicle that could trap propellant leakage."

Ship's PEZ-dispenser-like deployment mechanism has been upgraded as well, enabling speedier ejection of payloads. We'll see this mechanism in action on today's flight: Ship will deploy 20 dummy Starlink satellites, as well as two actual Starlinks equipped with special cameras that will scan Ship's heat shield. (On previous flights, Ship has deployed just eight to 10 dummy Starlinks.)

There are other significant Ship changes as well, the update relates. The V3 vehicle "is now designed to be capable of long-duration flights with more efficient reaction control systems, isolation valves for high-pressure gases, 100% vacuum jacketing coverage of the header feed system, a high-voltage electrically actuated cryogenic recirculation system, and a dedicated system for managing cryogenic propellant interactions with the engines during extended coasts in space."

V3 Ship also features four "docking drogues" — small receptacles that allow it to link up with specially modified (and not yet built) "tanker" Ships — as well as propellant line connections enabling those tankers to transfer their fuel. This upgrade is a very big deal, for every Ship headed to the moon, Mars and other deep-space locales will need to be fueled up in space a dozen times or more.

Today's flight will also mark the debut of the second launch pad at Starbase, which features advances of its own. For instance, its propellant farm can load fuel into the megarocket faster, according to SpaceX. And the "chopstick arms" of Pad 2's launch tower, which are designed to catch returning Super Heavy boosters and Ships, are shorter and nimbler.

"Together, these new elements are designed to enable a step-change in Starship capabilities and aim to unlock the vehicle's core functions, including full and rapid reuse, in-space propellant transfer, deployment of Starlink satellites and orbital data centers, and the ability to send people and cargo to the moon and Mars," SpaceX wrote in the update.

Will it really land on the moon?

And the moon is a destination for Starship V3 in the not-too-distant future. If all goes to plan, the vehicle will land astronauts on the lunar surface during NASA's Artemis 4 mission, which the agency aims to launch in late 2028.

Starship will have to check a lot of boxes before it flies that mission, however. For example, the vehicle has yet to reach Earth orbit; all 11 of its test flights to date (Flight 1 launched in April 2023) have been suborbital, as today's will be. It also needs to demonstrate off-Earth refueling and be outfitted with a life-support system and other astronaut accoutrements.

Such milestones must be met soon if SpaceX wants to stay on NASA's Artemis program timeline.

The agency plans to launch its crewed Artemis 3 mission to Earth orbit in mid- to late 2027. This will be a docking test between Artemis' Orion crew capsule and one or both of the program's privately developed lunar landers — Ship (by itself, without Super Heavy) and Blue Origin's Blue Moon vehicle. If Ship isn't ready and Blue Moon is, NASA will presumably go with the latter on Artemis 3, putting the Blue Origin vehicle in pole position for the moon a year later.

Blue Moon has a lot of work to do as well, of course; it has yet to get off the ground. But that could change soon: Blue Origin plans to launch an uncrewed test flight to the lunar south pole with a prototype lander called Blue Moon Mark 1 later this year. It will launch on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, which is also facing its own hurdles. New Glenn's recent NG-3 launch suffered an upper-stage failure, leading to the loss of its satellite payload. Blue Origin will need to fix that issue before Blue Moon Mark 1 can fly.

What if Starship V3 doesn't work?

Failure on V3's debut launch could therefore be a big deal — especially if the fix requires significant modification of a key Starship system or subsystem. SpaceX needs to move quickly at this point in Starship's development and cannot afford many more long delays. (Getting V3 to the pad took a while; Starship hasn't flown since October 2025.)

A subpar flight could also have short-term financial consequences.

SpaceX is gearing up for its initial public offering next month, which is expected to value the company at a record $1.75 trillion or so. A catastrophic Starship failure in the leadup to the market debut could affect that valuation, given how central the vehicle is to SpaceX's future: The company has said that Starship will be its workhorse over the long haul, doing everything from satellite launches to crewed Mars missions to "point-to-point" transportation around Earth.

If SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk is nervous about V3's debut, however, he isn't showing it.

"The Starship production pipeline is full and will complete roughly 10 more ships and about half that number of boosters this year, so, if something goes wrong, it will not be a major setback, unless the launch stand is destroyed," Musk said on Monday (May 18) via X, the social media platform that he owns.

The tallest rocket ever built is now standing on its launch pad ahead of its next mission.

SpaceX is about to debut Version 3 (V3) of its giant Starship rocket, which is poised to launch on the vehicle's 12th test flight. The rocket's two halves, the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, were stacked yesterday (May 19) at the newly-built pad at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas. Starship V3 is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) on May 21.

You can watch the Flight 12 launch live on Space.com, and follow the mission live with our SpaceX Starship V3 Flight 12 launch updates.

It's the second time the two stages have been mated in the last several days, as SpaceX has rolled Ship to and from its Starbase hangar for extensive prelaunch checkouts and tests. Super Heavy has undergone its own assessments in recent weeks, including test firings of the booster's 33 Raptor 3 engines.

SpaceX shared photos of yesterday's Starship stack in a post on X, and conducted a final wet dress rehearsal on the vehicle, fully fueling both stages and running through a simulated launch countdown leading to the moments just before engine ignition. That was completed Wednesday (May 20).

Starship Flight 12 will be a suborbital launch, with soft landing splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean for Ship and Super Heavy, respectively, rather than a return to Starbase for recovery and reuse. Ultimately, SpaceX has designed Starship for full reusability, and has successfully recovered Super Heavies using the launch tower's "chopstick" arms to catch the booster in midair, but has not yet attempted a catch of the Ship upper stage. Though, depending on the outcome of this first V3 test flight, SpaceX could potentially attempt such a recovery on the upcoming Flight 13 or 14.

You can watch Starship Flight 12 live on May 21, with streams available on SpaceX's website, and also on Space.com beginning at 5:45 p.m. EDT (2145).

Starship V3 is a big upgrade from the vehicle's previous V2 and V1 designs, and features key components crucial for maturing the vehicle for operational missions, including docking ports for in-space refueling. That capability will be needed on future flights when Starship needs to fly beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), like for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions.

NASA has contracted SpaceX to use Starship as one of the Artemis lunar landers, and their deadline to have the vehicle ready is quickly approaching. Artemis 3 is planned for late 2027, and will launch NASA's Orion capsule with a crew of astronauts to rendezvous and dock with Starship in LEO to assess the spacecrafts' ability to link up in orbit. If that's successful, Starship is slated to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on Artemis 4, currently scheduled for 2028.

NASA has also contracted a lunar lander from Blue Origin. Their Blue Moon spacecraft is also expected to fly on Artemis 3 for its own tests with Orion, and, while NASA is hoping for the opportunity to launch the mission using both landers, the agency has said it's willing to fly with just one, if the other stalls in development.

Update for May 22, 7:48 pm ET: SpaceX successfully launched its first next-generation Starship V3 megarocket on a test flight from Starbase, Texas on May 22. Our wrap story will be posted shortly.

The Ship upper stage lost one engine but performed most of its planned objectives and landed in the Indian Ocean as planned. The Super Heavy booster failed to perform its boost back burn correctly and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, but it also was not planned to be recovered. See our latest Starship V3 launch updates

SpaceX's new "V3" Starship megarocket will fly for the first time ever today (May 22), and you can watch the highly anticipated action live.

Starship Version 3 — the biggest and most powerful iteration of the vehicle yet — is scheduled to debut Thursday with a suborbital test flight that lifts off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. An attempt to launch Starship on Thursday was called off due to a stuck pad hydraulic pin, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said.

Launch will occur during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company's website; coverage will start about 45 minutes before liftoff. You can follow the launch live with our SpaceX Starship V3 Flight 12 launch updates.

Though this will the first flight for V3, it will be the 12th overall for Starship. The giant rocket first launched in April 2023 on a suborbital test mission that ended in an explosion not long after liftoff.

SpaceX has made considerable progress since then. For example, the most recent two Starship missions — Flight 10 and Flight 11, which launched in August and October of last year, respectively — were completely successful, according to the company.

On both flights, Starship's Super Heavy booster steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket's upper stage, known as "Ship," successfully deployed payloads (eight dummy Starlink satellites in each case) and made a splashdown of its own in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

The goals are broadly the same for Flight 12, with a few twists. For instance, this time, Ship will aim to deploy 20 dummy Starlink craft as well as two "specially modified" real Starlink satellites.

"The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship's heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship's heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 12 mission description.

The entire suborbital test will take a little over an hour, if all goes to plan. Super Heavy's splashdown will occur about seven minutes after liftoff, with Ship following suit 58 minutes later.

There's a lot riding on Flight 12, and not just because it will be the first Starship launch in more than seven months. SpaceX is developing the giant vehicle to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks, and V3 is the first Starship iteration capable of making such trips.

So SpaceX is doubtless keen to see how the vehicle flies. And so is NASA, which picked Starship to be one of the two crewed landers for its Artemis program of moon exploration.

If all goes well with Flight 12 and subsequent test missions, Starship could launch on the Artemis 3 docking test in Earth orbit late next year, and then land astronauts near the lunar south pole on Artemis 4 in 2028. Or, those honors could go to Blue Origin's Blue Moon, the other private lander in the Artemis stable.

Editor's note: This story was updated on May 22, 2026 to reflect SpaceX's Starship V3 launch delay.

A worker died at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas early Friday morning (May 15), as the company geared up for the debut launch of its Starship V3 megarocket.

The death occurred around 4 a.m. local time on Friday, according to the San Antonio Express-News, which further reported that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is investigating the incident.

Local officials have not identified the deceased or provided details about the death. However, The Wall Street Journal talked to sources who said the person was employed by a contractor and died after a fall.

Starbase is the manufacturing, testing and launch hub for Starship, the fully reusable rocket that SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks. The vehicle, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Starbase is also one of the nation's newest cities; it became incorporated in May 2025, by a vote of 212 to 6.

Starbase has been quite busy lately, for SpaceX has been gearing up for a very important launch — the debut of Starship V3 (Version 3), an advanced, more powerful iteration of the rocket that's capable of reuse and deep-space flight. V3's maiden test flight will be the 12th overall for Starship, which began flying in fully stacked form in April 2023.

Starship V3 was originally supposed to launch from Starbase today (May 19), but SpaceX pushed the suborbital flight back twice in the past few days, most recently to Thursday evening (May 21). The company has not given a reason for the delays, nor has it publicly commented on the Friday death at Starbase.

Starbase has a higher worker-injury rate than any other SpaceX manufacturing or test site, according to TechCrunch, which performed an analysis in 2025 using OSHA data. And that rate is higher than the industry average, the outlet reported.

Starbase "logged injury rates that were almost 6x higher than the average for comparable space vehicle-manufacturing outfits and nearly 3x higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024," TechCrunch wrote. "That outsized injury rate has persisted since 2019, when SpaceX began sharing Starbase injury data with the federal regulator [OSHA]."

SpaceX is currently dealing with a worker-safety lawsuit — one filed by a truck driver, who says he was injured by liquid methane while delivering the rocket propellant to the company's McGregor test site, near Waco, in June 2024.

And, on a tangentially related note: More than 50 people who live near Starbase recently filed a federal suit claiming that Starship launches have damaged their homes.

Update for May 22, 7:48 pm ET: SpaceX successfully launched its first next-generation Starship V3 megarocket on a test flight from Starbase, Texas on May 22. Our wrap story will be posted shortly.

The Ship upper stage lost one engine but performed most of its planned objectives and landed in the Indian Ocean as planned. The Super Heavy booster failed to perform its boost back burn correctly and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, but it also was not planned to be recovered. See our latest Starship V3 launch updates

SpaceX will attempt to launch its biggest and most powerful Starship megarocket ever today (May 22), and if you're hoping to watch the launch live, we have the details you need to make sure you don't miss it.

Called Flight 12, the Starship mission will lift off from SpaceX's Starbase test site in the relatively new city of Starbase in South Texas. Liftoff is scheduled for Friday (May 22) during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local time). You can watch the Starship Flight 12 launch live on Space.com at the top of this page, and it live with our SpaceX Starship V3 Flight 12 launch updates.

As its name suggests, Flight 12 will be SpaceX's 12th test flight of Starship, the world's biggest and most powerful rocket. It will be the first launch of the new Starship V3 design of the megarocket, which features a host of upgrades to make the more than 400-foot-tall (121 meters) rocket more powerful and effective.

There has been a long gap since the last Starship launch, Starship Flight 11 in October. For comparison, SpaceX launched five Starship missions in 2025, but Flight 12 will be the first of 2026. SpaceX has a lot riding on this Starship V3 flight test. NASA has picked Starship to land its Artemis 4 astronauts on the moon in 2028, but SpaceX has yet to send a Starship into a full orbit around Earth since test flights began in 2023, let alone fly a vehicle capable of supporting an astronaut crew, in-orbit refueling, docking with an Orion capsule in orbit or landing on the lunar surface. Starship V3 is supposed to be the baseline for that vehicle.

What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 12 launch?

SpaceX is currently targeting Friday (May 22), for the launch of its Starship Flight 12 test flight, with liftoff scheduled for no earlier than 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT).

SpaceX is expected to have a 90-minute launch window for the flight, so Starship could fly any time between 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. EDT (2230 to 0000 May 22 GMT).

Now SpaceX did try to launch Starship Flight 12 on Thursday, but a stuck hydraulic pin on the launch pad prevented liftoff at the last minute, despite several attempts to restart. SpaceX hopes to fix that issue in time for today's launch try.

We are awaiting updates from SpaceX for possible additional backup launch dates for the test flight, but the launch date has already changed a bit. SpaceX originally announced a launch target of Tuesday, May 19, but pushed it back two days before the the first launch try.

Related: Read our SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy guide for a detailed look

Can I watch SpaceX's Starship Flight 12 launch?

Yes, you'll be able to watch the SpaceX's Starship V3 launch online, but you do have several options to pick from.

First, there's SpaceX (of course), which will provide live views of the launch — and likely tantalizing views from Starship itself — during a livestream that will begin 30 minutes before liftoff. So, starting at about 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT), you'll be able to watch SpaceX's Starship livestream on the Flight 12 mission page, as well as SpaceX's X account and the X TV app.

Space.com will simulcast the SpaceX Flight 12 launch webcast on this page, as well as an our homepage and YouTube channel.

If you want to tune in a bit earlier to the Starship Flight 12 countdown, you can follow NASASpaceflight's webcast on YouTube. This stream will begin at about 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT). NASASpaceflight has cameras all around the Starbase facility, and it will give live commentary during preflight activities, often including early looks at the Starship and Super Heavy vehicles before launch.

If you plan to watch the launch in person, please note that SpaceX does not have an official launch viewing site.

I often tell spectators to watch Starship launches from the Cameron Country Amphitheater in Isla Blanca Park, which is located on South Padre Island. The area offers a clear line of sight of Space's Starbase test site (as well as the boats sailing around Port Isabel, which is nice).

Speaking of Port Isabel, the shore region facing Starbase at the port can also be a good spot to watch the launch from. Traffic can be heavy near launch time, so I suggest arriving in the area several hours in advance.

How long is SpaceX's Starship Flight 12?

SpaceX's Starship Flight 12 will last just over an hour and is expected to follow a similar flight profile as its last mission, Flight 11. But as we mentioned above, Flight 12 is testing the new Version 3 of Starship, so the mission will demonstrate a series of new upgrades to the reusable launch system.

"The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time, with each element of the Starship architecture featuring significant redesigns to enable full and rapid reuse that incorporate learnings from years of development and test," SpaceX wrote in a mission overview.

This mission will mark the first Starship launch from SpaceX's Pad 2 at Starbase, which has been upgraded with shorter, faster capture arms for a smoother recovery of future Super Heavy boosters and Ship upper-stage vehicles. Super Heavy also has been modified to remove one of its previous four grid fins for control during reentry and landing, but the remaining three are now larger.

Ship has also been modified. You can see a full overview of the Starship V3 changes here.

SpaceX will not attempt a return to launch site landing and capture of either the Super Heavy booster or the Ship upper stage during Flight 12.

"As this is the first flight test of a significantly redesigned vehicle, the booster will not attempt a return to the launch site for catch," SpaceX wrote in the mission overview.

Instead, the Super Heavy booster will return to Earth to make a water landing off the coast of Starbase in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ship upper stage, meanwhile, will continue on a suborbital trajectory that will take it around the world to a landing and splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean.

While in space, Ship is expected to deploy 22 dummy Starlink satellites — a large increase from the eight or 10 simulated payloads on previous flights. Two of those dummy Starlinks are carrying cameras, SpaceX has said.

"The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions," SpaceX wrote. All 22 dummy Starlinks will burn up in Earth's atmosphere, as they will also fall from space over the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX has removed one heat shield tile to test aerodynamic stresses on nearby tiles when there's a gap. The company will also attempt to mimic the stresses on Starship during a return to launch site and landing during reentry.

"Finally, the ship will perform experimental actions tested on previous flight tests, including a maneuver to intentionally stress the structural limits of the vehicle’s rear flaps and a dynamic banking maneuver to mimic the trajectory that future missions returning to Starbase will fly," SpaceX wrote.

The Starship V3 vehicle is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere at the 47 minutes, 47 second mark of the flight, with its splashdown zone likely located off the coast of Western Australia about one hour and five minutes after liftoff.

What if Starship Flight 12 can't launch?

If SpaceX was unable to launch Starship V3 on the Flight 12 test flight, and will try again on Friday, May 22. In the past, the company has reserved at least two backup days for its Starship launches.

Last week, officials with Starbase, Texas, issued beach closures for Boca Chica Beach (near the launch site) only for Sunday, May 17, and Monday, May 18 — the days immediately ahead of the original planned liftoff on May 19. But those road closures were later revoked.

On Monday, May 18, Starbase officials issued a new road closure notice that indicated the area would blocked to the public from May 19 until May 21. The town has since issued a new beach closure for May 22, but no advisories beyond Friday's second attempt.

Visit Space.com on Starship V3 launch day for complete coverage of the Starship Flight 12 test flight.

Editor's note: This story was updated on May 22, 2026 to reflect SpaceX's Starship V3 launch delay.

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about Tuesday's (May 19) planned test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket.

For starters, it will be the first launch of Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — in nearly seven months. And, while the mission will be Starship's 12th overall, it will mark the debut of the advanced new V3 vehicle, which features a number of important modifications and upgrades compared to its predecessors. (That helps explain the long launch lacuna.)

Finally, while Starship will fly a familiar suborbital trajectory on Flight 12, it will do something completely new while it's up there — take a good, long look at itself.

The Flight 12 plan calls for Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, to deploy 22 dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband spacecraft. These will be "similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 12 mission description.

That's an important detail: SpaceX has said that one of Starship's main tasks when it comes online will be to finish building out the Starlink megaconstellation. (Other key jobs will be ferrying astronauts to the lunar surface for NASA's Artemis program and helping set up a colony on Mars.)

That number marks a considerable increase over previous Starlink flights, during which Ship has carried eight or 10 such mass simulators. And there's another important difference as well — the Flight 12 dummy-Starlink batch includes two inspector spacecraft.

"The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship's heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship's heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions," SpaceX wrote in the mission description. "Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test."

This focus on the heat shield should not come as much of a surprise. After all, protecting returning spacecraft from the intense heat and other rigors of atmospheric reentry is a tough task, as we learned in the leadup to NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission with all the discussion about the Orion capsule's heat shield.

And protecting Starship is far harder, given that the vehicle is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Each Orion capsule's heat shield has to do its job just once, but each Ship vehicle will eventually launch and return to Earth multiple times per day, if all goes according to plan.

Indeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has flagged Ship's heat shield, which consists of about 40,000 hexagonal tiles, as the biggest hurdle facing the vehicle at the moment.

"The single biggest remaining problem for Starship? It's having the heat shield be reusable," Musk said in February on the Dwarkesh Podcast.

"No one has ever made a reusable orbital heat shield," he added. "So, the heat shield's got to make it through the ascent phase without shucking a bunch of tiles, and then it's got to come back in and also not lose a bunch of tiles or overheat the main airframe."

Ship's heat shield has done its job before; the vehicle has survived the journey back to Earth and splashed down softly in the ocean on multiple previous test flights. But improvement will be needed to get Starship where SpaceX wants it to go, according to Musk.

Ship lost a lot of tiles during on those previous flights, so "it was not reusable without a lot of work," the world's richest person said on the podcast. "If you want to be able to land it, refill propellant and fly again, you can't do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing."

If all goes to plan on Tuesday, Starship's first stage, a giant booster called Super Heavy, will steer itself to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. (There will be no dramatic catch of the booster by the launch tower's "chopstick" arms, as we've seen on several previous flights.)

Ship, meanwhile, will splash down in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after launch, as it has done multiple times before. But we should get some new, in-space views of the heat shield before that, giving us some clues in real time about how the harrowing reentry may go.

You'll have to crane your neck just a little farther to look up at SpaceX's new Starship rocket.

The company is gearing up for the planned May 19 debut launch of Version 3 (V3) of Starship, which has undergone a complete design overhaul since its last liftoff seven months ago.

The first fully stacked Starship rocket, which flew the combined Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, launched in April 2023. Three years and 10 additional test flights later, SpaceX has introduced Starship V3 — the culmination of successes, failures and lessons learned over those 11 launches. The rocket's new, refined design is more powerful, more resilient and more capable than its antecedent iterations, and a step closer to a fully reusable launch vehicle.

Starship V3 will also launch from SpaceX's newest pad, the second the company has erected at its Starbase site in South Texas. The upgraded hardware is meant to mature Starship's design, moving the vehicle from test flights toward an operational architecture that can support the rapid reuse, high flight rates and orbital refueling necessary for missions like the ones Starship plans to fly for NASA's Artemis program, which will land astronauts on the moon.

V3 stands about 5 feet (1.5 meters) taller than previous Starship builds and packs a much heavier punch. Both stages —Super Heavy and Ship — have been equipped with SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engine — sleeker, more powerful and more reliable upgrades over the previous Raptor 2. For the Super Heavy booster, that means 33 engines firing with a combined thrust of over 18 million pounds at liftoff.

The V3 Super Heavy has three grid fins — lattice-like structures that help it steer back to Earth for pinpoint touchdowns — rather than the previous four, according to a May 12 SpaceX update. Each one is about 50% larger than before and situated lower on the booster's trunk to avoid heat from "hot-fire" staging procedures when separating from its Ship counterpart in flight. (A "hot stage" separation means Ship begins firing its engines before actually separating from Super Heavy). The vehicle's hot stage ring has also been redesigned and attached to the top of the booster; the Starship V2 hot stage ring was an interstage piece that detached from both vehicles and fell back to Earth during flight.

Inside Super Heavy, a redesigned fuel transfer tube that's now "roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage" will allow the booster's 33 Raptor 3s faster and simultaneous ignitions for launch and landing burns, according to the update. SpaceX also made changes to the aft end of the rocket that supports those engines to better protect the area from heat with tightened integration of its fuel transfer, power and computer systems.

The Ship upper stage has a list of upgrades as well, including plumbing and wiring layout changes in its own aft section, a larger propellant tank and an improved reaction control system. SpaceX also made significant improvements to how Ship handles cryogenic fuels, adding four docking ports along Starship's body and a dedicated system for managing cryogenic propellant in zero-g.

Storing the spacecraft's cryogenic propellants and transferring them between vehicles is a capability SpaceX has yet to attempt, but it's a critical technology for Starship's design. For Ship to fly beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), the spacecraft will require refueling missions using other Starships to top off its tanks. And it's an ability that SpaceX needs to demonstrate soon if it wants to meet NASA's timeline for landing astronauts on the moon (in late 2028, on the Artemis 4 mission, if all goes to plan).

SpaceX is one of two companies contracted to provide lunar landers for the Artemis program, and it needs to meet NASA's qualifications for crewed flights before astronauts can fly on board Starship. That includes the aforementioned cryogenic fuel challenges, as well as the completion of an uncrewed moon landing and launch back safely to lunar orbit, where, on an actual mission, it would rendezvous and transfer astronauts back aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft.

NASA is targeting late 2027 for the Artemis 3 mission, which will launch Orion to LEO to practice docking procedures with Starship and/or the Artemis program's other lander, Blue Origin's Blue Moon. NASA has indicated a willingness to fly with either or both landers, depending on their respective readiness when it comes time for the mission.

So there's a lot riding the upcoming debut flight of Starship V3. A successful mission would include the deployment of 22 Starlink mass simulator payloads, upgraded heat tile dispersion and testing (which involves cameras on two of the simulator payloads inspecting Ship's underside for missing or damaged tiles), an in-space relight of a Ship Raptor 3, various test maneuvers to stress Ship during reentry, and deceleration burns of both stages for soft, offshore landing splashdowns. It's a long list, and any setbacks could have deep implications for both SpaceX and NASA.

Starship launches could soon be an international affair.

SpaceX revealed on Tuesday (May 12) that it's hunting for additional launch sites for Starship, the giant rocket it's developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

And some of those sites may be on foreign shores. "It's no secret that we intend to launch Starship a lot, targeting thousands of flights per year. That cadence will require the ability to launch from many different locations, so we are constantly exploring to find viable sites to expand Starship operations in the future, both domestically and internationally," the company wrote via X on Tuesday.

Those words addressed a May 4 post by X user S.E. Robinson, Jr., which discussed a rumor that SpaceX plans to acquire 212 square miles (550 square kilometers) of land in coastal Louisiana.

"At the southeast corner of the land near the Freshwater City boat launch is a plot ready to be converted for port operations and direct access to the Intercoastal Canal and the Gulf of America," Robinson wrote.

He also noted that the plot is about halfway between Boca Chica, Texas and Cape Canaveral, Florida. Boca Chica is home to Starbase, SpaceX's Starship manufacturing hub and the sole current launch site for the megarocket. (All 11 Starship test flights to date have lifted off from Starbase.)

And SpaceX is modifying three pads in the Cape Canaveral area — Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Launch Complex 37-A and 37-B at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station — to accommodate Starship launches. The huge vehicle could lift off from the Sunshine State for the first time later this year, if all goes to plan.

Starbase sports two launch mounts, the second of which will see its first action as soon as next Tuesday (May 19), when Starship Flight 12 is scheduled to lift off.

That suborbital test flight will also mark the debut of Starship Version 3, a bigger and more advanced iteration of the megarocket. Starship V3 is the first variant capable of flying to the moon and other deep-space destinations, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.

That makes five Starship launch pads that are officially in the works at the moment. But if the company is serious about launching thousands of Starship missions per year — and Musk has said that type of cadence will be necessary to build settlements on Mars — then more jumping-off points will be needed, as SpaceX's May 12 tweet makes clear.

And it's important to note: It would be much easier, from a logistical and legal standpoint, to develop additional launch sites domestically than overseas. The U.S. government regards rockets as sensitive national-security technology and therefore subjects launches to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations framework, known as ITAR.

American companies wishing to fly from foreign soil therefore have to jump through a number of bureaucratic hoops. The process is streamlined via the signing of a Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) at the nation-to-nation level. So maybe we should be on the lookout for SpaceX purchases in countries like Norway, New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and Brazil, all of whom have inked TSAs with the U.S.

Indeed, American rockets already fly from New Zealand: The Land of the Long White Cloud hosts the primary launch site for California-based Rocket Lab, which operates Electron, the second-busiest launcher in the world (after SpaceX's Falcon 9).

Update for 7:51 p.m. ET: SCRUB! SpaceX has called off the attempted launch of its first Starship V3 megarocket due to a technical issue in the last minute before liftoff. The next launch attempt of Starship Flight 12 could occur on Friday, May 22, at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), SpaceX says. See our latest Starship V3 launch updates

SpaceX's advanced new Starship megarocket will fly for the first time a week from today, if all goes to plan.

SpaceX is targeting May 19 for the debut launch of its Starship V3 (Version 3), a bigger and more capable vehicle that could help humanity take its first steps on the moon and Mars, the company announced Tuesday (May 12).

The rocket will lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on May 19 during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). You'll be able to watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes.

This will be the 12th flight overall for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. But it will be the first for Starship V3, which SpaceX says boasts many improvements over its predecessors.

For example, the V3 Super Heavy first stage now has three grid fins — lattice-like structures that help the booster steer its way back to Earth for recovery and reuse — instead of the original four. And each fin is now 50% larger and significantly stronger, according to SpaceX.

"These fins include a new catch point and have been re-clocked on the booster to support vehicle lift and catch operations," the company wrote in an update today. "They have also been lowered to reduce heat exposure from Starship’s engines during hot-staging."

SpaceX made many other modifications to Super Heavy as well. For example, the "hot stage" that joins the booster to the Ship upper stage is now integrated into Super Heavy and will not be discarded during flight.

In addition, Super Heavy's "fuel transfer tube, which channels cryogenic fuel from the main tank to the 33 Raptor engines, has been completely redesigned and is now roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage," SpaceX wrote. "This new design enables all 33 engines to start up simultaneously and faster, more reliable flip maneuvers."

Ship has been altered significantly as well. For instance, V3 features a "clean-sheet redesign of its propulsion system" — changes that "enable a new Raptor startup method, increase propellant tank volume, and improve the reaction control system used for steering while in flight," according to SpaceX. "The propulsion updates also reduce contained volumes in the aft end of the vehicle that could trap propellant leakage."

The new upper stage also sports "propellant feed connections" to support off-Earth fuel transfer — an activity that each Starship will have to perform multiple times on deep-space missions.

V3 Starship is powered by the V3 Raptor, which is more powerful than previous iterations. And the coming maiden launch will also mark the debut of Starbase's Pad 2, which can fuel Starship faster and sports shorter booster-catching "chopsticks," among other modifications.

"Together, these new elements are designed to enable a step-change in Starship capabilities and aim to unlock the vehicle’s core functions, including full and rapid reuse, in-space propellant transfer, deployment of Starlink satellites and orbital data centers, and the ability to send people and cargo to the moon and Mars," SpaceX wrote in the update.

Despite all of these changes, Starship Flight 12 will be broadly similar to its predecessors, according to a mission description that SpaceX posted today.

It will send Ship eastward on a suborbital trajectory. About 17.5 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft will begin deploying 22 dummy Starlink V2 satellites, an activity that will wrap up about 10 minutes later. The last two of those dummy craft will collect imagery of Ship's heat shield, to inform the development of future missions. Ship will also relight one of its six Raptor engines in space — something it will need to do on operational flights.

If all goes to plan, Ship will splash down about 65 minutes after launch (presumably in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, as has been the norm).

Super Heavy, meanwhile, will steer itself to a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after launch. "As this is the first flight test of a significantly redesigned vehicle, the booster will not attempt a return to the launch site for catch," SpaceX wrote in the mission description, referring to a bold maneuver that Super Heavy has pulled off on multiple previous flights.

Anticipation is high for Flight 12, and not just because of all the upgrades that will see their first-ever action on the launch. Starship hasn't flown since October 2025, on a test flight that went entirely according to plan.

SpaceX has fueled up the new variant of its Starship megarocket for the first time ever, preparing for a crucial test flight that could launch in less than a week.

The company assembled a Starship Version 3 (V3) vehicle for the first time over the weekend, stacking a Ship upper stage atop a Super Heavy first-stage booster at its Starbase site in South Texas. That set a new record for the world's tallest rocket at about 408 feet (124.4 meters), besting Starship V2 by 4 feet (1.2 m).

Then, on Monday (May 11), SpaceX announced it had conducted a successful launch rehearsal with the vehicle, a milestone that centered on the loading of huge amounts of liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant.

"Launch rehearsal complete. During a flight-like countdown, more than 5,000 metric tonnes (11+ million pounds) of propellant were loaded on the fully stacked Starship and Super Heavy V3 vehicles for the first time," SpaceX wrote Monday in a post on X that featured four photos of the rehearsal.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, finish deploying its Starlink broadband megaconstellation and perform a wide variety of other spaceflight tasks.

The giant vehicle debuted in April 2023, on a test flight that ended in a dramatic explosion just a few minutes after liftoff. Starship has flown 10 more suborbital test missions since then, most recently in October 2025. The last two flights have been completely successful.

All 11 missions to date involved Starship V1 or V2. The upcoming Flight 12 will mark the debut of V3, the first Starship variant that's capable of exploring deep space.

So there's a lot riding on Flight 12, for both SpaceX and NASA. The space agency picked Starship to be one of the two crewed landers for its Artemis program of moon exploration, along with Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

One or both of those private landers could launch as soon as next year, on NASA's Artemis 3 mission to low Earth orbit. That flight will test rendezvous and docking operations using Artemis' Orion capsule and Starship and/or Blue Moon, agency officials have said.

If all goes well with Artemis 3, Artemis 4 will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole as early as late 2028. It's unclear which private vehicle will fly on that mission — likely whichever one is ready in time.

SpaceX has not yet announced a target date for Starship Flight 12, but the suborbital test could apparently launch as soon as next Monday (May 19). The company had already conducted "static fire" engine tests with both Ship and Super Heavy, clearing the way for Monday's launch rehearsal.

Starship will still need to tick a lot of boxes after that flight before it gets fully up and running. For example, the vehicle does not have a life-support system, and it has yet to reach orbit or demonstrate off-Earth propellant transfer.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:20 a.m. ET on May 12 with the new apparent launch target of May 19.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket may indeed get off the ground next week.

The company is apparently targeting May 15 for the test flight, which will be the 12th for Starship overall but the first for the new, more powerful "Version 3" of the giant vehicle.

SpaceX cleared a big hurdle on the path to liftoff on Thursday (May 7), conducting a static-fire test with Starship's Super Heavy first stage at its Starbase site in Texas. The company lit up all 33 of Super Heavy's Raptor engines while the booster remained anchored to the pad — and everything apparently went well.

"Full duration and full thrust 33-engine static fire with Super Heavy V3," SpaceX wrote in a Thursday post on X that shared two videos of the 14-second-long test. (One video is about a minute long, but it seems to be a slow-motion version of the trial.)

This was the first successful full-up static fire test for a V3 Super Heavy. SpaceX performed a 10-engine trial with the same booster in March and ramped up to a 33-engine test on April 15. Both of those static fires ended early, however, due to issues with ground equipment.

The Starship upper stage (known as "Ship") that will launch on Flight 12 already has a successful static fire under its belt: It ignited all six of its Raptors on April 14.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket in history. It stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall and can haul more than 100 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.

SpaceX is developing the huge vehicle to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks. And Starship is in NASA's plans as well; the agency picked Starship's upper stage to be one of the crewed landers for its Artemis program of moon exploration.

If all goes well, Ship will fly on the Artemis 3 mission in late 2027, perhaps along with the other private Artemis lunar lander — Blue Origin's Blue Moon. Artemis 3 will remain in Earth orbit, testing rendezvous and docking operations using the lander(s) and Artemis' Orion space capsule. (The first Artemis moon-landing mission will be Artemis 4, which is currently targeted to launch in late 2028.)

Starship has flown 11 suborbital test missions to date, the first occurring in April 2023 and the most recent in October 2025. The lengthy delay between flights 11 and 12 owes partly to a mishap involving the original Flight 12 Super Heavy, which was destroyed during a pressure test this past November.

Flight 12 will be suborbital as well, so there will be more boxes to check even if everything goes well on the upcoming test launch. Before it can fly an Artemis moon mission, for example, Starship will have to be outfitted with a life-support system and show that it can reach orbit and be refueled away from Earth.

SpaceX's powerful Falcon Heavy rocket flew for the first time in 18 months on Wednesday (April 29), and a sharp-eyed satellite was watching.

The Falcon Heavy launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, carrying the ViaSat-3 F3 communications satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit.

One of BlackSky's Gen-3 Earth-observing spacecraft chronicled the liftoff, snapping a stunning shot of the powerful rocket on the pad and another one showing it climbing in the cloudy Florida skies.

"At 07:29 local time, Gen-3 captured an extreme off-nadir twilight shot of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on the pad before again catching the vehicle in flight at 10:13, 38 seconds after launch, as it was traveling more than 400 miles per hour," BlackSky wrote in a Wednesday X post that shared the images. "With time-diverse imaging capabilities and flexible imaging modes, Gen-3 sees relevant activity at all hours of the day."

BlackSky is building out its Gen-3 constellation in low Earth orbit, having launched four of the spacecraft to date. The satellites are capable of resolving features as small as 13.8 inches (35 centimeters) on the ground below, according to BlackSky.

The Falcon Heavy is the second-most-powerful launcher in operation today, trailing only NASA's Space Launch System moon rocket. (SpaceX's Starship is far more powerful than either of them, but it's still in the development stage.)

Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018 and now has 12 flights under its belt, all of them successful. Wednesday's launch was the first for the rocket since October 2024, when it sent NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft to the Jupiter system.

SpaceX's brawny Falcon Heavy rocket just took to the sky for the first time in a year and a half.

A Falcon Heavy topped with the huge ViaSat-3 F3 communications satellite launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Wednesday (April 29), lifting off at 10:13 a.m. EDT (1413 GMT).

The 6.6-ton (6 metric tons) satellite is headed to geostationary orbit (GEO) which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. It will be deployed about five hours after launch, if all goes to plan.

Falcon Heavy employs three modified, strapped-together first stages of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. The central booster hosts an upper stage, which is integrated with the payload.

Together, these three boosters generate about 5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, making Falcon Heavy the second-most-powerful launcher in operation today. The leader is NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket, which generates 8.8 million pounds. (SpaceX's Starship creates a whopping 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, but it's still in development.)

Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018 with a test flight that launched SpaceX founder Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster into orbit around the sun. The rocket has since flown 10 more missions, every one of them successful.

But it's been a while since Falcon Heavy breathed fire: It last launched in October 2024, sending NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft toward the Jupiter system.

As its name suggests, ViaSat-3 F3 is the third ViaSat-3 satellite to reach space. ViaSat-3 F1 did so atop a Falcon Heavy in April 2023, and ViaSat-3 F2 followed suit in November 2025 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V.

The satellites operate in geostationary orbit. At that altitude, orbital velocity matches our planet's rotational speed, allowing spacecraft to "hover" over the same patch of real estate continuously. ViaSat-3 F3's envisioned patch is a big one: The satellite will provide high-throughput broadband service to customers throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

ViaSat-3 F1 currently provides service to customers aboard airliners, and ViaSat-3 F2 will serve people in the Americas when it comes online next month. ViaSat-3 F3 rounds out the ViaSat-3 mini-constellation.

"This launch marks a pivotal moment in our journey to bring fast, secure and reliable high capacity, highly flexible broadband to our commercial, defense and consumer customers," Dave Abrahamian, ViaSat's vice president of space systems, said in a company statement earlier this month.

The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters returned for landing at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station about eight minutes after launch on Wednesday, touching down at SpaceX's landing facilities downrange from the rocket's KSC launch pad. In line with the mission's flight profile, the central booster was not recovered, and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean when its work was done.

SpaceX originally planned to launch this mission on Monday (April 27) but was foiled by bad weather.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:30 a.m. ET with news of launch and the two side booster landings.

The new, juiced-up version of SpaceX's Starship megarocket just cleared a big hurdle on the path to its first-ever launch.

That liftoff, targeted for early or mid-May, will be the 12th overall for Starship but the first for the vehicle's "Version 3," which is bigger and more powerful than its predecessors.

On Tuesday evening (April 14), SpaceX announced that it had conducted a static-fire test with a Starship V3 upper stage, lighting its engines while the vehicle stayed anchored to the pad.

"Full-duration static fire for the first time on Starship V3," the company wrote via X.

The milestone came four weeks after the first static fire of a Starship V3 first stage, a trial that involved just 10 of the booster's 33 Raptor engines and ended early due to an issue with ground equipment.

When stacked, Starship V3 stands 408.1 feet (124.4 meters) tall — about 4 feet (1.2 m) taller than its immediate predecessor, the V2.

The V3 is also much more powerful, thanks to its new V3 Raptor engines. This latest Starship variant can carry more than 100 tons to low Earth orbit, compared to about 35 tons for the V2, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.

Starship has flown 11 suborbital test missions to date, most recently in October 2025. The five latest launches were performed by the V2.

SpaceX is working to get the megarocket ready for astronaut missions to the moon; NASA selected Starship to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program.

The agency's Artemis 2 mission just sent four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth. NASA is now gearing up for Artemis 3, which will test docking operations in Earth orbit between the agency's Orion capsule and one or both of Artemis' contracted moon landers — Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

Artemis 3 is targeted to launch in mid-2027. If all goes well with that mission, Artemis 4 will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole in late 2028, aboard either Starship or Blue Moon.

Astronomers are up in arms, protesting against a proposed constellation of tens of thousands of orbiting mirrors intended to reflect light onto ground-based solar power plants and SpaceX's envisioned one million orbiting data centers.

The projects, which have been put forward to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval, would destroy the night sky as we know it and obscure the views of astronomical telescopes all over the world, hampering scientific progress, according to experts.

"This is really intolerable," Robert Massey, the deputy executive director at the British Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), told Space.com. "It's absolutely the destruction of a central part of human heritage."

RAS, the oldest astronomical society in the world, has joined the growing army of research institutions filing objections to the FCC against the proposals by SpaceX and California-based startup Reflect Orbital.

SpaceX announced its plans to launch one million data centers to space in January. The company's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, said on X at that time that moving power-hungry computing infrastructure into space is necessary to fully unleash the powers of AI. Reflect Orbital, founded by former SpaceX intern Ben Nowack, has ambitions to launch 50,000 orbiting mirrors into space, each one about 180 feet (55 meters) wide.

If those plans were to pass, the sky as humankind has known it for millions of years would change beyond recognition.

"If you have a direct view of this, it would be several times as bright as the full moon," said Massey. "That's extraordinarily bright."

Even if seen at an angle, the orbiting mirror would be as bright as Venus, the brightest object in the night sky after the moon.

"Imagine a stream of satellites with that kind of magnitude crossing the sky," said Massey. "It would absolutely transform our view of the sky."

Add to that the million proposed SpaceX data centers, which, although dimmer, would also be visible to the naked eye. Due to the vast size of these planned constellations, there would be thousands of shining dots as bright as stars criss-crossing the firmament at any given moment.

Massey estimates the sky would become up to three times brighter as a result of the vast quantity of Reflect Orbital's sun-reflecting mirrors. That brightening would affect the entire planet, including remote locations that are now considered dark sky sanctuaries, where astronomers build their sky-observing machines.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO), an international astronomy research organization that operates some of the world's largest telescopes, has also filed objections against the two proposals.

ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut told Space.com that the Very Large Telescope in Chile would lose up to 10% of pixels in every image if SpaceX's one million orbiting data centers were to materialize. That number could rise to up to 30% for some kinds of observations.

"That's a huge loss," Hainaut said. "We keep our technical losses below 3%, and the total weather losses are about 10%."

The overall increase in sky brightness caused by the Reflect Orbital mirror constellation would mean astronomers would have to triple exposure times when taking images.

"We wouldn't be able to observe our faint targets anymore," Hainaut said. "It would be disastrous."

Fabio Felchi, a light pollution researcher at Istituto Superiore "Enrico Fermi"​ Mantova in Italy, told Space.com that "the only option we have to save the starry night as it was for billions of years is to put a limit on the total number of satellites in orbit."

He added that a safe limit has already been passed and called for "a red-line policy on this, as there is for most other pollutants."

Noelia Noel, an astrophysicist at the University of Surrey in the U.K., said that the two proposals "mark a critical moment in how we manage humanity's presence in space."

"While innovation in satellite technology brings clear societal benefits, scaling to hundreds of thousands or even millions of bright objects — or deliberately illuminating the Earth from orbit — risks fundamentally altering the night sky," she said. "This would have profound consequences not only for astronomy but also for ecosystems, our cultural heritage, and our collective relationship with the cosmos."

Some worry that the FCC is in favor of those proposals, as it's fast-tracking their evaluation without expecting the companies to carry out environmental impact assessments, astronomer and dark sky consultant John Barentine previously told Space.com.

"The presumption now is that the application should be approved and that it should be up to the people who might object to prove that there's a problem of some kind," said Barentine. "The fact that they have fast-tracked this application, which has potentially tremendous effects not only for astronomy but for the environment too, and to do so without engaging in a full environmental review, is worrisome."

SpaceX's biggest, most powerful Starship to date just breathed fire for the first time.

On Monday (March 16), the company conducted a static fire test with Starship's "Super Heavy" first stage, briefly igniting the booster's engines while the vehicle remained anchored to Pad 2 at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.

It was the first-ever static fire for a Version 3 (V3) vehicle — the latest iteration of Starship, which SpaceX is developing to help humanity put boots on the moon and Mars. The test broke ground in another way as well: It was the first to occur at Pad 2, which will double Starbase's launch capacity when it comes online.

"Initial Super Heavy V3 and Starbase Pad 2 activation campaign complete, wrapping up several days of testing that loaded cryogenic fuel and oxidizer on a V3 vehicle for the first time," SpaceX wrote via X on Wednesday (March 18), in a post that shared four photos of the Super Heavy, known as Booster 19, on the pad.

That post also revealed that the static fire involved just 10 engines and "ended early due to a ground-side issue." The next step will be a static fire with Booster 19's full complement of 33 Raptor engines, 23 of which still need to be installed.

Monday's operation was part of the leadup to Starship's 12th-ever test flight, which SpaceX wants to launch in early to mid-April. That mission will be the first ever for a V3 vehicle. Booster 19 will fly with a Starship upper stage called Ship 39, which recently passed a key "cryoproofing" test at Starbase's Massey site.

Starship V3 is slightly taller than V2 — 408.1 feet (124.4 meters) vs. 403.9 feet (123.1 m). Thanks to its new V3 Raptor engine, the latest variant is also significantly more powerful: It can haul more than 100 tons to low Earth orbit, compared to about 35 tons for Starship V2, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.

V3 is also the first iteration of the megarocket capable of journeying to the moon and Mars. But there are a number of boxes to check before it can attempt to do so — reaching Earth orbit successfully, for example, and demonstrating the ability to top up its fuel tanks away from our planet.

SpaceX's plan to launch one million orbiting data centers to space worries astronomers,who say the satellite streaks caused by the proposed constellation would severely impair observations.

Just as astronomers began to learn how to coexist with broadband megaconstellations in low Earth orbit (LEO), such as SpaceX's Starlink, a new threat has emerged, causing significant concerns. Elon Musk's envisioned constellation of one million orbital data centers would result in possibly tens of thousands of moving objects as bright as stars that are visible in the night sky at any given moment, even to the naked eye, according to astronomer and dark sky consultant John Barentine.

Barentine spoke to Space.com on behalf of a group of astronomers who are raising objections against SpaceX's application to launch the constellation, which the company filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Jan. 30.

Starlink currently consists of around 10,000 satellites. Those spacecraft are visible to the naked eye only shortly after launch, because they dim as they raise their orbital altitude. The Starlinks still leave streaks in telescope images, but SpaceX has, after consultations with the astronomy community, managed to reduce the satellites' brightness by using less reflective materials and tilting reflective components like solar panels away from Earth. The brightness of newer Starlink satellites dropped to just above the limit recommended by the International Astronomical Union to prevent interference with astronomical observations. SpaceX's new data-center plan, however, threatens to thwart this progress, according to Barentine.

"It really feels like it's undermining what we have achieved in the last few years, which wasn't ideal for astronomy, but was a far cry from what we feared in 2019 when the Starlink program began," he told Space.com. "We felt we were heading in the right direction that was reasonably sustainable. And this feels like a complete reversal of that."

According to some estimates, each of the orbiting data centers could be up to 330 feet (100 meters) long, circling Earth at altitudes between 310 miles and 1,243 miles (500 to 2000 kilometers) pole to pole with a constant exposure to sunlight.

"The other constellations that we have dealt with so far are mostly at lower altitudes and in lower-inclination orbits," Barentine said. "That means the satellites spend most of their time in Earth's shadow. We really don't see them very much in the middle of the night, or they are not that bright. But the data centers will be in high-inclination orbits and will be fully illuminated by sunlight even as seen from the ground at midnight."

Barentine described the proposal as a "vastly different prospect" compared to all other existing and planned constellations.

"This is a challenge unlike any we have encountered thus far in this new era of commercial space," he said.

The development comes just as the astronomical world brings online some of the most powerful sky-observing machines of all time, designed to push the limits of the human understanding of the universe. These big ground-based scopes, including the $10 billion Vera Rubin Observatory, opened last year, or the $2 billion Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in Chile, will have their observations severely obstructed by those satellites.

"We could schedule our observations so that we aren't looking in the direction of the satellite when it's passing or close the shutter in front of our cameras and reopen it later on," said Barentine. "But at some point, the amount of time the shutter is closed starts degrading your observations. And I worry that, with more than a million objects, the shutter would be closed more than it would be open."

In addition, Barentine and his colleagues estimate that, with the expected rate of replacement of the constellation's satellites with newer technology, one old spacecraft would be burning up in Earth's atmosphere every three minutes. This mass incineration of metal would result in a steep increase in concentrations of potentially dangerous pollutants such as aluminum oxide and lithium in the upper atmosphere, which could lead to ozone depletion and temperature changes.

Currently, about three old satellites or used rocket bodies perish in the atmosphere every day. Further air pollution would come from the frequent rocket launches needed to deploy and maintain the constellation. The project would also increase the risk of space debris strikes on Earth, the astronomers say.

The researchers are even more concerned about the development because the FCC put the application on a fast-track path, meaning SpaceX won't need to conduct an environmental impact assessment of the project.

Barentine explained that, while in the past applicants had to prove that a development would not cause significant environmental harm, the fast-track process means it is now up to those objecting to a development to conduct those frequently time-consuming analyses to prove their case.

"The presumption now is that the application should be approved and that it should be up to the people who might object to prove that there's a problem of some kind," said Barentine. "The fact that they have fast-tracked this application, which has potentially tremendous effects not only for astronomy but for the environment too, and to do so without engaging in a full environmental review, is worrisome."

The objectors had only until March 6 to submit their documentation, putting further pressure on the astronomers, according to Barentine.

SpaceX didn't respond to Space.com's request for comment.

The first-ever launch of SpaceX's upgraded Starship rocket is about a month away, CEO Elon Musk says.

The company has been prepping "Version 3" of Starship for a while now, and is targeting early April for the rocket's debut test launch, which will be the 12th overall for the Starship program. "Starship V3 first flight in about 4 weeks," Musk said in a March 7 post on X.

The V3 upgrade makes significant changes to Starship's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage. Both are slightly taller than their predecessors and produce stronger, more efficient thrust using SpaceX's upgraded Raptor 3 rocket engine. Previous Starship iterations were already the biggest and most powerful rockets ever to launch, and V3 will continue to up the ante.

Starship V2 wrapped up its tenure during the Flight 11 launch last October. The mission continued a bounceback from a rocky start to 2025 for the rocket, which saw the Ship upper stage explode during its first three missions that year, in January, March and May. The final two Starship flights last year were deemed complete successes, but SpaceX hit another speed bump during its testing and preparations with V3 rocket hardware.

The first V3 Super Heavy booster suffered an accident on SpaceX's test stand in November, delaying the upgraded model's debut by several months as another booster was assembled. In the meantime, SpaceX has nearly completed construction on the second launch pad at its Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas, where the company plans to begin test operations on the Flight 12 booster "in the coming days," the company said in a March 9 post on X.

The V3 Starship upper stage for Flight 12, dubbed Ship 39, also recently completed a round of tests to qualify the vehicle before its upcoming launch.

"Across several days, engineers tested the vehicle’s redesigned propellant system and its structural strength, including squeeze tests to mimic the forces of future ship catches," SpaceX said in a March 7 post on X.

Starship is the first-ever launch vehicle designed for full reusability. Its Super Heavy booster has completed three returns to its Starbase pad, where the chopstick-like arms of SpaceX's "Mechazilla" launch towercatch the booster out of the air. The completion of the site's second pad and tower gives SpaceX the option to return Ship as well, for the upper stage's first-ever mid-air catch and recovery.

The ability to land and relaunch Starship is critical for SpaceX, which is contracted to design a version of the Ship upper stage as the lunar lander for NASA's Artemis program. The company had originally been tasked with providing a Starship lander for a crewed mission to the moon on Artemis 3 in 2028, but a recent shakeup of NASA's Artemis mission roadmap has tightened that timeline.

NASA now plans to launch Artemis 3 in 2027. The mission will fly to low Earth orbit, where Orion, the Artemis crew capsule, will conduct rendezvous and docking maneuvers with either or both Artemis lunar landers.

In addition to Starship, NASA selected Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface on future Artemis missions. And, as part of the Artemis restructuring, NASA has indicated a willingness to fly Orion with whichever lander is available when Artemis 3 is ready to launch. Should only one of those vehicles be space-worthy when the time comes, it's likely its competitor will miss out on the opportunity to perform the program's first crewed landing, which is now expected on Artemis 4.

Last week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk advised workers at the newly acquired company xAI that he wants to set up a factory on the moon to build artificial intelligence (AI) satellites. And he called for a colossal catapult on the lunar surface to fling them into space.

"My estimate is that, within two to three years, the lowest-cost way to generate AI compute will be in space," Elon Musk wrote in a Feb. 2 update that announced SpaceX's acquisition of xAI.

He reinforced that belief on Feb. 11 in an all-hands meeting with xAI staff, video of which the company posted on X. Musk said that, while launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, SpaceX's new Starship megarocket will also enable operations on other worlds.

Moon cargo

"Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer," Musk wrote in the Feb. 2 update, "Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the moon. Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits."

Factories on the moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them into space, Musk added.

"By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing," he wrote, "it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year [terawatts per year] of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the sun’s power."

Mass drivers

Musk isn't the first person to propose the use of mass drivers — which are basically railguns — on the moon. He's following in the footsteps of space visionary Gerard O'Neill, who floated the idea back in 1974.

"Mass drivers" based on a coilgun design can be adapted to accelerate a non-magnetic object. One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers: toss baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the moon into space. Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar power satellites.

O'Neill worked on mass drivers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with colleague Henry Kolm and a group of student volunteers to construct their first mass driver prototype.

Backed by grants from the Space Studies Institute, later prototypes improved on the concept, showing that a mass driver only 520 feet (160 meters) long could boost material off the lunar surface.

Kolm, O'Neil, and the student researchers demonstrated a laboratory system that they believed could scale to an operational lunar mass driver several kilometers long to deliver 600,000 tons per year to one of the Earth-moon Lagrange points.

Superior choice

Robert Peterkin of General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems bolstered the promise of lunar-based mass drivers more recently. In 2023, he filed a report to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) titled "Lunar Electromagnetic Launch for Resource Exploitation to Enhance National Security and Economic Growth."

"A modern electromagnetic launcher is a superior choice, because it can use abundant solar energy as a prime energy source instead of importing chemical rocket fuel from Earth," Peterkin told Space.com.

"The U.S. government should fund an evolution of the existing electromagnetic aircraft launch system, now operating reliably on the U.S. Navy's Gerald R. Ford nuclear aircraft carrier, to achieve higher speed, at lower mass, for reliable lunar launch," said Peterkin.

Lunar ecosystem

"Undoubtedly, the first spiral of a development cycle for a lunar ecosystem will rely on supply of machinery, structures and supporting systems from the Earth," Peterkin wrote in his AFOSR report.

"A SpaceX Starship with the ability to deliver 100 metric tons to the lunar surface will be a true enabler," he added. "SpaceX and NASA are developing plans to establish a lunar base of operations, and we recommend that this base be selected to allow for a reliable and enabling lunar electromagnetic launch system."

Underscored in the 30-page document is that the moon is rich in useful resources, including silicon, titanium, aluminum and iron. The prospect of tapping into lunar water also looms large.

"A not-too-distant future lunar economy will make use of these lunar resources to resupply, repair and refuel spacecraft in lunar orbit at lower cost than delivering terrestrial resources from Earth's deep gravitational well," Peterkin wrote in the report.

Elon Musk has always been locked in on Mars.

The world's richest man has repeatedly said that he founded SpaceX back in 2002 primarily to help settle the Red Planet. Indeed, the company's website places Mars front and center, explaining why the fourth rock from the sun is the best target for human exploration and expansion.

Musk has generally been dismissive of our other off-Earth option, the moon. Just 13 months ago, for example, he stressed that SpaceX will go "straight to Mars," declaring Earth's natural satellite "a distraction."

But over the weekend, Musk threw us a curveball, announcing that SpaceX is now centering its settlement plans on the moon — at least in the short term.

"For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years," the billionaire wrote on Sunday afternoon (Feb. 8) via X, the social media platform he bought in 2022.

"The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars," he added. "It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a moon city than a Mars city."

Must hinted at this shift last week, in a lengthy update detailing SpaceX's plans to operate a million-strong constellation of data-center satellites in Earth orbit.

The vehicle that will launch all of these satellites is Starship, the fully reusable megarocket that SpaceX has been developing to achieve its off-Earth settlement goals. In that Feb. 2 update, Musk stressed Starship's lunar potential.

"Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the moon," he wrote.

"Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits," Musk added. "Factories on the moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 [terawatts]/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the sun's power."

(The Kardashev scale, named after the Soviet scientist who came up with it in 1964, classifies civilizations based on the amount of energy they can control. A Type I civilization can harness all of its home planet's power; a Type II can exploit the entirety of its star's energy, via a Dyson sphere or other such structure; and a Type III has its entire galaxy's output at its fingertips. Humanity has not even made it to Type I yet.)

But the off-Earth data-center aspect is a mere "bonus element" of the new moon-focused strategy, Elon Musk stressed in an X post on Monday (Feb. 9).

"The priority shift is because I'm worried that a natural or manmade catastrophe stops the resupply ships coming from Earth, causing the colony to die out," he wrote. "We can make the moon city self-growing in less than 10 years, but Mars will take 20+ years due to the 26-month iteration cycle. That is what matters most."

And SpaceX hasn't given up on Mars settlement. In other X posts over the past few days, Musk has emphasized that the new plan just pushes the timeline back a bit.

"Mars will start in 5 or 6 years, so will be done in parallel with the moon, but the moon will be the initial focus," he wrote on Monday morning. In another recent post, he said that a crewed Mars flight could happen in 2031.

While the settlement focus on the moon is new, SpaceX has been working toward a crewed lunar mission for about five years now. In April 2021, NASA announced that it had selected Starship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent, sustained human presence on and around the moon by 2030 or so.

If all goes according to plan, Starship will deliver astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time on the Artemis 3 mission, which is currently expected to launch in 2028. But that timeline assumes success on Artemis 2, which will launch four people around the moon and back to Earth as soon as next month.

It also assumes that Starship will be ready, which certainly cannot be taken for granted. The giant rocket has flown 11 test flights to date, all of them suborbital, so there are a lot of development boxes left to check.

Starship still needs to ace an orbital mission, for example, and show that it can be refueled off Earth. (Each Starship lunar mission will require multiple "tanker" flights — perhaps 10 or 12 of them — to fill the vehicle with propellant for the long journey to the moon.)

Last fall, then-NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy voiced concern with the pace of Starship's development, announcing that he planned to open SpaceX's moon-landing contract up to competition from other companies, such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

That threat may have died down, given that Duffy no longer leads NASA; billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has flown to Earth orbit twice with SpaceX, is now the agency's chief. But competition is still very much in the air; Blue Origin recently announced that it's pausing its suborbital space tourism flights for at least two years to work on getting humans to the moon.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket will get off the ground again in mid-March, if all goes according to plan.

The company plans to launch Starship's next test flight in six weeks, Elon Musk said Sunday (Jan. 25) via X, the social media platform he bought in October 2022 (when it was still known as Twitter).

The flight will be the 12th overall for Starship but the first of the bigger, more powerful "Version 3" (V3) iteration of the vehicle.

SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity colonize Mars.

The giant vehicle consists of two elements: a booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship. Both stages are designed to be fully reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX's Raptor engine.

Starship debuted in April 2023 and now has 11 suborbital test flights under its belt, five of which occurred last year. The most recent two, which lifted off on Aug. 26 and Oct. 13, were completely successful, but there was a hiccup in the leadup to Flight 12: The Super Heavy originally slated for the mission buckled during testing in November, forcing SpaceX to get another booster ready.

Flight 12 will mark the debut of Starship V3, which is slightly taller than V2 — 408.1 feet (124.4 meters) vs. 403.9 feet (123.1 m) — but considerably more powerful. V3 can loft more than 100 tons of payload to low Earth orbit, compared to about 35 tons for V2, according to Musk.

The increased brawn comes courtesy of Raptor 3, a new variant of the engine that will fly for the first time on the upcoming test mission.

Flight 12 will be a pretty big deal, because Starship V3 is the first iteration of the megarocket that's capable of flying to Mars. If things go well with this and other upcoming test missions — which must demonstrate key capabilities such as reaching Earth orbit and in-space refueling — SpaceX could potentially launch a small fleet of uncrewed Starship V3 vehicles to the Red Planet late this year, Musk has said.

SpaceX launched the first mission of 2026 tonight (Jan. 2).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California tonight at 9:09 p.m. EST (6:09 p.m. local California time; 0209 GMT on Jan. 3), carrying an Italian Earth-observing satellite to orbit.

The rocket's first stage landed back at Vandenberg as planned about 8.5 minutes after liftoff. It was the 21st flight for this particular booster, according to SpaceX.

About 4.5 minutes later, the Falcon 9's second stage deployed the payload — a COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation satellite — into low Earth orbit for the Italian Space Agency and the Italian Ministry of Defence.

The spacecraft will study Earth using synthetic aperture radar, gathering data at all times of day and in all weather conditions from an altitude of 385 miles (620 kilometers).

COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation is a small network designed to "monitor the Earth for the sake of emergency prevention, strategy, scientific and commercial purposes, providing data on a global scale to support a variety of applications," according to a European Space Agency explainer.

Among those applications are "risk management, cartography, forest & environment protection, natural resources exploration, land management, defense and security, maritime surveillance, food & agriculture management," the explainer adds.

Three COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation satellites have now launched to date. The first one flew in December 2019 atop a Soyuz rocket, and the second lifted off in January 2022 on a Falcon 9.

Tonight's liftoff was the first of 2026 not just for SpaceX but for the global launch community.

It's no surprise that SpaceX is breaking in the year. Elon Musk's company launched a whopping 165 orbital missions in 2025 — far more than any other entity, either commercial or governmental. That was also a record for SpaceX, which the company may aim to break again this year.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:25 p.m. ET on Jan. 2 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and satellite deployment.

Surprise, surprise: SpaceX shattered its single-year launch record again in 2025.

Elon Musk's company has now set a new mark six years in a row, and the numbers are getting pretty silly. The record has risen from 25 orbital liftoffs in 2020 to 31 (2021) to 61 (2022) to 96 (2023) to 134 (2024) and, now, to a whopping 165. And that's not including five non-orbital Starship test flights by SpaceX.

That's a launch almost every other day, a staggering cadence that leaves other companies — and entire nations — in the dust. Indeed, SpaceX launched nearly twice as many orbital missions as China did this year, and the company's 2025 output represented about 85% of the United States' total tally.

All 165 of those launches were conducted by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, which features a reusable first stage. (There were no liftoffs by the powerful Falcon Heavy, which hasn't flown since October 2024.) And those Falcon 9 boosters came back to Earth for a safe landing on all but three occasions.

Two of the exceptions were launches in January and October that sent massive Spainsat NG communications satellites to geostationary transfer orbit. These were heavy lifts for the Falcon 9 first stage, which didn't have enough fuel left over for a return to Earth.

The other non-landing was a failed attempt, suffered during the launch of a batch of Starlink internet satellites on March 3. The booster actually touched down successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean as planned that day, but it tipped over after a fire broke out near its base and damaged a landing leg.

Speaking of Starlink missions: They dominated SpaceX's manifest this year, making up 123 of the 165 Falcon 9 launches. Together, those missions lofted more than 3,000 satellites for the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 9,300 active spacecraft.

SpaceX notched a number of other milestones during this very busy year. For example, the company pulled off its 500th rocket landing and 500th launch of a used rocket in 2025. And it repeatedly extended the record for most launches by a single Falcon 9 booster, which currently stands at 32.

The 165 Falcon 9 missions weren't SpaceX's only liftoffs this year, though. The company also launched five suborbital test flights of Starship, a fully reusable vehicle that's the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX lost at least one of the megarocket's two stages during the first three Starship flights of the year, but the most recent two, in August and October, were unalloyed successes.

We should see a lot more Starship action in 2026, including the stainless-steel vehicle's first orbital flight — and maybe, if things go exceedingly well, an uncrewed trip to Mars.

Correction: An earlier version of this story initially reported the number of SpaceX's orbital launches as 167 in 2025. It has been corrected to 165, per the company's records.

NASA finally has an official, permanent leader.

The U.S. Senate voted today (Dec. 17) 67-30 to confirm billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman as the new NASA administrator, ending more than a year of uncertainty as the space agency has followed marching orders from temporary chiefs

Isaacman, 42, is the billionaire founder of the payment-processing company Shift4. He's also an astronaut and sponsor of Polaris, a privately funded spaceflight program chartering SpaceX launches to orbit. Two of those missions have launched to date with Isaacman in the commander's seat, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn, which made history as the first private astronaut mission to Earth orbit and the first flight to feature a civilian spacewalk, respectively.

Though some members of Congress have expressed concerns about Isaacman's relationship with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, citing the potential for bias or favoritism, Isaacman's nomination has been favorably received by much of the space community.

Or nominations, rather, for there have been two of them. Donald Trump first tapped Isaacman for the top NASA job in December 2024, when he was still president-elect. Isaacman sat for a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in April, which advanced his nomination to the full Senate, but lawmakers didn't get the chance to vote. Trump abruptly withdrew Isaacman's nomination in late May, halting the confirmation process and leaving NASA with an indefinite acting administrator.

At the time, that position was held by Kennedy Space Center Director Janet Petro. In July, however, with no prospects for a new NASA administrator nomination on the horizon, Trump handed the role to Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has remained in the acting administrator position ever since.

Trump's reversal on Isaacman came amidst a public falling out between the president and Musk, with Trump posting on his social media site Truth Social that he hadn't realized Isaacman was "a blue-blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before."

Isaacman came back into the spotlight again in early November, when a Politico report exposed a 62-page document, known as "Project Athena," that outlines Isaacman's vision for NASA. After it was made public, Isaacman called the document a tentative list of "ideas, thoughts on the direction of the agency" and how it might operate in a leaner, more efficient way. Trump renominated Isaacman for NASA chief on Nov. 4 (a day after the Politico report published), which paved the way for his official appointment today.

President Trump's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal slashed NASA's budget by nearly 25% and cut the agency's science funding by 47%. When pressed during his two Senate nomination hearings this year, Isaacman voiced support for much of the administration's space agenda, including landing astronauts back on the moon before China does so and sending humans to Mars. Isaacman also indicated his commitment to spend NASA's funds as directed. It's still unclear what that budget will be; Congress aims to restore NASA funding to previous years' levels, though a final appropriations bill has yet to be passed.

"Mr. Isaacman emphasized the importance of developing a pipeline of future scientists, engineers, researchers, astronauts, to support the science and technology development and align with NASA's objectives," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said before lawmakers began their roll call vote this afternoon, in a statement that announced her support for his confirmation. "I look forward to working with administrator Isaacman on the future STEM talent with both NASA and more broadly, with the aerospace and innovation sector."

SpaceX intends to go public in 2026 and will seek a valuation of $1.5 trillion, according to media reports.

Elon Musk's company has been private since its founding in March 2002. Over the past six days, however, speculation has swirled that SpaceX will hold an initial public offering (IPO) next year, offering investors the chance to buy shares for the first time.

The Wall Street Journal and The Information first reported this plan last Friday (Dec. 5), and other outlets soon followed up. For example, a Bloomberg story on Tuesday (Dec. 9) suggested that SpaceX will seek a valuation of $1.5 trillion, which would make it one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world. The IPO, which is apparently targeted for mid- to late 2026, could raise a record $30 billion or more.

On Wednesday (Dec. 10), Ars Technica's Eric Berger posted a story confirming the IPO rumors and offering an explanation for the move: SpaceX wants to raise money to pay for the buildout of data centers in space, which Musk and a growing number of people believe will be a key enabler of the coming AI revolution.

"Foremost among Musk's goals right now is to 'win' the battle for artificial intelligence. He is already attacking the problem at xAI and Tesla, and he now seeks to throw SpaceX into the fray as well," Berger wrote. "Taking SpaceX public and using it to marshal an incredible amount of resources shows he is playing to win."

SpaceX's initial off-Earth data centers will be modified versions of the company's Starlink broadband satellites, according to Berger, who has written two books about SpaceX. But the company's long-term vision involves setting up AI-satellite factories on the moon and launching them into space using railguns, he added, citing a Dec. 7 X post by Musk.

Berger's sources are apparently reliable, for Musk backed the piece in a Wednesday X post. "As usual, Eric is accurate," the billionaire wrote.

The IPO news has stirred concern among some space fans, who worry that a publicly traded SpaceX won't be as free to pursue its Mars-settlement plans, which hinge on the development and operation of the company's giant, fully reusable Starship rocket. After all, establishing a city on Mars will be extremely expensive, with little financial return in the short term — not exactly the mission profile that most investors are keen to support.

However, Berger thinks Musk views the IPO as a way to help fund Mars settlement, which the billionaire has long stressed is his overarching goal and the reason he founded SpaceX in the first place.

"Musk has frequently expressed a concern that there may be a limited window for settling Mars," Berger wrote. "Perhaps financial markets collapse. Perhaps there’s a worse pandemic. Perhaps a large asteroid hits the planet. Taking SpaceX public now is a bet that he can marshal the resources now, during his lifetime, to make Mars City One a reality. He is 54 years old."

NASA may finally be on the cusp of regaining official leadership.

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire tech entrepreneur and sponsor of SpaceX's private Polaris spaceflight program, faced a key vote on Monday evening (Dec. 8) before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which determined whether or not to send his nomination as NASA chief to the full Senate. And the vote passed.

"Mr. Isaacman, I know that you are as committed to American supremacy in the final frontier as is this committee and the entire Senate," Committee Chairman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in an emailed statement on Monday evening. "My hope is that you will be confirmed and in this role before the end of this year."

The hearing began Monday at 5:30 p.m. ET (2230 GMT). The Senate committee had said the proceedings will be broadcast live, but that turned out not to be the case.

Isaacman has flown to space twice. He privately funded both missions, which launched groundbreaking spaceflights aboard SpaceX Crew Dragons. The first, Inspiration4, was also the first all-civilian launch, while his second, Polaris Dawn, included the first civilian spacewalk.

In his nomination hearing before the committee last week, Isaacman faced questions scrutinizing his relationship with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and probing his position on NASA's science and human spaceflight programs. It was Isaacman's second such hearing before the committee, which had the opportunity to press similar questions to him in April, during his first round through the nomination process.

Despite a positive and mostly bipartisan reception by lawmakers, a vote for Isaacman's confirmation earlier this year was halted when President Trump withdrew his nomination in May. Janet Petro, acting NASA Administrator at the time, later ceded the role to Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy when Trump appointed him to the position in July.

Isaacman quietly stepped aside, but little movement was made over the summer to nominate a new NASA chief as Duffy juggled dual roles at the space agency and DOT. Then, an early November report from Politico exposed a 62-page document, known as "Project Athena," outlining Isaacman's vision to outsource certain aspects of NASA to the commercial sector in order to operate a leaner, more efficient agency. A day after that report published, Trump renominated Isaacman for NASA's acting administrator.

In addition to Isaacman, seven other federal appointments face votes this evening, including John DeLeeuw, of Texas, and Michael Graham, of Virginia, to the National Transportation Safety Board, Steven Haines, of Virginia, as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Analysis, Robert Harvey, of Florida, as Federal Maritime Commissioner, Richard Kloster, of West Virginia, to the Surface Transportation Board, Adm. Kevin E. Lunday as Commandant of the United States Coast Guard and McCormack, of Virginia, as Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 6 p.m. ET on Dec. 8 with the news that the hearing will not be webcast after all, then again at 6:45 p.m. ET with the news that the committee had advanced Isaacman's nomination to the full Senate.

Ed Markey is persistent.

In April, during Jared Isaacman's first nomination hearing for the post of NASA administrator, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts asked repeatedly if SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk was in the room when President Donald Trump offered him the job of NASA chief. Isaacman declined to answer directly.

On Wednesday (Dec. 3), Isaacman appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation for the second time, as Trump has tapped the 42-year-old billionaire again after abruptly pulling his nomination on May 31. And Markey still wants an answer.

"I wanted to give you one more chance to set the record straight. Was Elon Musk in the meeting at Mar-a-Lago when President Trump offered you the job?" Markey asked on Wednesday, referring to Trump's Florida estate, where the then-president-elect interviewed Isaacman late last year.

Isaacman, who founded the payment-processing company Shift4, gave us a few more details this time but still danced around the question.

The interview "was in a ballroom-type setting," he told Markey. "There were dozens of people moving in and out that I would not say were in the meeting."

"It's a very simple question," Markey pressed. "Was Elon Musk in the room when President Trump offered you the job?"

"Senator, my interview, my conservations, were with the president," Isaacman responded. "There were dozens of people moving in and out of the room, and I don't think it's fair to bring any of them into this matter."

"So once again, you're refusing to tell us whether Elon Musk was in the room that day, and that actually makes me think that Elon Musk was in the room that day, but that you understand that it's a clear conflict of interest that he was there," Markey said.

The senator laid out his conflict-of-interest concerns during Isaacman's first nomination hearing on April 9, citing Isaacman's "deep personal and financial ties" to Musk.

Isaacman has long stressed that he has no real personal relationship with Musk, but there certainly are financial ties. Isaacman organized, funded and commanded two pioneering spaceflights to Earth orbit using SpaceX hardware: Inspiration4 in September 2021 and Polaris Dawn, which pulled off the first-ever private spacewalk, three years later.

However, since the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in 2011, SpaceX has been the only American organization capable of flying people to and from orbit — a point that Isaacman made on Wednesday, stressing that going with Musk's company was not a sign of favoritism.

During the second hearing, Markey asked Isaacman how much he paid for his two spaceflights. But the billionaire demurred, apparently because of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) he signed with SpaceX.

"So you won't tell what you paid the man who publicly campaigned for your nomination," Markey replied. "Will you request that SpaceX release you from the NDA so that you can provide the committee with this information?"

Isaacman said that he has "no issue" with making that request.

Despite Markey's grilling of Isaacman on Wednesday, the billionaire appears to be on a glide path for confirmation as NASA chief.

Most of the other senators on the committee, including the Democrats, struck a more positive tone in their questions. And Isaacman is broadly popular in the spaceflight community, as evidenced by a letter of support signed by 36 astronauts, which the billionaire cited during Wednesday's hearing.

But you never know. After all, the signs all pointed to Isaacman being confirmed by the Senate in early June, but the rug was pulled out from under him with just a week or so to go.

SpaceX just took a big step toward launching its Starship megarocket from Florida.

The U.S. Air Force has given SpaceX permission to develop Space Launch Complex-37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as a launch site for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. All 11 of the giant vehicle's test flights to date have flown from Starbase, SpaceX's facility in South Texas.

SLC-37 could end up hosting up to 76 Starship launches and 152 landings every year, provided the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration determines that the airspace impacts aren't too onerous.

The approval, delivered via a Nov. 20 Record of Decision (RoD), wraps up a long and drawn-out environmental review that included a series of public hearings.

Some people in those hearings raised concerns about the impact of Starship launches on the diverse flora and fauna of the Space Coast. In the RoD, Air Force officials said they will "implement mitigation measures to avoid, minimize or compensate for" any such environmental ill effects.

Those measures will help safeguard on-site populations of threatened and/or vulnerable species such as the southeastern beach mouse, Florida scrub-jay, tricolored bat and eastern indigo snake, according to the RoD.

SLC-37 was built to support NASA's Apollo program, which put 12 people on the moon between 1969 and 1972. The site consists of two pads, A and B, though the former never hosted any launches.

SLC-37B served as the jumping-off point for eight Saturn I and Saturn IB missions from 1964 to 1968, the last of which launched the Apollo 5 mission to low Earth orbit. Pad B then lay fallow until 2002, when it began hosting launches of Delta IV rockets, the last of which flew from the site in April 2024.

SpaceX is next in line to use the facility. It plans to launch Starship from both SLC-37A and SLC-37B as well as historic Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which is next door to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

"With three launch pads in Florida, Starship will be ready to support America’s national security and Artemis goals as the world’s premiere spaceport continues to evolve to enable airport-like operations. We’d like to thank the Department of the Air Force (@usairforce), 45th Space Force (@SLDelta45), and U.S. Fish and Wildlife (@USFWS) for their effort on the environmental review," SpaceX wrote in an X post on Monday (Dec. 1).

In that post, the company also said that Starship-related construction at SLC-37 has already begun.

Starship, a two-stage vehicle that stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is designed to be completely and rapidly reusable. SpaceX believes the vehicle will help humanity settle Mars and establish a footprint on the moon. As SpaceX noted in that X post, NASA is invested in the vehicle, choosing it as the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration.

The U.S. Senate will hold a hearing to consider billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman's re-nomination for NASA chief on today (Dec. 3), and you can watch the action live.

The hearing, before the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, begins Wednesday at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT).

It will stream live on the committee's website and on YouTube. Space.com will carry the feed as well, if (as expected) it's made available.

This will be the second such hearing for Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut who has funded and commanded two SpaceX missions to Earth orbit.

The first occurred in April and seemed to go well, setting Isaacman up for confirmation in early June. But on May 31, President Donald Trump abruptly pulled his nomination, citing Isaacman's past donations to Democratic political candidates and concerns about his relationship with SpaceX boss Elon Musk. (That relationship is purely professional and would not affect his activities as NASA chief, according to Isaacman.)

If the Senate confirms Isaacman, the founder of the payment-processing company Shift4, he will take the reins from Sean Duffy, who currently serves as the agency's acting administrator. Duffy is a former reality TV star who is also head of the Department of Transportation.

Isaacman won't be the only person appearing before the committee on Wednesday. The senators will also consider the nomination of Steven Haines to be an Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Analysis.

Jared Isaacman will head back to Capitol Hill early next month.

The U.S. Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold a hearing on Dec. 3 to consider the nomination of the billionaire tech entrepreneur and private astronaut as NASA chief.

The event will begin at 10:00 a.m. EST (1500 GMT). You'll be able to watch it live; the hearing will stream on the committee's website and on YouTube.

Isaacman, who founded the payments company Shift4, has been through this before: He went through a nomination hearing on April 9, 3.5 months after President Donald Trump first tapped him for the top NASA job.

Isaacman was set to be confirmed by Congress in early June, but Trump abruptly pulled his nomination on May 31, citing his past donations to Democratic politicians and supposed closeness to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Isaacman funded, organized and commanded two flights to Earth orbit using SpaceX rockets and capsules — Inspiration4 in September 2021 and Polaris Dawn in September 2024. But he has stressed that his relationship with Musk is a business one, and that he would not give SpaceX any preferential treatment should he be confirmed as NASA chief.

Trump had a change of heart on Nov. 4, announcing that Isaacman is his pick for NASA chief after all. If the nomination process goes smoothly this time around, Isaacman will take over for Acting Administrator Sean Duffy, who also leads the Department of Transportation.

Isaacman won't be the only person getting grilled by senators on Dec. 3. The committee will also consider the nomination of Steven Haines to be an Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Analysis.

Jared Isaacman is in line to be NASA chief — again.

President Donald Trump just tapped the billionaire tech entrepreneur to lead the U.S. space agency, five months after pulling his nomination for the same post.

"Jared's passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and unlocking the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era," Trump wrote Tuesday (Nov. 4) in a post on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns.

That astronaut experience is extensive. Jared Isaacman, who founded the payments company Shift4, has organized, funded and commanded two private astronaut missions to Earth orbit, both of them using SpaceX hardware. On the second of those flights, called Polaris Dawn, he conducted the first-ever private spacewalk.

This will be Isaacman's second trip down nomination lane. Trump put him up for NASA chief this past January, and Isaacman looked set to be confirmed by Congress — until the president abruptly pulled his nomination on May 31, citing Isaacman's past donations to Democratic political candidates and supposedly close relationship with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Isaacman apparently isn't holding a grudge; he said he's ready to go through the process all over again.

"Thank you, Mr. President @POTUS, for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership," Isaacman said in a post on X, the social media platform that Musk owns, on Tuesday evening.

"The support from the space-loving community has been overwhelming. I am not sure how I earned the trust of so many, but I will do everything I can to live up to those expectations," he added.

NASA is currently led, in an acting capacity, by Sean Duffy, the former timber-sports champion and reality TV star who also serves as the Secretary of Transportation.

Duffy had been angling to hold on to the NASA job, according to media reports. But he struck a conciliatory and congratulatory tone in his own X post on Tuesday.

"Thank you @realDonaldTrump for the honor to lead @NASA. We’ve made giant leaps in our mission to return to the moon before China. It’s critical for our national security and national pride that we win the next space race. Congratulations to @rookisaacman. I wish him all the success and will ensure the transition is seamless," Duffy wrote.

Isaacman seems to enjoy widespread support from the space community, but his ascension to NASA chief is not a fait accompli — he still has to go through the confirmation process, which didn't end well last time. That confirmation process will likely be on hold due to the ongoing government shutdown, which has been underway since Oct. 1.

SpaceX may be rethinking its moon-landing plans.

The company holds a contract to put NASA astronauts down near the lunar south pole on the Artemis 3 mission, which is expected to launch in 2028, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX will use a modified upper stage of its Starship megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launcher ever built — for this very high-profile job.

Or will it? Last week, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said the agency will reopen the Artemis 3 landing contract to competition, citing concerns with the pace of Starship's development. The rocket has flown 11 uncrewed test flights to date, the last two of them completely successful, but has yet to reach Earth orbit or demonstrate key moon-critical milestones such as in-space propellant transfer. (Each Starship vehicle will need to be refueled multiple times in Earth orbit before it can reach the moon.)

"I love SpaceX; it's an amazing company. The problem is, they're behind. They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China," Duffy said on Oct. 20 during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box." (China plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and has been making steady progress toward this goal.)

This announcement did not sit well with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. He attacked Duffy via social media repeatedly over the following few days, calling the acting NASA chief "Sean Dummy" and claiming that he "is trying to kill NASA."

Now, more than a week later, SpaceX has formulated a more substantive response. On Thursday (Oct. 30), the company posted an update called "To the Moon and Beyond," which summarizes the progress that SpaceX has made with Starship to date and lays out the vehicle's potential to make NASA's lunar ambitions a reality.

"Starship provides unmatched capability to explore the moon, thanks to its large size and ability to refill propellant in space," the blog post reads. "One single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, which is roughly two-thirds the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station, and is complete with a cabin that can be scaled for large numbers of explorers and dual airlocks for surface exploration."

SpaceX stressed in the update that it's working in parallel along two Starship paths, developing the "core" megarocket (which will help humanity colonize Mars, among other tasks) as well as the Artemis-specific moon-lander upper stage. SpaceX is self-funding the core path, and its contract for the Artemis lander is of the fixed-price variety, "ensuring that the company is only paid after the successful completion of progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs," the company wrote.

According to Thursday's update, SpaceX has already completed 49 such milestones for the Artemis lander, including testing of micrometeoroid and space debris shielding and demonstrations of "lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control" systems. And the company plans to make even more progress soon, sending a Starship upper stage to Earth orbit and completing an in-space fueling test with the vehicle in 2026, if all goes to plan.

SpaceX affirmed in the blog post that it shares NASA's goal to return astronauts to the moon "as expeditiously as possible" and wants to be "a core enabler" of the Artemis program's overriding ambition — to establish a permanent and sustained human presence on the moon, rather than mount a flags-and-footprints retread of Apollo. And the company said it's willing to be flexible to help make all of this happen.

"Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis 3 have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities," reads the update, which also features a new render of the interior of a crewed Starship moon lander. "In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the moon while simultaneously improving crew safety."

The current Artemis 3 plan calls for its four astronauts to lift off atop a NASA Space Launch System rocket, then ride an Orion capsule to lunar orbit, where they'll meet up with the Starship upper stage. The astronauts will move into Starship, which will take them to and from the lunar surface.

SpaceX's new blog post doesn't provide any details about the possible "simplified" Artemis 3 architecture. But Musk may have given us a clue on Oct. 20, in one of his many Duffy reaction posts. "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry," the billionaire wrote. "Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole moon mission. Mark my words."

Back in September 2024, we brought you word of a legal dispute over property boundaries and trespassing in South Texas, where Elon Musk's SpaceX was allegedly storing equipment on a plot of land that did not belong to them.

Now, it seems that the parties involved have come to an amicable settlement, the monetary details of which weren't disclosed.

This court-aimed quarrel began last year, when Cards Against Humanity (CAH), the Chicago-based publisher of that popular adult party game, became aware of a piece of their South Texas property being used to store heavy equipment, vehicles and random construction materials owned by SpaceX in an area adjacent to the aerospace company's Starbase manufacturing and launch facility.

The kerfuffle escalated when CAH filed a $15 million lawsuit seeking restitution for the encroachment and subsequent damage to that slice of land, which is situated near the U.S.-Mexico border. The property was purchased in 2017 by a coalition of supporters who aimed to disrupt then-President Donald Trump's plan to build a border wall.

As part of the Cards Against Humanity Saves America project, 150,000 customers donated $15 each to buy that grassland meadow, which eventually became a sprawling parking lot filled with "gravel, tractors and space junk," CAH wrote in a statement on Sept. 20, 2024. Any remaining funds recovered in the lawsuit were promised to be equally distributed back to those who had participated in the land’s initial purchase.

Per AP, according to Texas court records, a settlement was finalized last month, prior to the upcoming Nov. 3 jury trial marked on the calendar. SpaceX owns other land plots in the Brownsville, Texas area in Cameron County, but apparently had no right to use this patch.

"The upside is that SpaceX has removed their construction equipment from our land and we're able to work with a local landscaping company to restore the land to its natural state: devoid of space garbage and pointless border walls," CAH wrote in a recent message to customers. "Were we hoping to be able to pay all our fans? Sure. But we did warn them they would probably only be able to get like $2 or most likely nothing."

CAH has opted for a different approach to compensate its donors, since the (undisclosed) amount gained will mostly go toward refurbishment of the property. They've come up with a funny consolation prize for fans that reflects the bold spirit and attitude of the successful gaming firm.

"Elon Musk's team admitted on the record that they illegally trespassed on your land, and then they packed up the space garbage and f***ed off," CAH's recent message adds. "But when it comes to paying you all, he did the legal equivalent of throwing dust in our eyes and kicking us in the balls. So while we can't give you what you really wanted –– cash money from Elon Musk –– we're going to make it up to you, our best, sexiest customers … with comedy! We're sending you each a brand new mini-pack of exclusive cards all about Elon Musk."

And something tells us this special pack of Musk cards won’t be very flattering!

Elon Musk is not a fan of NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy.

The SpaceX founder and CEO has hammered Duffy repeatedly on social media over the past few days, calling him "Sean Dummy" (which he later amended to "Sean 'Dangerously Stupid' Dummy") and claiming that Duffy "is trying to kill NASA."

Musk also posted the following poll question on X: "Should someone whose biggest claim to fame is climbing trees be running America's space program?" That's a nod to Duffy's lumberjack past; he was active in timber sports in his youth and held two world speed-climbing titles by the age of 30.

This barrage didn't come out of left field. It followed on the heels of Duffy's announcement that NASA will reopen competition for the Artemis 3 moon-landing contract, which SpaceX won in April 2021. The company plans to use a modified upper stage of its Starship megarocket for that mission, which will put astronauts down on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The current plan calls for Artemis 3 astronauts to launch atop a NASA Space Launch System rocket, then ride an Orion capsule to lunar orbit, where they'll meet up with Starship for the trip down.

Duffy, however, voiced concerns that Starship may not be ready on NASA's desired Artemis 3 timeline, which now features a 2028 launch target.

"I love SpaceX; it's an amazing company. The problem is, they're behind. They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China," Duffy said on Monday (Oct. 20) during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term, so I'm gonna open up the contract," he added. "I'm gonna let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin."

Musk did not seem happy about that. He responded by noting that Blue Origin has never delivered a "useful payload" to Earth orbit — something SpaceX has done hundreds of times — and then made a prediction: "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole moon mission. Mark my words."

Musk also responded in another, less substantive way, posting a meme on X asking Duffy why he is "gae."

Musk's beef with Duffy appears to extend beyond the Artemis 3 contract issue, however. The SpaceX chief has long backed fellow billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator — a post Isaacman was poised to secure until President Trump abruptly withdrew his nomination on May 31.

Trump himself nominated Isaacman but had a change of heart very late in the game, citing the tech entrepreneur's past donations to Democratic politicians and alleged close relationship with Musk. That decision resulted in Duffy taking the agency over in an acting capacity.

In a twist, Isaacman now appears to be back in the mix as a candidate for the top NASA job. But Duffy is keen to hold onto the position, according to both The Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica.

Both outlets also reported that Duffy may seek to fold NASA into the Department of Transportation, an agency also led by the former lumberjack and reality TV star. (Duffy was on the sixth season of MTV's "The Real World," which aired in 1997.)

Musk thinks this is a bad idea: He replied with the "100" emoji to a post by AstroForge CEO and founder Matt Gialich that reads, "No one wants this to happen. This would mark the beginning of the end for our nation's dominance in space."

And, in a post this morning (Oct. 22), Musk took the fight directly to Duffy yet again: "Having a NASA Administrator who knows literally ZERO about rockets & spacecraft undermines the American space program and endangers our astronauts."

The obvious but unsaid point of comparison is Isaacman, who funded, organized and commanded two private missions to Earth orbit, using SpaceX rockets and capsules. (Musk did distance himself from this comparison in another X post today, however, saying, "At this point, I am not advocating any particular candidate for NASA Administrator. I am just desperate for someone with a 3 digit IQ.")

Will Trump re-up Isaacman's nomination? Will Duffy get to take the "acting" modifier off his NASA job title? And how will Musk respond to any of these eventualities? Stay tuned; there could be much more drama ahead.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:28 p.m. ET on Oct. 22 to include a new X post from Musk, which reads, in part, "I am just desperate for someone with a 3 digit IQ."

The first crewed moon landing in more than half a century may not be pulled off by SpaceX after all.

In April 2021, NASA awarded Elon Musk's company a $2.9 billion contract to provide the first crewed lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program. That vehicle, a modified upper stage of SpaceX's Starship megarocket, is supposed to land astronauts on the moon for the first time on the upcoming Artemis 3 mission.

But NASA isn't satisfied with the pace of Starship's development and is therefore shaking things up, acting agency chief Sean Duffy announced on Monday (Oct. 20).

"I love SpaceX; it's an amazing company. The problem is, they're behind. They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China," Duffy said on Monday morning, during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term, so I'm gonna open up the contract," he added. "I'm gonna let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin."

Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, won an Artemis Human Landing System contract of its own in 2023, an award worth $3.4 billion. The company plans to fulfill that deal with its Blue Moon lander, which was originally expected to make its crewed lunar debut on the Artemis 5 mission.

Musk voiced skepticism that Blue Origin could speed up its timeline enough to be ready for a crewed moon mission before SpaceX.

"Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the moon," the world's richest person said via X on Monday, qualifying that to "useful payload" in a follow-up post. (Blue Origin's huge New Glenn rocket carried a prototype of the company's Blue Ring spacecraft to Earth orbit on its first — and so far, only — launch this past January.)

Artemis 3's timeline has shifted to the right several times over the past few years, and not just because Starship is still in the testing phase; issues with spacesuits, NASA's Orion capsule and other tech have also played a role. (Orion will carry Artemis astronauts to lunar orbit, where they'll meet up with the lander that will deliver them to the surface.)

The launch date was originally targeted for late 2024 but was pushed back to 2025, September 2026 and then mid-2027.

And NASA is now apparently eyeing an even later timeline: In Monday's "Squawk Box" interview, Duffy suggests that 2028 is the target for Artemis 3.

The Artemis program has one launch under its belt — that of Artemis 1, which successfully sent an uncrewed Orion to and from lunar orbit in late 2022.

NASA is now gearing up for Artemis 2, which will launch four people on a 10-day journey around the moon next year. That mission remains on track to launch as early as February, Duffy said on Monday.

SpaceX's Starship, meanwhile, has launched on 11 suborbital test flights to date. The most recent two liftoffs, which took place on Aug. 26 and Oct. 13, respectively, were fully successful.

As Duffy noted, China has moon plans of its own: The nation plans to land astronauts on Earth's nearest neighbor by 2030 and is making serious progress toward achieving that goal. No humans have touched the lunar surface since NASA's Apollo 17 astronauts did so in December 1972.

The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built is about to get even larger.

On Monday (Oct. 13), SpaceX launched the 11th test flight of its Starship megarocket, sending the 403-foot-tall (124 meters) vehicle aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas.

The suborbital flight was a complete success. Both of Starship's elements — its Super Heavy booster and Starship (or "Ship" for short) upper stage — came back to Earth for pinpoint splashdowns. Ship also managed to relight one of its engines in space and deploy eight dummy payloads.

Flight 11 was a big moment for the Starship program, and not just because everything went so well. It was also a swan song, the final liftoff of the vehicle's "Version 2" variant.

"Focus now turns to the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy, with multiple vehicles currently in active build and preparing for tests," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 11 wrap-up post.

"This next iteration will be used for the first Starship orbital flights, operational payload missions, propellant transfer and more as we iterate to a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle with service to Earth orbit, the moon, Mars and beyond," the company added.

That next iteration is Starship Version 3, which will be about 5 feet (1.5 m) taller than its predecessor. V3 will look a lot like V2, but there will be big differences "under the hood," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during the Flight 11 launch webcast on Monday.

For example, the V3 Ship's propulsion system has been overhauled to accommodate Raptor 3, a new, brawnier version of the engine that powers both of Starship's stages. (Super Heavy has 33 Raptors and Ship has six.)

"We're also getting energy storage upgrades, tons of avionics changes — a lot of things that will enable longer-duration missions," Huot said.

"One notable thing you'll start seeing on the outside are these new docking adapters, which we'll use when we bring two Starships together for propellant transfer," he added. "That's a core capability of Starship that we're going to demonstrate next year."

Indeed, in-space fuel transfer is a crucial part of any Starship deep-space mission. Ship upper stages bound for the moon or Mars will launch with a minimum amount of propellant onboard (to save mass for payloads) and will therefore need to meet up with multiple "tanker" ships in Earth orbit to fuel up.

The V3 Super Heavy, meanwhile, features a redesigned fuel transfer tube, a giant metallic structure that channels cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen down to the booster's Raptor engines.

"New boosters are also going to have an integrated hot stage, a lot more vent area, and it's designed to be fully reusable," Huot said. (The hot stage marks the junction of Super Heavy and Ship; the "hot" part refers to the fact that Ship begins firing its engines before it has fully separated from the booster.)

The V3 Super Heavy will also have just three grid fins — the waffle-like structures that help the booster steer its way back to Earth for pinpoint touchdowns — instead of V2's four.

"They're 50% larger, though — much higher strength," Huot said. "They're also going to get used for vehicle lift and catch."

The lifting and catching will be done by the Starship launch tower's "chopstick" arms. These arms lift Ship and Super Heavy onto the launch mount, and they'll also catch both vehicles when they come back home after liftoff. (SpaceX has performed three such chopstick catches with Super Heavy to date but has not yet tried it with Ship.)

All 11 Starship test flights have lifted off from Starbase's Orbital Launch Mount 1. That pad will go on hiatus for a spell, however, as it's overhauled to accommodate Starship V3.

"Among many other things, we're installing a new orbital launch mount, a new flame trench system and upgrading the chopsticks for future catches," Jake Berkowitz, a SpaceX lead propulsion engineer, said during Monday's launch webcast. "So until that's complete, we'll be running launches from Pad 2, which will be online very soon."

Starship V3 will be capable of flying to Mars and may well do so next year, if testing continues to go well: SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company would like to launch a small fleet of uncrewed Starships to the Red Planet during the next opportunity, which comes in late 2026. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)

Over the long haul, however, SpaceX plans to rely on an even bigger and more powerful Starship — one that stands a whopping 466 feet (142 m) tall and sports 42 Raptors instead of the current 39. This V4 iteration is expected to debut in 2027, Musk has said.

2027 could be a landmark year, for both SpaceX and NASA. It's when the agency aims to launch its Artemis 3 mission, which will land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. The lunar lander for that epic mission will be a Starship upper stage.