SpaceX launches next-gen Starship, but suffers some engine issues
SpaceX's debut of its next-generation version of Starship managed to take flight Friday after an issue on the launch tower forced a scrub on Thursday night, but did face some engine headaches after liftoff.
The first flight of Version 3 of Starship and Super Heavy lifted off near the opening of a 90-minute launch window just after 5:30 p.m. Central time from SpaceX's Texas launch site Starbase.
Things didn't go exactly as planned. While the upper stage successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster, only five of its six Raptor engines were active as it headed into space. The booster also shut down all 33 of its Raptor engines soon after separation, meaning it had an uncontrolled landing in the Gulf.
The upper stage, dubbed Ship 39, though was running smooth, minus one engine, on its way as it will try to venture more than halfway around the Earth landing in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia. It burned its five remaining engines a little longer than planned.
"We've definitely got a ship in space right now," said SpaceX commentator Dan Huot. "I wouldn't call it a nominal orbital insertion … but we're on a trajectory that we had analyzed, and it's within bounds."
Thursday's attempt to launch was thwarted by a hydraulic pin that held the launch tower arm in place, according to an update from SpaceX founder Elon Musk. It did not retract, but Friday's launch plans went ahead with teams able to fix it overnight.
Starship is SpaceX's replacement for its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and has been in development for years. This marks its 12th suborbital test flight. The company is building out three launch towers for operational missions in Florida, but for now continues test flights from Texas.
The plan was never to recover the Super Heavy booster at the launch tower as SpaceX had been able to do on several previous launches, but instead make a controlled landing over the Gulf waters off the coast of Texas. Instead, the booster came in hot and crashed into the Gulf.
The launch came more than seven months since the last Starship flight, and the delay in the Version 3 debut had among other things stressed NASA's timeline for its Artemis program.
A version of Starship that has been tapped for future moon landings, needs to be ready for the Artemis III mission next year to dock with the Orion spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Blue Origin is also pushing to get a version of its Blue Moon lander to be able to dock with Orion as well. NASA will move forward with whichever of the two landers is ready for when it flies Artemis IV, currently aiming for a 2028 launch. That's the mission that looks to return humans to lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
For this latest test mission, though, while Version 3 looks similar to the previous versions of Starship, the company has done major overhauls to its interior, was using brand new versions of the Raptor engines, and utilized a new launch tower for the first time.
In SpaceX's effort to make Starship and Super Heavy completely reusable, a hot stage section of the booster that previously was discarded during separation is now integrated. A hot stage allows the upper stage engines to begin firing before separation from the booster.
The new booster still used 33 Raptor engines at liftoff while the upper stage featured six. The booster engines now have more power capability that could produce more than 18 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which makes it more than twice the power of NASA's Space Launch System rocket.
The upper stage has propulsion upgrades as well as changes to its satellite "PEZ Dispenser" mechanism, which for this test flight aims to deploy 20 Starlink satellite simulators and two special satellites testing hardware that will try and scan the upper stage's heat shield during its flight.
SpaceX has nailed down its heat tile formula for the most part, but has removed a single tile to measure stresses on adjacent tiles during flight.
Operational missions of Starship from Florida are slated to begin as early as this year first from a new tower in the works at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 37-A. Two more towers are under construction at neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 37.
The company is also constructing a massive manufacturing site on KSC property to build Starship as part of a $1.8 billion infrastructure project. First flights, though, will use rockets built in Texas and sailed over to Florida.
SpaceX is seeking to fly up to 120 missions a year from among the three launch towers on the Space Coast.
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This story was originally published May 22, 2026 at 7:40 PM.