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After a week and a half of delays, SpaceX finally got its Starship Flight 13th test flight off the ground on Friday evening, capping the mission with a huge success. Instead of the fiery breakup that has ended several previous flights, the towering rocket’s upper stage drifted down gently and came to rest floating on its side in the Indian Ocean.

The vehicle, made up of the Ship 40 upper stage and the Booster 20 first stage, lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas at 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT), roughly an hour before the close of a 90-minute launch window.

Starship Flight 13: Initial Challenges and Problems

SpaceX first attempted to launch the mission on July 16, but the flight computer triggered an automatic abort at the very last second when four of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite. Company founder Elon Musk later said the issue traced back to problems with the engines’ oxidizer turbopumps, and SpaceX opted to swap out at least two of the suspect Raptors before trying again.

A second launch attempt, initially targeted for July 20 and then pushed to July 23, was ultimately scrubbed just hours before liftoff due to poor weather along the Texas coast. With clearer skies forecast, the company reset for a Friday attempt, and this time the countdown ran clean through fueling, ignition, and liftoff.

Post Launch Events

Minutes after liftoff, Super Heavy separated cleanly from the Ship upper stage and executed its boostback flip to begin the trip back toward the Gulf of Mexico for a controlled offshore splashdown. The maneuver, however, did not go entirely to plan. SpaceX commentator Dan Huot noted during the live broadcast that the booster appeared to fire only five of the 13 engines called for during its final landing burn, causing it to hit the water considerably harder and faster than intended, with onboard camera views cutting out shortly after.

While the booster dealt with its rough return, the Ship upper stage pressed ahead with the mission’s headline objective: deploying the first-ever batch of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink V3 satellites. Flying on a suborbital trajectory, Ship 40 released 20 of the new satellites through its slit-shaped payload bay door, a mechanism SpaceX has likened to a giant PEZ dispenser.

Reigniting the Engine and Return

Once its satellites were away, Ship 40 moved on to a second test: reigniting one of its six Raptor engines while coasting in space. This kind of in-flight relight is what would let a future Starship fire its engines again after reaching orbit, whether to raise or adjust its orbit or to begin a controlled burn back down to Earth.

The final phase of the flight was reentry, where Starship falls back through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed, and its heat shield takes the brunt of the punishment. Cameras showed the vehicle glowing as it was enveloped in plasma, a normal part of the process that has occasionally proven fatal to earlier test vehicles. Starship survived the descent and then attempted its landing sequence over the Indian Ocean, flipping to a vertical orientation and firing its engines to slow down.

As the Starship neared the water, only one of its three engines was functional due to a rough entry back into the atmosphere. With too little thrust to stay upright, the vehicle tipped onto its side on touchdown, rather than tipping over and exploding, which is how most earlier attempts at this stage have ended.

Musk wrote on X that Starship remained intact, floating in the ocean and continuing to transmit telemetry after splashdown. Huot described it as the smoothest ocean landing the vehicle has ever achieved, calling the outcome a valuable opportunity to gather heat shield data from a mostly intact vehicle rather than fragments.

Future of Starship Missions

For now, SpaceX appears to be treating Flight 13 as a milestone worth celebrating, even with an imperfect booster landing weighing against an otherwise strong showing. As Huot put it while wrapping up the broadcast, it was a memorable outing for a rocket that had, up to that point, brought the company nothing but frustration on its 13th attempt.