Starship Flight 13 Hit Every Target — Then the Recovered Ship Got Away Anyway

Starship Flight 13 launched July 24, 2026 — SpaceX's first Starship test since its own June 12 IPO — and hit its primary objectives. The Super Heavy booster, designated Booster 20, achieved a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico roughly seven minutes after liftoff. The landing wasn't flawless: satellite industry analyst Tim Farrar noted that only part of the booster's Raptor engines relit properly for the landing burn, and warned that a similar failure during an actual attempted catch at the launch site could cause severe pad damage — a reminder that a soft ocean splashdown and a precision catch at the tower are different bars to clear.

About 18 minutes into the flight, Starship deployed 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, each capable of roughly 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity — a meaningful capacity jump that, at a full 60-satellite Starship payload, would deliver roughly 20 times the capacity of a single Falcon 9 V2 Mini launch. The upper stage, Ship 40, then splashed down under control in the Indian Ocean. As part of an orbital inspection experiment, six camera-equipped V3 satellites scanned the heat shield from orbit, with some tiles intentionally painted white beforehand to help the imaging pick out simulated damage.

The heat shield has been Starship's most persistent technical problem, and this flight appears to have resolved it: Musk said afterward that data and visual inspection indicated the heat shield problem was solved, a notable claim after tile cracking and damage plagued earlier flights.

What didn't go to plan was recovering the actual hardware. SpaceX's recovery team spent roughly two weeks working to retrieve Ship 40 from the Indian Ocean, battling increasingly rough seas while attempting to guide the 52-meter vehicle to port. On August 7, 2026, the company said that effort was not looking good — the ship was likely to be lost — though the team did manage to capture close-up photographs of critical heat shield and engine regions before conceding the attempt, data SpaceX said would inform future upgrades regardless of the outcome. SPCX shares were little changed on the update, consistent with a recovery failure being a logistics setback rather than new information about the vehicle's core technical performance, which had already been validated by the successful flight itself.