SpaceX’s Starship Successfully Completes 13th Launch, Survives the Ocean

SpaceX sent its towering Starship stack skyward from Starbase in South Texas late on July 24, 2026, and brought the upper stage home in a way no previous flight had managed. The vehicle climbed on 33 Raptor engines, released a fresh batch of Starlink satellites, restarted an engine in space, and then settled gently onto the waves of the Indian Ocean still in one piece. For a program that has spent years watching its ships break apart or vanish in fireballs, that quiet float marked a real turning point.

Liftoff ultimately occurred at 6:51 p.m. Eastern, following delays caused by weather and a messy engine abort. The Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage blasted off simultaneously, creating the distinct sound of a rocket blasting across the Texas coast. Right on cue, the booster parted from the Starship. It promptly spun around, pointed at the Gulf of Mexico, and began returning. Thirteen engines should have ignited for the landing burn, but only five did. Not surprisingly, the rocket hit the water much harder and faster than expected. The cameras on board went dark immediately after the impact. SpaceX described the splashdown as fairly rough, leaving the booster for recovery workers to sort out later.

As the ship continued on its suborbital flight path, it reached a point eighteen minutes after liftoff when the payload bay opened and a Pez-style dispenser began shooting out satellites. Twenty brand new Starlink Version 3 satellites were launched one after the other from the Ship. These new machines are significantly larger than their predecessors, including larger solar panels and more powerful laser linkages. They’re intended to carry significantly more data than previous Starlink constellations. Fortunately, all twenty of them deployed successfully. A handful even turned on their lights and took a quick look back at the ship before launching into space; because the route never quite reached orbit, these satellites burned up in the atmosphere as anticipated.

After that, the ship moved on to its next vital mission. One of its Raptor engines fired back up in the vacuum of space, and to no one’s surprise, it worked perfectly. Being able to restart an engine in space is critical for future missions, as they will need to alter orbits or slow down before landing on the Moon, making this capacity a must-have. Once the test was completed, the vehicle began its long descent down to Earth.

Re-entry cast a flash of plasma surrounding the ship, and the heat-shield tiles absorbed the full blast. Even as the fire burned, cameras continued to send back images. After the worst of the heat had passed, the ship flipped over, fired three engines, then two, then one, and began a gentle descent toward the Indian Ocean, northwest of Australia. An hour and five minutes after departing Texas, the ship splashed down in the water. It came to a stop, flipped onto its side, and simply floated there, belly up and still providing vital signals. Residual propellant suddenly ignited at the nose but then burned away. Drone footage showed the ship bobbing away calmly on the open sea, with the stainless steel hull sitting very steadily on the waves.