SpaceX chief Elon Musk said in February that the mighty Starship rocket would embark on its 12th test flight this month, although several more recent reports have suggested that it might not leave the launchpad until early April.
Preflight tests on the Starship rocket have been underway at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southern Texas as the team works to ready the rocket for showtime.
In an important step toward launch day, the first-stage Super Heavy — the most powerful booster ever to fly — underwent a ground-based engine test, known as a static fire, on Monday.
NASASpaceflight, which has a number of cameras trained on the Starbase site, shared some footage of the test.
STATIC FIRE: Multi angle replay as Booster 19 fires up, While it was a short test, potentially an abort, this was the first time for Pad 2, the first time for V3, and the first time Raptor 3’s have fired up together.@NASASpaceflight livestream:https://t.co/2tzj8VRkQC pic.twitter.com/Mos8nSWiHh
STATIC FIRE: Booster 19 fires up, but feels very short and potentially aborted early. However, first time for Pad 2, the first time for V3, and the first time Raptor 3’s have fired up together. https://t.co/T7aIDKYBYn pic.twitter.com/6uOzjVjpnM
Monday’s test scored three firsts for SpaceX. It was the first time the new Pad 2 has been put to use in this way, the first such test for the new Starship Version 3, and the first time for the rocket’s new Raptor 3 engines to be fired up for this kind of procedure.
But the static fire ended after only a few seconds — much shorter than usual — suggesting there may have been an issue as the engines roared into life. SpaceX has yet to make any official comment on the outcome of the important preflight test.
The Starship flew most recently in October 2025. That means it’s been a long wait for the 12th flight of the massive rocket, especially considering that the more recent Starship launches have taken place within two or three months of each other.
The delay has been put down to the extra preparations needed for the new version of Starship.
Once fully ready, SpaceX’s newest and largest rocket will be used for crew and cargo flights to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, and could even take the first humans to Mars.
First up, a modified version of the upper-stage Ship spacecraft will be used to return humans to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis IV mission, which is currently set for 2028.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.