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SpaceX Starship Flight 13 livestream [video]
- georgeburdell 2mo agoSeems like the booster landing burn did not light all the engines and so it crashed into the water.
- wat10000 2mo agoThe “chopstick” catcher arrangement seems awfully fragile. Would the ground equipment have survived this if it had been a real catch?
- pixl97 2mo agoYes, because it would have landed a few hundred meters out from the chopsticks. It swings in towards the catcher as part of its slowdown. If it doesn't slow down, that doesn't happen.
- tenuousemphasis 2mo agoThey generally initiate landing aiming just off shore and only adjust to the landing pad after everything is nominal. So yes.
- consensus1 2mo agoRockets have a self destruct feature to avoid exactly this type of contingency
- inglor_cz 2mo agoBy the time that the booster returns to the landing zone, the Flight Termination System (FTS) is AFAIK no longer active and cannot be reactivated. Which makes sense because it is a bunch of high explosives, now nearing some valuable equipment. The SpaceX solution is to steer carefully and have the default trajectory end in the sea. Only if everything looks good, is the booster redirected to the tower.
- wat10000 2mo agoI wonder what happens when things go wrong after everything looks good. They punched a good number of holes in their landing barges when they were perfecting Falcon 9 landings. And I imagine this crazy catch tower is a lot more expensive than a barge with a flat surface.
- inglor_cz 2mo agoFalcon 9 engines (Merlins) cannot throttle down, they either run on max power or they don't. Which means that any attempts to land are incredibly risky. You have to reignite them at the precise moment to slow down the rocket to zero at the height of the landing platform, or else. That is why the maneuver is called "suicide burn", and it is incredible that someone actually perfected something as crazy as this. The landing legs can absorb a tiny error, but anything over that = Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (Monty Python theme starts to play in the background...) Raptors are much more finely controllable and both stages of Starship can even hover when necessary, so the total control envelope, while not perfect, is much larger. That is why they can even try to land into a steely embrace, with no landing legs used.
- wat10000 2mo agoMerlin and Raptor can both throttle to about 40%. The difference is that Super Heavy has way more engines, so 40% of one engine is a lot less thrust relative to the mass of the nearly empty booster. Did the suicide burn actually play a role in the various barge-holing events? It’s been a while but I don’t remember that being the hard part.
- inglor_cz 2mo agoI was mistaken, Merlins can indeed throttle down. Thanks for correction. What they cannot is achieve thrust-to-weight ratio of <= 1 when the first stage is empty, so controlled descent is basically impossible and suicide burn is the only option to land. When it comes to failed returns, I think that at least once they ran out of fuel several meters early(?)
- stephc_int13 2mo agoIt was going in the water anyway, but yeah, it touched visibly faster than it should have.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoThe actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good. They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out. Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
- ls612 2mo agoDamn so this probably means another identical suborbital flight in 6-8 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that we will see either prop transfer or a ship catch this year.
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoThey don’t have to catch the booster to test any of that.
- davmar 2mo agoi don't think so - the ascent looked good. i don't think they need to put the ship on another suborbital trajectory because the booster landing burn failed. also, i don't think this impacts prop transfer or ship catch - both are separate problems.
- ls612 2mo agoI think this is technically true but that they want a seamless suborbital flight (like the last two for the Block 2) before they move forward on those other goals.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 2mo agoYup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago>it will explode after it does because of physics Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
- ACCount37 2mo agoNo, that's exactly what happens. Most of the time. There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though. EDIT: Of fucking course.
- ChuckMcM 2mo agoSort of? Everything is weight. And since it isn't a design feature to lay down in water there isn't any weight budget for making that modality survivable? So typically when it falls (and this thing is really tall) the interior tanks detach from their mounts and hit the inside walls and rupture. The skin is still hot, oxygen and remaining fuel mix and it goes boom. This time we had fires but no boom. I look forward to hearing what was different.
- m4rtink 2mo agoStarship is quite a bit sturdier thanks to the stainless steel used & very efficient engines that make it possible to have the structure heavier. We had it demonstrated in the past with Starship surviving multiple burnthroughts and now in failing to explode. :-)
- deleted 2mo ago
- fastball 2mo agoRe-light seems to be one of their biggest remaining obstacles in a lot of these flight tests.
- andsoitis 2mo agoYou can also track the progress in text: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-starship-flight-13-launch https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-star...
- andsoitis 2mo ago[dead]
- fsloth 2mo agoWhoa the acceleration from the start surprised me. It’s huge and it just … zipped off the pad like a bullet (ok not real bullet but still).
- ACCount37 2mo agoThey juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are the single biggest upgrade. It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
- laughing_man 2mo agoFelix on the "what about it" YouTube channel says flight 14 will be even faster. That's going to be something to see.
- ivewonyoung 2mo agoThe more you accelerate early instead of later, the less fuel you have to subsequently carry to get to the same speed so it's more efficient.
- jauntywundrkind 2mo agoGiven how little payload is onboard at the moment, what an empty can starship is, i sure hope for their sake there is a lot a lot a lot of zip to spare right now.
- modeless 2mo agoSuccessful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program. And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact? We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one. Edit: Spashdown video https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619 https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619
- maxlin 2mo agoMy brain refuses to resolve the effect of it as anything but CGI. Event though it isn't.
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoI mean, folks who make CGI better watch these too or they're not doing their jobs.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoI hope they watch some of these, because movies are full of disappointing rocket scenes that are so many orders of magnitude away from the real thing that it's like representing a skyscraper with a treehouse. There is considerable room for reality to inspire fiction a bit more on this front.
- ceejayoz 2mo agoI remain shocked at how lame the nuke in Oppenheimer looked.
- adolph 2mo agoIts amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough). The reason it’s very small is that almost all of the energy in hydrogen and oxygen is not stored in the chemical binding energy of these things going together. The vast majority of it is stored in just the rest mass energy of the protons and the neutrons, which chemical burning doesn’t affect at all. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown-gr https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown-gr [Edit note: Starship and Booster are methalox, yes. The physicist is talking generically, not about this launch specifically)
- appplication 2mo agoIt’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
- amanaplanacanal 2mo agoThe tiny part of SpaceX that is actually about space, yes. Unfortunate that it has been bolted onto the hulk of Musk's AI fever dreams.
- yieldcrv 2mo agoEven at $38/share it will still be number 20 on the fortune 500 by marketcap Too bad for Elon gullibles its at $113/share but its a great company at $38
- tim333 2mo agoDepends a bit on how the AI stuff goes.
- yieldcrv 2mo agoright. instead of having an enterprise AI strategy, they've become a landlord, renting capacity directly to competitors on a month to month basis, competitors who are building their own compute and can cancel this rental contract at any time. so they'll use that to try to print rosy revenue numbers, except the size of the contract is until 2029 and the month to month payments can be cancelled at any time. and they only have capacity to rent out because they don't have an enterprise AI strategy, they overspent on GPUs for an audience that never showed up for Grok, it has abysmal usage and its radioactive because it creates CSAM and is based af. It's just outdated Nvidia hardware that they are trying to recoup just a little bit of value from. and if you believe in space datacenters, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you! actually space datacenters are the 21st century bridge in brooklyn, whoever is selling you about it thinks you are stupid. Elon Musk just wanted the trillionaire print by all accepted metrics, and got that, so he said anything and disclosed it properly, and 4.9% of the shareholders bought that plan because they were greedy hoping for a pop. The pop came. now they're underwater. Elon Musk doesn't believe the total addressable market of SpaceX's other business lines are that valuable in comparison. 25 trillion TAM for enterprise AI applications, 3 for everything else. ruh roh
- s08148692 2mo agoReal time reentry plasma field will never get old. Amazing
- andsoitis 2mo agoearth is looking beautiful
- ACCount37 2mo agoStarship landed in the ocean intact and only slightly on fire!
- NolF 2mo agoThat just seemed to be standard venting, methane if I'm not mistaken.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- moomoo11 2mo agospacex is a really cool company
- CurbStomper 2mo ago[dead]
- plazmatic 2mo ago[dead]
- staplung 2mo agoSummary: almost, but not quite entirely successful. Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield. So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoSpeaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
- ceejayoz 2mo agoThe 12th flight was the first to use the third generation Raptors, so this is only their second flight test.
- laughing_man 2mo agoThe leading theory, from what I can tell, is slosh. The flip on separation is relatively violent, and while there's not much fuel left compared to the amount at launch, it's still heavy enough to do damage.
- staplung 2mo agoThe cast I was watching said that during the flip and boost-back the booster is pulling 11 Gs. That's a pretty hard hitting water-hammer for sure.
- smallmancontrov 2mo ago
- arjie 2mo agoIncredible. I missed the launch but exciting to see the remarkable success. Boy am I hoping we go to the Moon and to Mars and to all the other places!
- pupppet 2mo agoJust watching the live-stream, does SpaceX only hire young guys in their 20's?
- m348e912 2mo ago>Just watching the live-stream, does SpaceX only hire young guys in their 20's? Basically. It's a rough work-life balance at SpaceX and as people get older, they want to live their lives and not live at work.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Anzix 2mo agoI got a job offer in May and I'm about to be 40 in a week, so you can definitely get hired if you are older.
- spwa4 2mo agoDoes anyone care? I'm DOGEdly tired of these videos.