SpaceX Starship flight clearance has been granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), opening the path for a second V3 launch attempt as soon as Thursday, 16 July, roughly seven weeks after a booster failure derailed the system’s debut outing in May.
The timing matters. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on 12 June, raising nearly $86 billion and entering the ranks of the ten most valuable companies in the world. The next Starship test is therefore the first the company will conduct as a publicly traded entity, putting its much-discussed ‘fly, fail, fix’ development philosophy squarely in front of shareholders for the first time.
What Went Wrong on 22 May
The V3 Starship’s debut on 22 May was a partial success. The 407-foot rocket reached space, the upper stage separated cleanly, and the vehicle deployed 20 satellite simulators along with two modified Starlinks that filmed the exterior. But the Super Heavy booster failed to return.
SpaceX said that ‘slight differences in engine startup on the ship’ caused the booster to rotate 90 degrees in the wrong direction at the point of separation, preventing it from performing the controlled flip needed for re-entry. The FAA, in its own statement, identified the most probable root causes as ‘heat effects on propulsion system components during the [rocket’s] ascent and erroneous engine alarm system settings.’
The upper stage also lost one of its three vacuum Raptor engines during the flight, though it still managed a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico, a milestone SpaceX had struggled to reach in earlier iterations of the programme.
SpaceX says it has modified the engine startup sequence to allow the booster to ‘more reliably flip in the desired direction’ and has made changes to ‘improve re-light reliability.’ The company also disclosed ‘[s]everal hardware and operational modifications’ aimed at preventing another vacuum Raptor loss, alongside revisions to Starship’s engine alarm and abort systems.
SpaceX Starship Flight Clearance Comes Loaded With New Payload
Thursday’s flight will carry the first real third-generation Starlink satellites to orbit. SpaceX plans to deploy 20 of them during the launch. Previous Starship test flights carried only dummy versions of the larger, more powerful satellites.
These V3 Starlinks are designed to connect with the broader constellation ‘via high-capacity lasers’ before burning up in the atmosphere roughly 20 minutes after deployment. Six will carry cameras to photograph the Starship exterior, continuing SpaceX’s practice of using test payloads to gather engineering data simultaneously.
The stakes for Starlink’s next generation are commercial as well as technical. Starlink was the only profitable segment of SpaceX’s business ahead of the IPO, and the V3 satellites are intended to expand network capacity and improve user speeds. A reliable, fully reusable Starship is what makes a high launch cadence economically viable.
The longer arc is even more ambitious. SpaceX’s SEC registration filing states that the company anticipates beginning payload delivery to orbit in 2026, with orbital AI compute satellites potentially deployable as early as 2028. Those targets now sit inside a public-company disclosure framework, giving investors a concrete timeline against which to measure progress.
The IPO itself offered a close look at governance. SpaceX’s S-1 registration statement shows the company issued Class A common stock at a par value of $0.001 per share, and that chief executive Elon Musk retained an option to purchase additional Class A shares immediately after the offering completed. The arrangement preserves Musk’s influence over the company’s capital structure even as public shareholders come aboard.
Musk himself has never seemed troubled by the spectacle of exploding rockets, describing the detonations as ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly.’ Whether shareholders share his equanimity will become clearer once the countdown clock reaches zero on Thursday.
