Starship launches Flight 13 from SpaceX Starbase

The flight

The window opened at 22:45 UTC and ran 90 minutes. Liftoff came 6 minutes into it.

The first stage, Booster 20, was making its 1st flight.

The recovery attempt on Gulf of Mexico was not successful.

The payload was bound for Suborbital.

The mission

13th test flight of the two-stage Starship launch vehicle. Second flight of Starship V3. For the first time, Starship will carry 20 V3 Starlink satellites to space, which will extend solar arrays and antennas and will attempt to connect with ground stations in South Africa and the larger Starlink constellation via high-capacity lasers. 6 of the satellites have been modified with a suite of cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to continue testing methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test.

Payload description as recorded by Launch Library 2.

By the numbers

SpaceX has now flown 713 launches in total. Its run of consecutive successful launches stands at 198.

It was the 2nd launch from Orbital Launch Pad 2.