SpaceX aborts Starship test flight

SpaceX called off a Starship test flight at its Starbase facility in South Texas after the launch was automatically aborted during the Super Heavy booster’s engine start sequence. Ars Technica reports that the countdown had progressed through propellant loading—more than 11.5 million pounds of liquid methane and liquid oxygen—before computers halted the attempt, and the company began draining the tanks.

Elon Musk wrote on X that some engines did not start, triggering the abort, and later said ground crews would replace two Raptor engines on the booster. SpaceX did not immediately give a new launch date, though Musk said the next attempt could come “in a few days,” with early next week described as the most probable timing. A graphic on SpaceX’s own livestream suggested four of the booster’s 33 engines failed to ignite, though SpaceX did not specify the number.

The scrub comes as SpaceX tries to turn Starship into a repeatable system rather than a sequence of one-off stunts. Flight 13 is the 13th full-scale Starship launch attempt and the second to use the company’s upgraded Starship Version 3 rocket with third-generation Raptor 3 engines, according to Ars Technica. The Version 3 configuration debuted in May on what the outlet describes as a mostly successful test, but with in-flight engine issues even as the pad startup sequence worked.

This time, the point was to validate fixes from Flight 12 two months earlier. Ars Technica notes that on Flight 12 the booster’s flip after stage separation was off by about 90 degrees, attributed to differences in engine startup timing, and that the startup sequence has been modified to be more robust. Some engines also failed to reignite during the landing burn, preventing a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico—an outcome SpaceX wants on Flight 13 to support future reuse of the Super Heavy booster. The upper stage had its own problems on Flight 12, with one of six engines shutting down early, forcing SpaceX to skip an in-space engine relight attempt that remains on Flight 13’s objectives.

Business Insider frames Thursday’s attempt as the first Starship launch since SpaceX’s June IPO, a change that makes aborted launches look less like private experimentation and more like public performance. The engineering reality is the same—33 engines must light in sequence, and one weak link can stop the whole stack—but the audience is larger and less patient. When a launch is scrubbed after the tanks are full, the cost is not just propellant and time; it is the reminder that the hardest part of reusable rocketry is not the livestream, but the checklist.

SpaceX ended the day by offloading propellant at Starbase and planning engine swaps on the booster before trying again.