SpaceX's Starship completed its 13th test flight on Friday, deploying satellites, surviving reentry, and splashing down in the Indian Ocean like a champ. Shame about the booster hitting the water harder than planned, the engine failures that scrubbed the previous attempt, and the Government Accountability Office report released the same day warning that SpaceX is more than a year behind on the rocket that NASA needs to land humans on the moon. Other than all that, great week.
What Actually Happened on Friday
The 397-foot-tall Super Heavy-Starship lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase facility in Texas at 5:51 p.m. ET, CBS News reports, generating around 16 million pounds of thrust from its 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines. Weather had pushed the launch back a full day, and a July 16 attempt was scrubbed at the last second after four of those same Raptor engines refused to start properly. Friday, thankfully, all 33 lit up and the rocket climbed through a mostly clear sky without incident.
Once the Starship upper stage separated and coasted along its sub-orbital path, it deployed 20 third-generation Starlink satellites one at a time from what CBS News describes as a Pez-like payload dispenser near the nose of the vehicle. Six of those satellites carried cameras specifically to inspect the Starship's heat shield tiles, giving engineers a way to assess the vehicle's condition before future reentries. The spacecraft then briefly reignited one of its Raptor engines in space, a capability SpaceX will need for moon missions. One hour and five minutes after launch, it completed a belly-first reentry and splashed down northwest of Australia.
The Starlinks, traveling the same sub-orbital arc as the Starship, were never meant to survive. SpaceX says they will "demise" in the atmosphere before reaching the ocean. Which is one way to put it.
The Booster Did Not Stick the Landing
The Super Heavy booster, the enormous first stage that provides the initial thrust before separating and returning to Earth, had a rougher day. According to CBS News, fewer engines restarted than planned during its descent toward the Gulf of Mexico, sending it into what the outlet calls a "hard" splashdown at higher velocity than intended.
To be fair, SpaceX was not trying to catch this one with the mechanical arms, nicknamed chopsticks, mounted on the launch tower. For the early flights of this third-generation rocket, the company opted for Gulf splashdowns as a precaution while it works out the kinks. A hard landing in the Gulf is survivable in a way that a hard landing into a steel gantry is not. So points for forward planning, minus points for the engines that did not cooperate.
This was the second flight of the V3 Starship configuration. CBS News notes that the first V3 test in May also had problems, including a missed booster landing target and an early engine shutdown on the Starship upper stage. Progress is being made, but it is the kind of progress that still involves things going wrong.
The GAO Report That Nobody Wanted to Read on Launch Day
Here is where the story gets genuinely uncomfortable. On the same day SpaceX was launching, the Government Accountability Office released a report concluding that SpaceX is more than a year behind its original schedule for key milestones in the NASA Artemis moon lander program. As CBS News reports, those delays include the critical design review, long-duration propellant transfer demonstrations, and an uncrewed lunar landing flight test.
The GAO identified SpaceX's cryogenic fuel management technology as a top program risk. That is not a minor footnote. For the planned moon mission architecture, SpaceX must launch up to 15 or so Starship tanker flights to refuel the lunar lander in orbit before it can even head to the moon. None of that refueling technology has been demonstrated in space. No Starship of any kind has reached Earth orbit yet. The moon lander variant of the upper stage has not flown at all.
NASA veterans have been raising alarms about this architecture for years, according to CBS News. The complexity of requiring more than a dozen successful tanker launches, all within days of the lander's own launch, before two astronauts can descend to the lunar surface, is the kind of thing that makes mission planners wake up at 3 a.m. The GAO is now putting those concerns in writing.
The 2028 Moon Landing Timeline Is Looking Optimistic
SpaceX and NASA are targeting a crewed lunar landing for 2028. The plan involves astronauts riding a Lockheed Martin-built Orion capsule to lunar orbit, where the Starship lander will be waiting after being refueled by a small fleet of tankers. The 165-foot-tall lander then carries two crew members to the lunar south pole, where they ride an external elevator down to the surface. The whole choreography requires the kind of flawless execution that has not yet been demonstrated at any single step.
The GAO also flagged ongoing development challenges with the upgraded Raptor engines, citing "issues identified through testing" that still need to be resolved. Given that engine problems scrubbed the launch attempt a week ago and caused the booster to hit the water harder than planned on Friday, that note reads less like bureaucratic caution and more like reporting from the field.
Blue Origin's Backup Plan Also Exploded
NASA, being NASA, is hedging its bets. The agency also contracted with Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, to develop an alternative moon lander that could conceivably substitute for Starship if SpaceX cannot make the schedule. Blue Origin's lander would fly on the company's New Glenn rocket and would also require in-space refueling.
About that backup plan. According to CBS News, during preparations to test-fire the main engines of the third New Glenn rocket, the launcher exploded in a spectacular fireball, described as virtually vaporizing the vehicle. So the primary contractor is more than a year behind schedule, and the backup plan's rocket just blew up on the pad. The 2028 timeline is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now, metaphorically speaking.
The Dingo Take
Look, Friday's launch was genuinely impressive in several ways. Deploying real operational Starlink satellites from a test vehicle, reigniting an engine in space, surviving reentry, splashing down on target an ocean away from the launch site, these are not trivial achievements. SpaceX is building something that has never existed before, and iterative test flights are how you get there. The rocket science is hard and the people doing it are not stupid.
But the GAO does not write reports like this because everything is fine. More than a year behind schedule on a crewed moon landing program that already depends on technology that has never been demonstrated, involving a vehicle that has never reached orbit, with a backup plan whose rocket just exploded. That is the context in which to read Friday's successful splashdown. It is good news wrapped around a genuinely alarming set of open questions.
NASA needs SpaceX to pull this off, and SpaceX now has the added pressure of performing as a publicly traded company, which means earnings calls and shareholder expectations on top of rocket propulsion. Elon Musk has spent the last year enthusiastically blowing up his credibility in other arenas. Starship is one of the few places where the work speaks for itself. The GAO is saying the work is not speaking fast enough.
