FAA Gives Green Light for Next Starship Launch
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has cleared SpaceX to fly Starship prototypes again, following the company’s identification of the probable cause of the booster stage failure during a flight in May. SpaceX announced over the weekend that the next Starship flight could occur as soon as Thursday, July 16, 2026. This will mark the second-ever launch of the third version (V3) of Starship and the first to carry operational third-generation Starlink satellites into space.
SpaceX completed its IPO and publicly listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on June 12, 2026, raising nearly $86 billion—a record. This upcoming test flight will be SpaceX’s first as a public company, testing the market’s tolerance for the company’s ‘fly, fail, fix’ approach to rocket development, often culminating in what CEO Elon Musk calls ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly.’
Details of the May Failure and Investigation
SpaceX’s first test launch of the V3 Starship on May 22, 2026, was largely successful. The Super Heavy booster lifted the 407-foot rocket into space before the upper stage separated and deployed 20 satellite simulators along with two modified Starlinks that recorded footage of the Starship exterior. The new third-generation booster was intended to return to Earth and perform a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico, but its engines failed to properly re-ignite, causing it to plummet into the water.
Root Causes Identified
The problem occurred at booster separation, according to SpaceX and the FAA. SpaceX stated over the weekend that ‘slight differences in engine startup on the ship’ caused the booster to turn 90 degrees in the wrong direction. The FAA added in a statement on Monday that the most probable root causes were ‘heat effects on propulsion system components during the [rocket’s] ascent and erroneous engine alarm system settings.’
Modifications and Next Steps
SpaceX has modified the engine startup sequence to allow the booster to ‘more reliably flip in the desired direction’ and improved the booster’s ‘re-light reliability.’ The company has also made changes to Starship’s engine alarm and abort systems to reduce the chance of similar future failures. While the first V3 upper stage successfully deployed its test payload in May and simulated a landing in the Gulf—a milestone SpaceX previously struggled to achieve—it did so while losing one of the three Raptor engines intended for vacuum use. SpaceX confirmed ‘several hardware and operational modifications’ to prevent a recurrence.
Launching V3 Starlink Satellites
The next Starship test flight will deploy the first V3 Starlink satellites, designed to increase the satellite network’s capacity and user speeds. SpaceX plans to deploy 20 of these new satellites during the launch. They are designed to connect with the larger Starlink constellation ‘via high-capacity lasers’ and then burn up in the atmosphere roughly 20 minutes after deployment. Six of them will be equipped with cameras to photograph the exterior of Starship. The V3 versions of both Starship and Starlink are crucial to SpaceX’s future, as Starlink was the only profitable part of SpaceX’s business leading up to its IPO, and Starship is needed for ambitious plans involving space-based data centers and interplanetary travel.