SpaceX (SPCX) announced that on Friday, July 24, Starship lifted off from Starbase, Texas on its thirteenth flight test. The company said, “This was the second flight of the Starship and Super Heavy V3 vehicles and the first Starship flight to deploy the next generation Starlink V3 satellites. The flight test began with Super Heavy igniting all 33 Raptor 3 engines and ascending over the Gulf of America. The successful first-stage ascent was followed by a hot-staging maneuver, with Starship’s upper stage igniting its six Raptor engines to continue its flight to space. Following stage separation, the Super Heavy booster performed a directional flip maneuver. The startup sequence was modified for this flight to be more robust to timing variability in engine startup and flip in the desired direction, which is done to increase overall performance. The booster successfully completed the high thrust portion of the boostback burn with all 33 engines, the first time with a Super Heavy V3, before ending the burn early. It attempted to relight its engines for the landing burn, with a subset successfully igniting before experiencing a hard splashdown in the Gulf.”
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