SpaceX Delays Starship Flight 13 to July 20 After Raptor Failures

SpaceX pushed Starship Flight 13 to Monday, July 20, after an automatic abort halted Thursday’s countdown less than a second before liftoff. Several of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines failed to ignite, and two are now being replaced at Starbase, Texas. The rocket stands about 400 feet tall, the largest vehicle ever to fly.

Twelve earlier Starship tests were pure engineering stories. Flight 13 also moves a stock price, touches NASA’s moon landing schedule, and decides how fast SpaceX can scale its Starlink network, because this is the first Starship test since the company’s record initial public offering (IPO) in June.

Four Raptors Go Silent at T-0

Thursday evening looked routine until the very end. SpaceX loaded methalox, the liquid methane and liquid oxygen mix that fuels both Starship stages, and the 90-minute launch window opened on schedule at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT) from Starbase’s Pad 2.

Then, at T-0, the flight computer called a hold instead of ignition. Gadget Review reported that four of the booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines failed to ignite during the startup sequence, tripping the automatic abort system before the vehicle ever left the ground.

SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot told viewers on the company’s webcast, “We’ll take some time, dig into what triggered that abort once the booster was igniting to launch, and then we’ll figure out what our path forward is going to be.” Musk went further hours later, posting the fix directly.

To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week.

SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk wrote in a post confirming two engines would be swapped, hours after Thursday’s scrub. The mission profile, laid out in the flight’s official test objectives, still calls for Booster 20 to fly the Super Heavy stage and Ship 40 to fly the upper stage, the same pairing that stood on the pad Thursday night.

A Rocket Delay That Now Moves a Stock

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 12, raising $85.7 billion including the underwriters’ option, the largest IPO on record, according to CNBC. Shares trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, and the exchange fast-tracked the stock into the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 trading days, a process that normally takes months.

The rally did not hold. SPCX climbed as high as $225.64 before reversing hard, and by Wednesday, July 15, it had slipped under its own IPO price for the first time. Thursday’s scrub added another leg down, and Friday brought a sixth straight losing session, off 5.43 percent and nearly 23 percent below the price at which SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100, CNBC reported.

SPCX’s slide toward shares sliding toward a fresh post-IPO low has given SpaceX’s newest shareholders a very different relationship to a Starship countdown than employees or NASA officials have had across the program’s first three years.

Cathie Wood Buys What Short Sellers Are Selling

Wall Street is not reading Thursday’s abort the same way twice. Piper Sandler initiated coverage of SPCX at Neutral this past week, flagging valuation and the lock-up expirations still ahead on a float where only about 4 percent of shares currently trade, Benzinga reported.

Short sellers have built a bearish position against the stock worth roughly $25 billion, per the same Benzinga report. ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood took the other side. Four of her funds bought 122,807 SPCX shares worth about $16.6 million in a single Wednesday session, part of a buying spree Benzinga pegged at more than $36 million for the week.

• Bulls, led by ARK Invest, are buying the dip and betting the abort proves the vehicle’s safety systems work as designed.
• Piper Sandler rates the stock Neutral, pointing to valuation and a float where only around 4% of shares are currently tradable.
• Short sellers have built a roughly $25 billion bearish position, wagering that repeated engine trouble outweighs the test-and-iterate approach that eventually produced Falcon 9.

Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, a frequent critic of Musk’s technology ventures, argued on social media that the failed countdown could deepen doubts about Musk’s ability to execute on SpaceX’s roadmap, crypto.news reported. Prediction markets read it differently. Benzinga reported that Polymarket traders priced a 92 percent chance Starship flies by the end of July and 98 percent odds by the end of August, even though the same market gave Thursday’s attempt an 83 percent chance the booster would explode, a category where planned, controlled destruction still counts as a win. The scarcity of tradable shares is also reshaping record fee income from this year’s IPO boom, a dynamic playing out across Wall Street’s wider listings pipeline.

NASA and Starlink Have Their Own Stakes in Monday

SpaceX’s shareholders are not the only ones with something riding on a clean countdown. NASA has committed roughly $2.9 billion for a Starship-based lunar lander, and the agency is watching Flight 13 closely for signs of the cryogenic propellant handling a crewed Artemis mission will require, CNBC and Space.com both reported.

Managing those propellants is one item on NASA’s checklist before it certifies the vehicle to carry astronauts, and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander is already lined up as a backup landing system for Artemis should Starship slip further behind.

Starlink is the nearer-term business case. Flight 13 will fly the first 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, extending their solar arrays and antennas and attempting laser links into the broader constellation, which had grown past 11,979 satellites as of late May. SpaceX’s own broadcast team has said a clean flight would open the door to near-term orbital missions and, eventually, a constellation of up to 100,000 Starlink V3 satellites in low Earth orbit.

The Raptor 3’s Second Scare in Two Flights

Flight 13’s pre-liftoff abort is not the program’s first Raptor 3 headache. Space.com described Flight 12, the V3 debut in May, as mostly successful overall, but the Super Heavy booster’s return told a rougher story than the upper stage did.

According to SpaceX’s own mission recap, Ship 39 lost one Raptor Vacuum engine during ascent, demonstrated the vehicle’s engine-out capability, and still reached its planned trajectory before splashing down in the Indian Ocean as designed. The booster could not complete its boostback burn and came down hard in the Gulf of Mexico instead.

That hard landing triggered a federal review. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the regulator that licenses commercial launches, required a SpaceX-led mishap investigation and grounded the program, then closed the case citing heat effects on propulsion components and erroneous alarm settings as the most probable causes.

Engineers spent the weeks in between on hardware and software changes meant to fix the booster. Those changes satisfied the regulator, yet a separate ignition problem stopped Thursday’s countdown anyway. It is not the program’s first brush with this kind of review, either. Spaceflight Now noted SpaceX had already completed mishap investigations after each of the first four Starship flights in its original configuration, plus three more across Flights 7 through 9 in Version 2. Raptor 3 was supposed to close that chapter. Instead, the new engine has forced a change in plans twice in its first two outings.

The two-month timeline from Flight 12 to Monday’s new attempt:

1. May 22, 2026: Flight 12, the first Version 3 test, launches from Pad 2. Ship 39 reaches its planned trajectory and splashes down in the Indian Ocean; Super Heavy Booster 19 fails its boostback burn and hits the Gulf of Mexico hard.
2. May 27, 2026: The FAA declares the booster’s return a mishap and grounds Starship pending a SpaceX-led investigation.
3. July 13, 2026: The FAA closes the investigation and clears SpaceX to prepare Flight 13.
4. July 16, 2026: Flight 13’s countdown reaches T-0 before four Raptor 3 engines fail to ignite, triggering an automatic abort.
5. July 20, 2026: A new 90-minute window opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT with two replaced engines aboard Booster 20.

What Monday’s Countdown Still Has to Prove

Assuming Booster 20 and Ship 40 fly clean on Monday, Flight 13 still has a full list of test points to clear.

• Deploy 20 production Starlink V3 satellites for the first time, extending their solar arrays and antennas and attempting laser links into the broader constellation.
• Use six camera-equipped satellites among that batch to scan Ship’s heat shield, including load-sensing tiles built to measure stress during a steeper, higher-pressure ascent than earlier flights flew.
• Relight a single Raptor engine in space aboard Ship, a step SpaceX skipped on Flight 12 after that mission’s early engine anomaly.
• Complete Super Heavy’s boostback burn and a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the objective the booster missed in May.
• Land Ship in the Indian Ocean, laying groundwork for a future attempt to catch the upper stage with Starbase’s tower arms.

Both stages were stacked overnight ahead of Thursday’s attempt, and SpaceX has not signaled further hardware changes beyond the two swapped engines. The broadcast team has framed a clean flight as the gateway to near-term orbital missions, the next milestone after thirteen straight suborbital tests.

Monday’s window also falls on a notable date regardless of how the countdown goes. July 20 marks 57 years since Apollo 11 landed the first astronauts on the moon, and seven years to the day after that, NASA’s robotic Viking 1 lander touched down on Mars.

Frequently Asked Questions

When exactly does Starship Flight 13 launch, and where can I watch it?

Liftoff is targeted for 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT) on Monday, July 20, from Pad 2 at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, with a 90-minute window that runs until 8:15 p.m. EDT. SpaceX’s own webcast starts about 30 minutes before liftoff, and independent coverage from NASASpaceflight typically begins several hours earlier for viewers who want extended pre-launch footage.

Could the same engine problem happen again on July 20?

SpaceX cannot guarantee a clean countdown, but the company has removed and replaced the two Raptor engines flagged after Thursday’s abort, and it separately satisfied the FAA’s corrective actions from the May mishap before this attempt was scheduled. The two fixes address different failure points: one in the booster’s ignition sequence, the other in its boostback and landing systems.

Has Starship ever reached full orbital velocity?

No. All thirteen Starship test flights, including Flight 13, have flown or are planned to fly suborbital trajectories that fall just short of orbital velocity, a deliberate choice that lets SpaceX control where the vehicle comes down. A full orbital insertion remains a milestone SpaceX has said will follow additional Version 3 flights.

What makes Starship V3 different from earlier versions?

Version 3 uses the redesigned Raptor 3 engine, a new launch pad at Starbase, and structural changes aimed at pushing reusable payload capacity to more than 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit, nearly triple what the Version 2 vehicle carried through Flight 11, according to industry reporting. Flight 12 in May was the configuration’s first flight; Flight 13 is its second.

Disclaimer: This article covers SPCX share price moves for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Figures reflect trading data reported as of July 17, 2026, and readers should consult a licensed financial adviser before making investment decisions.