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Starbase This Week (2026-07-12) | Written by @Space_Mr_Banana
Booster 20 conducts a full-duration Static Fire, SpaceX breaks the chopsticks again and Ship 40 is still in Megabay 2. Flight 13 is just around the corner, but more on that in a moment, welcome to this week's Starbase This Week.
Flight 13
Starship's thirteenth flight test is currently set to launch no earlier than the 16th of July as per SpaceX with the launch window opening at 5:45 pm CT, that means we are just under four days away from the launch.
Starship flight 13 will be very similar to what we saw on the previous launch, but with a few key differences.
First of all this flight will not be carrying satellite simulators. Instead SpaceX has finally opted to put 20 real version 3 Starlink satellites despite the mission not being orbital. Its possible that these 20 v3 sats are some of the first to come out of the production line and they are probably still closer to test articles rather than the real thing but it is good that SpaceX is using this flight to test the hardware and software of the satellites.
Originally the flight 13 info-dump suggested that the v3 Starlinks would attempt to connect to ground stations across Africa, however, that statement was removed for whatever reason. This doesn't necessarily mean that SpaceX won’t attempt this milestone, just that they maybe didn't mean to reveal it so early. The reality is, we don’t know.
The v3 Starlinks will not make orbit and will burn up in the atmosphere around 20 minutes after deployment.
SpaceX also revealed that they pushed a bunch of reliability upgrades to the Starship Booster, Ship and Raptor engines for testing on this flight to remedy the issues that were experienced on flight 12 with Booster 19 and Ship 39, the Raptor vacuum engine that went out on Ship and the five booster engines that encountered anomalies destroying the booster.
Now the launch timeline has a few things to be said about it as well.
There is nothing really different about what happens before the vehicle can fly…Propellant loading, all the times are the same here. When we start to see some differences is with Max Q (the moment of peak aerodynamic stress on the vehicle).
Max Q on flight 13 is planned to be 13 seconds later than on flight 12, this means less acceleration in that first phase of the flight, however, despite being slower here, Starship will turn up the power during Max Q to make stage separation be 3 seconds earlier than on flight 12.
Quickly doing the maths that means the vehicle is going to make up 16 seconds of time in this section of the flight, that might be noticeable in the moment, and it shows that SpaceX is trying to get more performance to maximise payload capacity – not that they need too as the payload for this flight is far lower than what the vehicle can actually carry, but its worth testing.
The next notable time difference is the length of the boostback burn, obviously Starship flight 12 encountered a small hiccup in this part of the boosters flight as it failed to even start the burn properly but, it was planned to be one minute long. For this flight boostback will be 38 seconds.
The block 3 booster is designed to run all 33-engines on boostback and then at the end go down to less engines for accuracy. The reason for this huge time difference is likely that SpaceX plans to run 33-engines on booster 20 for longer than they had planned for booster 19, this improves the efficiency of the boostback so they get more performance out of the booster. So despite the shorter burn time, it should still be targeting roughly the same position as it would with a longer boostback.
After boostback SpaceX still plans to hit all the same objective that flight 12 hit or missed. Including booster landing burn, payload deploy demo, the in-space engine relight demo, Ship reentry and landing burn starting with three engines then down selecting to two engines and finally to one for a controlled soft splashdown.
Flight 13 vehicles and Pad 2
Now moving away from the details of Flight 13, its also worth discussing Booster 20, Ship 40 and Pad 2.
This week Booster 20 completed a key milestone towards flight… The 33-engine static fire. This one was slightly different though.
Unlike previous booster static fires which have only been 10-15 seconds long, this one lasted 25 seconds, giving SpaceX more data and likely a bit more confidence as well.
Not all was smooth however. After the static fire was complete SpaceX had planned to roll the booster back to the production site fairly quickly, but they soon discovered that one of the chopstick actuators was broken and they had to replace it causing a day or so delay. Otherwise we could be targeting the 15th of July instead.
It's likely that the actuator was broken during some of the chopstick testing that SpaceX was doing before and after the Static fire, not broken by the static fire.
Of course Booster 20 is now at the production site so that SpaceX can complete final check-ups on the vehicle and alongside installing the flight termination system (FTS) remove all the testing hardware that is not needed for flight.
Ship 40 which will be flying with B20 is currently on one of the workstands in MegaBay 2 and has been since it completed its six-engine static fire. The next steps for this vehicle will be to load up all the 20 v3 satellites and then roll out to the launch site once Booster 20 makes it back there for a full stack and then hopefully launch.
Production Site
Flight 13 isnt the only thing we look forward too right now, we are also closely watching the vehicles for future flights.
Ship 41 despite having already completed its cryogenic testing campaign (where Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Nitrogen is loaded onto the vehicle for testing) was once again rolled out to Massey’s. While it did look like it did nothing at the site as it had no propellant loaded onto it, Its likely that SpaceX just sent it back out to more testing with the test structure, which is for checking the catch points and flaps.
Inside Megabay 2 Ship 42 is being stacked, with the common dome section (CX:3) being rolled into the bay.
Finally inside the other Megabay, Booster 22’s A5:4, one of the LOX tank sections was rolled out from Starfactory to join up with the rest of the booster bringing it one step closer to being fully stacked.
Thats all for this week, It is looking like the next few days will be quite exciting. Do you agree? Do you think Starship will fly again on the 16th or will it be delayed? If so, why?
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