What's next for Starship in the second half of 2026?
Where we are today
SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket lifted off from the brand new Pad 2 in Starbase TX, in the afternoon of May 22nd. All 33 next-generation Raptor engines lit for a spectacular liftoff of the first V3 Starship. The next 65 minutes were intense and not many people could have predicted that Starship would reach both such lows and highs in the same flight. The upper stage for that flight, named S39, successfully splashed down in the indian ocean despite crawling to its suborbital trajectory on only 5/6 engines.
With flight 12 being mostly considered a success, what’s next for the Starship program? Well, first and foremost, the next two vehicles in line for flight 13 will undergo preflight testing which may take one or two months. No one really knows when flight 13 will happen but it should be before september. Flight 13 is sadly unlikely to be orbital as the Raptor relight maneuver that was meant to happen during flight 12 was cancelled last minute probably due to the engine trouble SpaceX had on ascent.
The next few months
That most likely means that flight 13 will be a repeat of flight 12, hopefully with a better outcome for the booster which failed its boostback burn. If flight 13 manages to fix whatever issues came up on flight 12, then flight 14 could be the first orbital starship flight with the first V3 booster catch as well as possibly the first ever ship catch if SpaceX dares to attempt all three milestones in one flight.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk previously stated that SpaceX would only try for a ship catch after two successful V3 ship splashdown in a row. Considering Starship never failed reentry as long as it’s got attitude control, flight 13 should be just fine for the ship. SpaceX could also have flight 14 be orbital but still land the ship in the indian ocean as a precaution, but that wouldn’t feel very spacex-ey would it?
As for the booster, SpaceX already proved they could catch it and even reuse it, but not with this new generation of boosters. If flight 13’s booster “B20” splashes down at the right location in the gulf, SpaceX could try for a catch also on flight 14 since that’s exactly what they did with flights 4 and 5. Furthermore, back when flight 4 happened, the booster team had a lot less data and was a lot less confident on their baby’s ability to get caught by giant mechanical arms. Nowadays, both the pad and booster teams are a lot more confident.
Despite the two Gigabays that should finish construction before October, SpaceX may not have a fast enough cadence with the tools at their disposal to achieve more than 6 flights this year. That said, each of these flights will be very important to the program as they should each achieve major milestones in the program, finally linking most of the dots together instead of proving one at a time.
2027 and onwards
What makes the tower team a bit nervous still is the ship catch since that’s a much more complex maneuver than a booster coming in slightly sideways. Once the first ship catch happens hopefully later this year, as early as flight 14 mind you, Starship will have begun cracking the code to the economics of modern spaceflight. If SpaceX does catch the first ship in 2026, then 2027 could finally see Starship cadence ramping up dramatically.
This will (hopefully) be the beginning of the deployment of the V3 Starlink constellation which should be able to handle much more traffic. As the first few Starlink launches aboard Starship take place, we should also start seeing the first Data-center launches. Not much is known about these satellites other than that they’ll be huge compared to Starlinks. Let’s also not forget about Artemis III which should happen around mid-2027 in which Starship HLS and Orion will rendezvous and dock in low earth orbit to prove the capability of Starship. (Since New Glenn exploded at LC-36C and destroyed most of the pad infrastructure, it is unlikely that Blue Origin will be ready for a mid-2027 launch, thus giving Starship some breathing room)
There are still many challenges ahead for SpaceX as many key milestones are still somewhat far away, but if the Starbase engineers have shown one thing over the past 7 years, it’s that they’re going to try their absolute best to solve these problems. The next few months of Starship development may be a bit slow still, but the ones after that should finally start to show what Starship is truly capable of.