You guys... Starship Flight 13 is launching this week and the upgrade from the last flight is absolutely wild! Instead of mockups, they packed 20 REAL functioning Starlink V3 satellites into the payload bay. The window opens Thursday at 5:45 pm CDT — that's about 22:45 UTC for those watching later. The whole mission lasts just over an hour with a suborbital arc from Texas out past Australia, and while the ship is targeting a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean they have six actual cameras on these satellites to film the heat shield during reentry so engineers can analyze it after it comes home. This isn't just another test flight — this one proves Starship can actually carry and deploy real hardware before they commit to an orbital launch, which is huge for their timeline!
The math here is what really blows my mind because each Falcon V2 mission adds about 2.6 Terabits per second but ONE fully loaded Starship could carry up to 60 of these Version 3 sats and that's adding a whopping 60 TERABITS PER SECOND to the network in one go! They designed it for even more — future customer payloads, massive orbital data center networks, moon missions with NASA's Artemis program, and eventually Mars. The V1/V2 fleet laid the foundation but this flight is where Starlink goes next-generation; these satellites will try laser links to existing ones in orbit during the mission to prove cross-gen compatibility too which means your internet won't break when they swap hardware generations later!
I know some of you are waiting for an orbital launch and I get it, but here's why this week stays suborbital: on flight 12 a Raptor shut down prematurely and they had to skip the planned in-orbit engine burn so they need another flawless test under pressure first. They won't go orbit until Starship is fully validated as rapidly reusable - meaning returning to Texas after landing, not just falling into the ocean — which they want before launching any actual satellites for service. So think of this flight less as a repeat and more as the critical proof-of-concept that enables everything else: in-orbit refueling demos, real satellite deployments later this year, and eventually the first humaned spaceflight on American soil again!
Source: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/spacex-is-gearing-up-for-Starship's-13th-test-flight-later-this-week/
The math here is what really blows my mind because each Falcon V2 mission adds about 2.6 Terabits per second but ONE fully loaded Starship could carry up to 60 of these Version 3 sats and that's adding a whopping 60 TERABITS PER SECOND to the network in one go! They designed it for even more — future customer payloads, massive orbital data center networks, moon missions with NASA's Artemis program, and eventually Mars. The V1/V2 fleet laid the foundation but this flight is where Starlink goes next-generation; these satellites will try laser links to existing ones in orbit during the mission to prove cross-gen compatibility too which means your internet won't break when they swap hardware generations later!
I know some of you are waiting for an orbital launch and I get it, but here's why this week stays suborbital: on flight 12 a Raptor shut down prematurely and they had to skip the planned in-orbit engine burn so they need another flawless test under pressure first. They won't go orbit until Starship is fully validated as rapidly reusable - meaning returning to Texas after landing, not just falling into the ocean — which they want before launching any actual satellites for service. So think of this flight less as a repeat and more as the critical proof-of-concept that enables everything else: in-orbit refueling demos, real satellite deployments later this year, and eventually the first humaned spaceflight on American soil again!
Source: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/spacex-is-gearing-up-for-Starship's-13th-test-flight-later-this-week/