No-Go For Starship Today, Next Try Maybe Next Week

SpaceX’s first attempt to launch Starship on its 13th test flight today didn’t go as planned. At the moment of startup, some of the 33 engines on Starship’s first stage didn’t light, triggering an automatic abort. They may try again as soon as next week.

The 13th Starship Integrated Flight Test, IFT-13, was scheduled for liftoff at 6:45 pm ET from Starbase, TX.  The countdown proceeded nominally until the T-1 minute mark when there was a brief hold.  It quickly resumed, but at the moment of liftoff, some of the engines didn’t light.

Starship’s first stage, Super Heavy, has 33 Raptor engines. The symbol in the lower left corner shows all of them. The engines that are firing are white. Four are black, indicating they are not.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that they will replace two of the engines before trying again, probably next week.

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

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2026

Starship is critical not only to SpaceX’s own plans for constellations of thousands of Starlink communications satellites as well as one million orbiting data centers, but to NASA’s plans to put astronauts back on the Moon. Starship is one of two lunar landing systems for NASA’s Artemis program. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is the other.

NASA plans to launch the earth-orbiting Artemis III mission next year to test rendezvous and docking operations between its Orion crew spacecraft and both SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon.

During today’s webcast, SpaceX showed a rendering of Starship and Orion docked together, illustrating the size differential.