SpaceX has canceled the first launch of its third-generation Starship rocket system from its headquarters in Starbase, Texas. The company is expected to make another attempt on Friday.
Not only because this is the first real-world test of the upgraded Starship V3 hardware. This is also a significant financial moment for SpaceX. The company recently filed for an IPO and is expected to go public in the coming weeks, putting additional pressure on SpaceX to demonstrate that its next-generation rocket program is making meaningful progress.
This launch (Starship’s 12th) will be Starship’s first flight since the company’s last attempt in October 2025. SpaceX has spent several months developing and testing this third version of Starship, which has faced several issues. For example, in November, one of the first V3 boosters suffered an explosion during testing.
The company delayed Thursday’s liftoff several times and ultimately attempted to send the rocket into space near the end of its expected launch period. The spacecraft and its massive rocket boosters were fully fueled and the countdown was down to less than T-40 seconds, but various rocket and launcher system problems led the company to recycle the countdown several times.
“The hydraulic pins holding the (launch) tower arms in place have not retracted,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on
This new version of Starship represents a major upgrade to the vehicle’s design and the way the company’s launch pad infrastructure operates. One of the bigger changes is SpaceX’s third-generation Raptor engine, which packs more thrust into a streamlined design. The third-generation Starship boosters are easier to hold on the launch pad and have one fewer grid fin.
SpaceX also made a number of changes to make this version of Starship more reliable. For example, the new design is supposed to prevent propellant leaks inside certain parts of Starship’s upper stage, which have caused problems on several previous Starship test flights. The goal is to make the entire vehicle fully reusable, similar to the company’s flagship rocket, the Falcon 9.
If this particular flight goes as planned, it won’t achieve all of the goals SpaceX has set for proving Starship V3. The company is not seeking to recover the boosters or the Starship vehicle itself. Both are expected to perform “soft landings” in the water – Booster in the Atlantic Ocean and Starship in the Indian Ocean. The spacecraft also will not fly in actual Earth orbit. That means SpaceX will have to wait for another mission to prove that the upper stage of this giant rocket can deliver commercial payloads.
Now that SpaceX has invested heavily in Starlink, which generated $11 billion in revenue last year, it needs the Starship V3 to be a reliable launch system, according to publicly available IPO filings. SpaceX has demonstrated Starship’s ability to deploy dummy versions of upgraded Starlink satellites in previous launches, but has yet to place a functioning payload into space using the new rocket system.
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