The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has once again cleared SpaceX to launch its Starship rocket, two months after the failure that destroyed the booster during a May test flight. Liftoff could take place as early as Thursday, July 16, and this time the vehicle will not fly empty: it will carry the first fully operational third-generation Starlink satellites.

What went wrong in May

The investigation pointed to a combination of three factors. During stage separation, slight differences in engine ignition caused the booster to rotate 90 degrees in the wrong direction, a movement that should never have occurred. On top of that came thermal effects on propulsion system components as the rocket climbed, along with an incorrect configuration in the engine alarm system, which failed to raise a warning in time. With the causes identified and corrections applied, the U.S. regulator lifted the flight restriction.

A flight with a real payload

The major difference from previous attempts is that Starship is leaving mass simulators behind. On this mission it will deploy twenty Starlink V3 satellites, the first operational units of that generation. Six of them carry cameras pointed at the rocket’s exterior to record how the vehicle behaves in flight, valuable data for refining the design. The satellites will not remain in a permanent orbit: given the chosen trajectory, they will burn up in the atmosphere roughly twenty minutes after release. In practice, it is a dress rehearsal for the deployment mechanism before the system enters real service.

The bet behind the 124-meter rocket

The V3 version of Starship stands about 124 meters tall and is the centerpiece of SpaceX’s strategy to drastically cut the cost of putting mass into orbit. The company arrives at this launch at a notable moment: it debuted on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, in an offering that raised close to 86 billion dollars, the largest in its history. Every test, with or without an explosion along the way — Elon Musk famously calls them «rapid unscheduled disassembly» — is now watched closely by the market.

Why it matters beyond space

A denser, cheaper Starlink constellation means more satellite bandwidth in places fiber never reaches, something particularly relevant in a long, isolated territory like Chile. And the underlying pattern is one that matters to anyone building technology: iterate fast, fail in public, fix it and fly again.

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Source: TechCrunch.

Image: Steve Jurvetson — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.