Starship is cleared for takeoff — and this time, shareholders are along for the ride
The FAA has cleared SpaceX to fly Starship again. The investigation into May's booster failure is closed, the fixes are in, and the next launch could come as soon as Thursday, July 16.
On paper, it's just the second flight of Starship V3, the newest and biggest version of the vehicle. In practice, the stakes have changed shape entirely. This is the first Starship test since SpaceX went public — and the first to carry a real payload: the opening batch of third-generation Starlink satellites.
What went wrong in May
The May 22 flight nearly earned a clean report card. Super Heavy, the first stage, hauled the 407-foot stack to space. The upper ship separated cleanly, then deployed 20 satellite simulators plus two modified Starlinks that filmed the vehicle from outside.
Then came the trip home. The booster's engines didn't re-ignite properly ahead of a planned splashdown landing rehearsal in the Gulf of Mexico, and the stage dropped into the sea. SpaceX traced it to "slight differences in engine startup on the ship" that spun the booster 90 degrees the wrong way right at separation. The FAA's verdict, issued Monday, added two probable root causes: heat stress on propulsion components during ascent, and engine alarm settings that simply got it wrong.
The fix list
SpaceX says it reworked the startup sequence so the booster flips the way it's supposed to, improved engine re-light reliability, and revised the alarm and abort systems that misfired. The upper stage needed attention too — it lost one of its three vacuum-rated Raptor engines in May, which prompted several hardware and operational changes.
Real cargo, real pressure
Thursday's flight is set to deploy 20 new V3 Starlink satellites, the first non-dummy payload Starship has ever carried. They're built to boost Starlink's capacity and speeds, linking to the constellation through high-capacity lasers. They won't stay up long — the batch is designed to burn up about 20 minutes after deployment — but six carry cameras to photograph Starship in flight. Even the cargo is part of the test.
The financial subtext is hard to miss. SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq on June 12, raised nearly $86 billion in a record offering, and briefly cracked the world's ten most valuable companies. Starlink was the only profitable business heading into that IPO. Starship's full reusability is the load-bearing assumption under everything else the company wants to do, orbital data centers and Mars included.
Which puts the famous SpaceX method under new scrutiny. The company runs on a fly-fail-fix loop and has always treated spectacular explosions — "rapid unscheduled disassembly," as Elon Musk likes to call them — as tuition, not catastrophe. Private investors tolerated the fireworks for years. A public market votes on them daily, in the share price.
What to watch Thursday
Three things decide it: a booster that flips the right way and re-lights on cue, an upper stage that keeps all three vacuum engines burning, and a clean release of the first V3 Starlink batch. Every fix maps to a specific failure from May, so this flight isn't about breaking new ground. It's about proving the corrections hold.
If they do, SpaceX gets a step closer to the reusable-rocket economics its valuation already assumes. If they don't — well, the company is about to find out how Wall Street prices a fireball.
Image: SpaceX, via Unsplash
