SpaceX's 13th Starship flight test launches with Starlink's next-gen satellites

SpaceX

Starship has taken off for its 13th test flight after a couple of delays due to unfavorable weather conditions. This is the first Starship flight to carry SpaceX's next-generation V3 Starlink satellites, which were designed to provide meaningful increases to its service's performance. The company says they can support up to 1 Tbps of downlink, 10 times more than what the V2 satellites are capable of, and 160 Gbps of uplink that represents an increase of 22 times from V2. 

While Starship will deploy 20 satellites this flight, Starlink customers won't be feeling those improvements yet. This is just a test flight for the satellites, which will extend their solar arrays and antennas to check if they can connect with the rest of the Starlink constellation using their high-capacity lasers. These satellites will remain in suborbital space, in the same altitude and trajectory as Starship, and are expected to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up merely 20 minutes after they get deployed. 

Since Starship itself is also still under testing, SpaceX modified two of the Starlink satellites. It added cameras that would enable them to scan Starship's heat shield and then transmit images to the ground for analysis, as part of the company efforts to ensure that it's ready for more flights.

This is the second launch for SpaceX's V3 Starship model, which debuted during the heavy-lift launch vehicle's 12th flight test in May. It will have pretty much the same goals as the previous flight, all meant collect data so that SpaceX can "continue iteration towards a fully and rapidly reusable design."

Watch Starship's thirteenth flight test https://t.co/qkYYJiX24h

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 23, 2026