SpaceX’s next-gen Starship megarocket finally got off the ground last week.
On May 22, SpaceX’s first Starship V3 (“Version 3”) vehicle lifted off from a brand-new pad at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas. It was the first Starship launch in more than seven months, a lag caused by the time it took to develop and incorporate V3’s many upgrades over its predecessors. (The destruction of a V3 Super Heavy booster during testing in November didn’t help, either.)
Though Starship V3 suffered a few engine glitches on May 22, and its Super Heavy booster didn’t steer itself down for a soft ocean splashdown as planned, SpaceX heralded the suborbital test flight as a success. That’s a big deal, because V3 is expected to carry a heavy load for the company, and for NASA, in the coming years.
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Great expectations
The 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship V3 is the biggest and most powerful iteration of Starship yet. It’s the first variant of the vehicle outfitted with SpaceX’s new Raptor 3 engine, the sleekest, lightest and brawniest Raptor that the company has built.
V3 sports many other upgrades as well. For example, its Super Heavy first stage has an improved fuel-transfer system that allows the booster’s 33 engines to fire more quickly, according to a May 12 SpaceX update.
The Ship upper stage, meanwhile, features a more efficient propulsion system, larger propellant tanks and docking ports that will enable meetups with refueling “tanker” vehicles in Earth orbit, among other modifications.
Those in-space meetups will be a big part of Starship missions in the future. Any Starship flight to the moon, Mars or another deep-space destination will require the launch of a dozen or more Ships to haul its required propellant to space, experts say. (The exact number of necessary tanker missions is hard to pin down.)
And the moon is indeed a target. In 2021, NASA selected Ship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of lunar exploration. SpaceX is currently working to get Ship ready for the next two Artemis missions — Artemis 3, a docking test with NASA’s Orion crew capsule in low Earth orbit, and Artemis 4, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole. If all goes to plan, Artemis 3 will launch in mid-2027, and Artemis 4 will lift off in late 2028.
Ship isn’t guaranteed to fly on either of these missions, however. NASA also picked Blue Origin’s Blue Moon spacecraft to be an Artemis lander, and both are still in the running for Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. (Both private landers could fly on Artemis 3, NASA officials have said, but only one will make the trip to the moon a year later.)
Another view of Starship V3 during its May 22 test flight. (Image credit: SpaceX)
Next steps
SpaceX is working to get Starship V3 up and running in time for Artemis 3. And it needs to move quickly, for there’s a lot still needs to be done.
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The immediate priority is determining why Super Heavy failed to stick its landing during the May 22 test flight. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration declared that failure a mishap and has grounded Starship until SpaceX wraps up an investigation into the matter.
After Starship V3 has been cleared to fly again, it will need to notch some big milestones in the final frontier — notably, reaching Earth orbit and topping off its tanks there. And SpaceX has laid out how it plans to tick those boxes.
“It will start with a Starship launched from Starbase to spend an extended time on orbit, gathering data on vehicle propulsion and thermal behavior on an extended duration mission, including long duration propellant storage and boil-off characterization,” the company wrote in an update on Oct. 30, about two weeks after Starship’s 11th test flight. “A second Starship will then launch to rendezvous with the first to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer in Earth orbit.”
SpaceX aims to launch both of those Starship flights this year, the company added. But we don’t know if the next Starship launch will kick off the first leg of that refueling test; SpaceX hasn’t announced details about Flight 13 (including its flight date).
We should expect Starship to launch again relatively soon, however, for SpaceX prioritizes flight-testing as the best way to develop and mature its hardware. And there’s no shortage of hardware to fly at the moment: The company has built up a stockpile of Starship V3 vehicles, according to founder and CEO Elon Musk.
“The Starship production pipeline is full and will complete roughly 10 more ships and about half that number of boosters this year,” Musk wrote on May 18 via X, the social media platform he owns.
SpaceX also needs to integrate a life-support system into Starship ahead of Artemis 4. That vital tech may not be necessary for Artemis 3, however; NASA is still defining the parameters of that docking test and has left open the possibility that the astronauts will not enter whichever private lander flies on Artemis 3.
SpaceX has been operating life-support systems in space since 2020, when it launched its first Crew Dragon astronaut mission to the International Space Station. And the company has been working on a Starship version of the tech as well.
In the October 2025 update, SpaceX wrote that it has completed “lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control system demonstrations, using a full-scale cabin module inhabited by multiple people to test the capability to inject oxygen and nitrogen into the cabin environment and accurately manage air distribution and sanitation, along with humidity and thermal control.”
There’s other vital gear to integrate as well — the elevator, for instance. Ship stands a whopping 171 feet (52 meters) tall, so the astronauts who fly on it to the moon will need a way to get from the vehicle’s nose (where the cabin will be) down to the gray dirt.
SpaceX has already conducted a demonstration of Ship elevator and airlock tech, according to the October 2025 update. That test — performed with Axiom Space, which is building the Artemis program’s spacesuits — occurred at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California in mid-2024.
Over the longer term, we can expect an accelerating cadence of increasingly ambitious test flights as SpaceX gets even more proficient at building and flying Starship hardware.
Perhaps the most important of these trials is an uncrewed test flight to the lunar surface, which both Ship and Blue Moon will need to ace before the private vehicles are certified to carry NASA astronauts.
There’s no stated timeline for either of those landmark flights, though at least one of them will have to occur before late 2028 to keep Artemis 4 on schedule. (A robotic prototype of Blue Moon will launch on a lunar-landing mission this fall, if all goes to plan. But the mature, crew-capable variant of Blue Moon will still have to duplicate the feat before astronauts can climb aboard.)
What can we expect once Starship gets fully up and running? It’s hard to say, but Musk has certainly set expectations high.
“Our goal is launching Starship >10k/year, which would be more than once an hour,” the world’s richest man wrote via X on May 23. “Probably over 200 tons of useful load to a useful orbit per flight by then.”
