Tropical Storm Bertha, churning through the Gulf of Mexico, forced SpaceX to postpone the thirteenth test flight of its Starship rocket, and the company rescheduled the launch for Friday, July 24, its second attempt of the week. The delay came after engineers ordered additional testing of engines on Booster 20, the giant first stage for the flight.
The scrubbed attempt was the latest sign of how much of the Starship program’s schedule depends on weather and hardware readiness. Tropical storms in the Gulf bring wind, lightning, and heavy rain to the launch site on the Texas coast, and the company’s policy has been to stand down rather than risk a vehicle that is still in development.
Starship is the largest rocket ever built, standing about 400 feet tall with a first stage powered by 33 Raptor engines. The design is fully reusable, and the test campaign has been marked by rapid iteration: SpaceX flies, fixes what breaks, and flies again. Thirteen flights into the campaign, the booster-catch landing system has been demonstrated, and each flight has extended the vehicle’s reach toward orbit.
The previous flight went off largely as planned, giving engineers a stable baseline and clearing the way for the current attempt, according to people familiar with the program. The company has used the interval between flights to refine the landing sequence and to address the heat-shield issues that have plagued earlier ships.
The engine retest is the kind of step that has become routine in the program. Booster 20’s engines required additional validation before the next attempt, SpaceX said, without specifying what prompted the extra checks. Static-fire tests, in which engines are ignited while the vehicle is held to the ground, are standard practice before every flight.
The delay matters beyond the schedule. Starship is the vehicle SpaceX has bet its commercial roadmap on: the company has begun turning away new Falcon 9 customers for missions after 2028, on the assumption that Starship will carry the commercial load by then. Every slip in the flight program compounds the risk of that bet.
Starship is also central to the next phase of Starlink, the satellite constellation that is SpaceX’s cash engine. The next-generation satellites are designed to be launched in batches aboard Starship, and the company has said the giant rocket will eventually carry its biggest and most capable satellites. A delay in the flight program is a delay in that roadmap as well.
The private-company stock market has taken notice. Shares of SpaceX, which trade on secondary markets, have drifted lower through July, and traders active in space-linked equities say short positions have accumulated more than $15 billion in gains this year, according to people tracking the trades. The weak tone reflects broader market jitters about tariffs and interest rates as much as anything specific to the launch schedule.
The test flight itself is part of a deliberate escalation. Early flights in the program ended in explosions, some planned, some not, and each failure produced design changes. Recent flights have been more controlled, with the booster returning to the launch tower and the ship flying longer and higher. Flight 13 was expected to continue that progression, though the company has not detailed the specific objectives.
Weather is a recurring variable at the Texas site. The Gulf coast is prone to storms in summer, and the program has been delayed by weather before, sometimes for weeks. The rescheduling to Friday kept the flight on the near horizon, but forecasters said Bertha’s path remained uncertain.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses each flight, cleared the attempt before the weather forced the delay, according to people familiar with the process. The agency and SpaceX have clashed repeatedly over the pace of reviews, and a smooth licensing process for the remainder of the campaign is a prerequisite for the cadence the company has promised.
For the industry, each Starship flight is also a test of the economics that SpaceX has promised. The company has said Starship will eventually launch at a fraction of Falcon 9’s cost per kilogram, opening markets that high launch prices have kept closed. Operators are watching the flight program for signs that the cost projections hold.
For now, the program waits on the storm. SpaceX has said it will attempt launch as soon as conditions allow, and engineers are using the delay to finish the booster engine work. The company’s habit, established across a dozen flights, is that the next attempt comes quickly, and that the flight itself, once it happens, will tell more than any schedule. Musk has said repeatedly that Starship is the vehicle that will take humans to Mars, and each successful test moves the company closer to the operational flights that would carry crews.
