Overview
- On Thursday, SpaceX triggered an automatic abort at the last moment of the 13th Starship launch countdown after telemetry showed an engine-start fault on the Super Heavy booster.
- Elon Musk posted that some Raptor engines failed to start and that engineers will remove and replace two Raptors before the next launch attempt.
- Independent observers and live telemetry reports suggested up to four booster engines may not have ignited, a detail that remains unconfirmed as SpaceX investigates the cause.
- The mission was to fly Starship V3 hardware and carry a Starlink V3 satellite, so the abort pauses both vehicle development checks and a planned operational payload deployment.
- Starship’s test program has repeatedly used automated abort systems to prevent unsafe launches and has a multi-year record of iterative failures and partial successes, which frames this pause as part of ongoing development; investors also reacted negatively to the cancellation in after-hours trading.