Was Starship Launch 13 A Success?

It's complicated. Or is it?

Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash

It has been over a decade since Elon announced Starship and three years since its first test launch, but this colossal rocket has yet to show any evidence that it can actually work as a space launch vehicle, let alone revolutionise this tiny niche industry. So, was 13 SpaceX’s lucky number? Did their 13th test flight actually move the needle forward on this quagmire of a project? From one very narrow perspective, yes, it did. But in real terms, this flight hasn’t got SpaceX any closer to the mythical fully reusable, cheap-to-launch, 100-ton-to-LEO (Low Earth Orbit) rocket Musk promised us a decade ago. It’s almost like this guy has proven himself to be a narcissistic pathological liar, and we should know better than to trust anything that falls out of his gaping maw.

The Good

However, I want to separate the authoritarian oligarch from the work, because the actual engineers at SpaceX, the ones tasked with making Musk’s idiotic ideas a reality, pulled off a miracle here, and they deserve praise. So, what went well?

Well, this flight successfully deployed 20 functional Starlink V3 satellites, which marks the first time its payload wasn’t just a dummy mass. That factor matters because V3 is critical to Starlink’s future, and Starlink is by far SpaceX’s biggest breadwinner. The V3 satellites have far greater capacity than the current V2 varieties but are so physically large that only Starship can accommodate them. In SpaceX’s IPO, they stated that a “single Starship launch will be capable of deploying up to 60 Starlink V3 satellites to LEO, representing a potential twenty-fold increase in Starlink downlink capacity deployed relative to a Falcon 9 launch”, and let’s not forget that SpaceX is trying to make Starship launches cheaper than the current Falcon 9 launch. In other words, for Starlink to become massively profitable, cheap enough to compete industry-wide, and have enough local capacity to adequately service densely populated areas (where most internet users are), it needs Starship to be able to successfully deploy Starlink V3 satellites.

So, even though they only deployed a third of Starship’s supposed capacity, this is a major step forward for SpaceX actually having a use case for this rocket. But there are still some serious issues here, which we will get onto in a minute.

This was also the first time Starship’s upper stage performed a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean without exploding. This is a huge positive in multiple ways. For Starship’s upper stage to be reusable, it needs to land back on Earth. The upper stage faces a far more risky landing procedure than the booster/lower stage because it re-enters the atmosphere at near-orbital speeds during landing. As such, it needs to prove it can consistently land safely over the ocean (as part of a soft splashdown) before they attempt a terrestrial landing. This marks a reasonable step towards reaching that critical reusability goal, and it shows how well SpaceX engineers have optimised Starship’s design and incredibly risky landing procedure.

Also, because Starship didn’t explode and simply floated in the water, SpaceX was able to source data about its heat shield. A heat shield is critical for any spacecraft hoping to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, as it prevents the spacecraft from burning up. Not only is Starship’s heat shield the largest ever made (and built from thousands of tiles, making it way more susceptible to failure), but for Starship to be economically viable as a reusable launch vehicle, it needs to be capable of working reliably over multiple landings. Building such a component is a material science miracle, so the more data they can collect about the current shield’s performance, the better.

Indeed, the drone footage of the heat shield after landing also looked promising. It appeared intact, with only minor discolouration and only a few possible broken tiles. However, again, there are some issues here that we will discuss in a moment.

This brings me to the final good point, if you can even call it good. This test flight “looked good”. It is something for SpaceX bagholders — I mean, investors — to point towards. From a purely marketing and PR standpoint, deploying satellites and looking good on landing is enough to signal progress to those clinging onto the Musk bandwagon. While it by no means boosted SpaceX’s stock price, it has seemingly slowed the rate at which it has been losing value at the very least.

But that is where the positives end.

The Bad — Booster

Okay, are you ready? There is a lot to go through, and I will try to be as concise as possible.

The booster failed to land. It completed its jobs of initial launch and separation from the upper stage, but as it came back down to Earth, three of its engines failed to reignite, and at the point of splashdown, only five of its 13 landing engines appeared to be working. It hit the water at such velocity that it basically exploded on impact, also known as a “hard splashdown”.

But, hang on, hadn’t SpaceX already figured out how to land the booster? They have landed one on land and reflown it already. Well, that was the older version of the booster. Test Flights 12 and 13 were the first use of the V3 Starship and booster, and SpaceX seems to understand they have taken a step backwards. Rather than try to properly land either of these boosters, SpaceX sent both of them to do a “soft splashdown” in the Gulf of Mexico, almost as if they knew they would fail. The first failed spectacularly, with the engines completely failing to reignite after separation, causing it to crash into the water at 900 mph! And now the second one has failed in a similar fashion. Reusing the booster was supposed to be the easy part, which means this repeated failure really doesn’t bode well for Starship’s reusability. Remember this part for later — it is important context.

The Bad — Payload

The biggest issue for Starship isn’t actually its reusability but its payload. Musk promised 100 tons to LEO but has only ever taken a tiny fraction of that on a suborbital launch. There is no point having a fully reusable rocket if it can’t take a decent payload to orbit. So, you’d think that SpaceX would be fully transparent with how much payload these test flights carried, particularly now that they are a publicly traded company. Indeed, they were transparent with Launches 1 to 11 but not with Launches 12 and 13 of this V3 Starship. Instead, SpaceX quoted it in terms of the number of Starlink V3 satellites (or dummy satellites) it was carrying. But we don’t know how much these satellites weigh. The closest estimate we have had for a long time is an announcement a year ago that said V3 Starlink satellites would have a mass of up to two metric tons. But SpaceX’s IPO filing stated that Starship will be able to take 60 satellites to LEO, which, based on a 100-ton payload capacity, puts each satellite at less than 1.6 tons.

This has muddied the waters and potentially hidden a truly damaging implication. For example, I based my previous analysis of Flight 12 on the two-ton figure, leading me to estimate its payload at 44 tons. That made it look like V3 had a significant payload capacity increase over V2 (even if the V3 booster failed when the V2 didn’t, with more on that in a minute). However, the IPO filing suggests that this figure was actually 37.5 tons or less, and based on the IPO filing figures, Flight 13 had a payload of 34.1 tons or less. As you will have noticed, this is less, not more. The payload capacity is going in the wrong direction.

Now, Starship V2 only ever carried 16 tons on a successful transatmospheric flight, but SpaceX rated Starship V2 at 35 tons to LEO. And now, V3’s booster is failing at around the same figure, which implies that V3 doesn’t have that much more payload capacity than V2. SpaceX’s attempts to hide the actual payload mass only strengthen that damning implication. That is objectively awful news for Starship.

The Bad — Not Orbit

But hang on again, did you catch that? Flight 13, like every other Starship launch, wasn’t an orbital flight; it was a transatmospheric suborbital flight. That dramatically changes the maths on every front.

For one, it means the 20 V3 Starlink satellites didn’t enter orbit. They were able to connect to the Starlink network briefly to test out their new systems, but they burned up in the atmosphere about 20 minutes later. So, as it stands, Starship can’t deliver satellites to orbit, meaning this Starlink deployment isn’t actually a milestone at all. Instead, it’s hollow and meaningless, because Starship still isn’t a usable launch vehicle.

According to SpaceX’s livestream of Flight 13, the upper stage reached a maximum altitude of 198 km, and at that peak it had a velocity of 26,292 km.

I conducted this kind of analysis in my Flight 12 article, but that isn’t fast enough to enter orbit and suggests that Starship’s functional payload to orbit is far lower than it seems. You can enter orbit at 198 km, but it creates major atmospheric resistance and isn’t stable, so it is known as VLEO (very low Earth orbit), and very few satellites use it. For some context, Starlink satellites are some of the lowest operational satellites, and they have an altitude of 550 km, or more than double what Flight 13 reached.

Orbital velocity at 198 km is 28,042 km/h; that is 1,749 km/h (1,086.778 mph) faster than Flight 13. So, could Starship 13 have turned on its engines, gained that speed and entered orbit?

Well, we will have to make some assumptions, and to be safe, let’s be overly optimistic. Let’s say Starship’s dry mass is stupidly low at 150 tons, the payload was the lowest estimate at 34.1 tons, and Starship has a huge amount of propellant left at that altitude, say 30 tons. To give you an idea just how overkill that is, using the rocket equation and a vacuum exhaust velocity of 3,700 m/s (which is commonly cited for Starship’s new engines), we can calculate that this is enough propellant to speed up or slow down Starship by 2,011 km/h, and during its landing, Flight 13 only used its rocket to scrub off around 360 km/h.

That means that, according to our highly optimistic model, Starship could turn on its engines and enter orbit at 198 km. But it would only have 3.1 tons of propellant left afterwards. That last bit of propellant can only speed up or slow down Starship by 222 km/h, meaning it isn’t enough to land Starship. If they tried to, they would run out of fuel and hit terra firma at around 140 km/h, or 87 mph.

But an altitude of 198 km is useless for satellite deployment. How much more propellant would Starship need to burn to get up to a usable 550 km? Well, using a Hohmann transfer calculator, and a specific impulse of 355 m/s (commonly cited for Starship’s engines), we can calculate that Starship would need to burn an additional 12.9 tons of propellant to travel from a 198 km orbit to a 550 km orbit. But our Starship only has 3.1 tons of fuel onboard. So, 9.8 tons of the payload would have to be sacrificed to make room for more propellant. In other words, our little model suggests that, even with wildly optimistic assumptions, Starship can only take 24.3 tons to LEO (34.1 tons minus 9.8) but then won’t have enough propellant to land.

Now yes, this is a very rough model. But it shows the scale of how drastically Starship is underperforming. Even with insanely optimistic assumptions, Starship appears to only be able to deliver a quarter of its promised payload to LEO when expending its upper stage! Or, to put it another way, when a reusable Starship has a functional payload of zero.

So, Starship lacks full reusability and carries less payload than SpaceX’s nearly decade-old Falcon Heavy.

The Bad — Easy Landing

Let’s also not forget the landing issue here. If Flight 13 had reached orbit, it would have landed with a velocity 1,749 km/h higher than it actually did. That might be only a 7% increase in speed, but don’t forget that kinetic energy is equal to mass times the square of velocity (KE=mv²). In other words, kinetic energy increases quadratically with velocity, and so Starship will have to deal with substantially more kinetic energy from orbit than these suborbital flights. This is a problem, as Starship uses air resistance to scrub off most of its velocity during landing, meaning this kinetic energy is turned into heat energy, which is then dumped into the heat shield. So yes, the heat shield “looking better” from this flight is impressive. But during an actual landing from orbit, this heat shield would have to cope with substantially more heat. So again, the condition of Flight 13’s heat shield on landing isn’t as impressive as many believe.

The Bad — Booster №2

Then there is the context of the boosters failing (which is the point I asked you to remember). But, before I go on, I must clarify: I cannot prove what I am about to say, and I am not accusing SpaceX or Musk of anything. What I am going to do is point out a possibility and show the motivations and past behaviours that give this possibility some weight.

Despite SpaceX having previously nailed the booster landings, both the V3 boosters have failed the same way: their rocket engines failed to reignite during landing.

Moreover, unlike the upper stage, the booster doesn’t have enough velocity or altitude to scrub off almost all its speed on landing, so it needs to carry proportionally more propellant to land.

Now, Starship has a payload problem. Starship’s payload capacity needs to be seen to be increasing to justify its overhyped narrative and make its stocks’ insane price seem even slightly feasible. So, how can you do that?

Well, you make the thing lighter. But the vast majority of a fully stacked and fuelled Starship’s weight is propellant. So, what if they cut back on the booster’s propellant and didn’t give it enough fuel to properly land? Sure, they couldn’t catch it on land and reuse it; they would have to ditch it in the ocean. But it would expand the amount of payload capacity Starship could carry. And if they didn’t tell people they had done this, then it would look like the engines failed during landing, rather than running out of fuel during landing, thereby allowing them to add tens of tons to the payload of the upper stage.

Musk has a precedent for this kind of sleight of hand and dishonest manipulation. Remember that video in 2017 of a Tesla driving autonomously? The one that convinced everyone that Musk was on the verge of cracking self-driving cars? Engineers have testified that the entire thing was totally faked.

Now, again, I am not saying that the boosters have been underfuelled to artificially increase Starship’s payload capacity in an attempt to boost SpaceX’s falling stock. I do not have the evidence to support such a claim, and two booster failures do not provide enough anecdotal evidence either. What I am saying is that this is a possibility. We can see precedent in Musk’s past actions, we know they are actively hiding critical facts about this flight (such as the obscured payload mass), and there is ample motivation on Musk’s part in the form of SpaceX’s stock price.

This potential alone should make us ask for more transparency regarding these test flights and also take the results with a healthy dose of scepticism.

The Bad — Reusability?

This brings me to the obvious reusability problem.

At the very least, we can agree that the V3 boosters are being pushed too hard and failing, which prevents them from being reusable. Likewise, while the upper stage launched by one of these failed boosters did conduct a beautiful soft splashdown, its tiny payload and suborbital flight path heavily suggest that it cannot be reused if it tries to deploy a payload into orbit. So, as it stands, it seems like no part of Starship is close to being reusable when it is used as an actual launch vehicle, not a PR test vehicle. I cannot emphasise this point enough, but that really isn’t good at all!

Even if they somehow sort out this payload capacity issue and Starship reaches orbit without overstressing the booster and with ample propellant to land, there is still a monumental challenge to overcome.

That nice-looking heatshield is hiding a huge secret. You see, SpaceX tried to make purely ceramic tiles work, which failed. Then they tried to make metallic heat shield tiles work, which also failed. Now, SpaceX uses an ablative layer over the ceramic tiles. This is a layer designed to burn off and take the heat with it in a process known as ablative cooling. In other words, a large part of the heat shield is designed to burn off during landing. That is the antithesis of reusable, as this layer will need to be painstakingly reapplied, checked and verified before each launch. In other words, the current heat shield isn’t reusable, and the only reason Flight 13’s shield looked so good was because a serious portion of it had been burnt off. Oh, and this ablative layer doesn’t mean that the tiles, their adhesion to the rocket, or the rocket’s structure weren’t damaged by excess heat during re-entry.

In other words, there is zero evidence to suggest that Starship can even be reusable, and mounting evidence that, in fact, it can’t.

This is insanely damaging for SpaceX. Even in their self-aggrandising IPO filing, SpaceX stated that without a fully reusable Starship, progress on Starlink “would be at a slower pace and higher cost.”

But, arguably, there is an even bigger issue I haven’t talked about yet. You see, Flight 13 beautifully demonstrated Starship’s biggest Achilles heel — namely, how launch delays will affect orbital refuelling and boil-off rates. Sadly, I do not have the time to dive into that topic today; that will have to be its own sprawling article.

Conclusion

As it stands, it looks like Starship can only take less than 25 tons to LEO when fully expendable. That is catastrophically less than the claimed 100 tons to LEO while fully reusable figure. It’s also functionally not much further ahead than we were a year or two ago. Yes, there have been some major design changes, but Starship’s functionality hasn’t actually improved. So, if you measure progress as an increase in usability or an increase in functional use, then Starship is not just light-years behind where it should be but is going absolutely nowhere. Every launch is making this project look like more and more of a dead end, with fatal flaws baked into its fundamental concept. SpaceX stock is already falling at an unprecedented rate, and Starship is critical to retaining its absurd hype value. If people see Starship as a failure, then SpaceX’s stock could lose way more value than it already has. SpaceX has to take a colossal leap forward with Starship soon; otherwise, they will truly be in the stink. But I’m not sure such a leap forward is even physically possible.

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Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!