Thirteen Starship flights, and Mars slips to 2028
SpaceX has flown Starship thirteen times since April 2023. None has reached orbit, none has transferred propellant in space, and the 2026 Mars window has been given up.
The first full Starship stack left Starbase on 20 April 2023 and tore itself apart four minutes later, tumbling end over end after its hydraulic thrust-vector system failed and several Raptors shut down. Twelve more have flown since. By the usual tally of the thirteen, eight count as successes and five as failures — and not one of them has reached orbit.
That is deliberate, and it is also the point. Every flight through number thirteen flew a transatmospheric trajectory: almost orbital velocity, but on a path that intersects the atmosphere, so the ship comes down over the Indian Ocean whether or not its engines relight. Putting a several-hundred-tonne stainless-steel vehicle into a stable orbit before you can reliably deorbit it is a bad idea, and SpaceX declined to. Flight 14 — twenty-six operational Starlink V3 satellites, a real low Earth orbit, a Pacific splashdown for the ship — is the first attempt at genuine orbital insertion, and was scheduled for late September 2026.
The progress is real. The Super Heavy booster has been caught out of the air by the launch tower's arms three times — first on Flight 5 in October 2024, then on Flights 7 and 8 in January and March 2025. Flight 9 reflew a booster. Flights 10 and 11, in August and October 2025, both went cleanly end to end. Block 3, with the Raptor 3 engine, debuted on Flight 12 in May 2026, and on Flight 13 in July the ship deployed twenty real Starlink V3 satellites, which then burned up as planned because the trajectory was never orbital — though that booster's landing burn failed when only ten of thirteen engines relit, and it was destroyed on impact.
None of that is the thing Mars needs. A Starship departing Earth orbit for Mars must be refuelled after launch with something on the order of 1,200 tonnes of liquid oxygen and methane, delivered roughly a hundred tonnes at a time. SpaceX has spoken of around eight tanker flights per vehicle; the arithmetic says about a dozen, and NASA officials have suggested higher still. Meanwhile the propellant boils off while the tankers queue. SpaceX moved liquid oxygen between two internal tanks on a single ship in 2024. It has never transferred propellant between two Starships. That demonstration was pencilled in for 2025, then 2026; it has not been attempted.
So the 2026 window is gone. In 2024 Elon Musk said five uncrewed Starships would leave for Mars during it; in May 2025 he put the odds at fifty-fifty; by August 2025 he was talking about roughly three and a half years out for the first uncrewed flights. SpaceX now lists cargo landings on the Martian surface as no earlier than 2028. The pattern has been consistent for a decade — 2018, then 2022, then 2026, now 2028 — each date announced alongside genuine hardware progress, and each one missed. No Starship has yet completed a single orbit of the Earth, let alone left it.