Skip to the timeline
Let's go to Mars

Thirteen Starship flights, and Mars slips to 2028

SpaceX flew Starship thirteen times from April 2023 to July 2026. None reached orbit, none transferred propellant between two ships, and the 2026 Mars window was given up.

A tall stainless-steel rocket rising past its launch tower in daylight, its base wrapped in a boiling white cloud lit orange from beneath, flat coastal water and scrub in the foreground.
Flight 5 leaving Starbase in October 2024 — the flight that first brought the booster back into the tower's arms, and, like every flight until Flight 14, stopped short of orbit. · Image: Steve Jurvetson

The first full Starship stack left Starbase on 20 April 2023 and tore itself apart four minutes later, tumbling end over end after it lost thrust vector control and several Raptors shut down. Twelve more flew by July 2026: eight of the thirteen count as successes, five as failures, and none reached orbit.

That was deliberate. Flights 3 to 13 targeted a suborbital trajectory: almost orbital velocity on a path that intersects the atmosphere, bringing the ship down over the Indian Ocean whether or not its engines relit. SpaceX would not put a several-hundred-tonne stainless-steel vehicle into stable orbit before it could deorbit it. Flight 14 — twenty-six operational Starlink V3 satellites, low Earth orbit, a Pacific splashdown for the ship — was the first to reach orbit, on 28 September 2026.

The tower's arms have caught the Super Heavy booster three times: Flight 5 in October 2024, Flights 7 and 8 in January and March 2025. Flight 9 reflew a booster; Flights 10 and 11, in August and October 2025, went cleanly end to end. Block 3, with the Raptor 3 engine, debuted on Flight 12 in May 2026. On Flight 13 in July the ship deployed twenty Starlink V3 satellites, which burned up as planned; that booster's landing burn failed when only eight of thirteen engines relit, and it splashed down hard.

A Starship leaving Earth orbit for Mars must be refuelled after launch with about 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 suggest higher. Propellant boils off while the tankers queue. SpaceX moved liquid oxygen between two internal tanks on one ship in 2024 but has never transferred propellant between two Starships; that demonstration was pencilled in for 2025, then 2026.

In 2024 Elon Musk said five uncrewed Starships would leave for Mars in the 2026 window; in May 2025 he put the odds at fifty-fifty, and by August 2025 said roughly three and a half years out for the first uncrewed flights. SpaceX's website still lists cargo landings on Mars as no earlier than 2028. On 8 February 2026 Musk said SpaceX would put the Moon first and begin building a city on Mars "in about 5 to 7 years".