SpaceX Reschedules 13th Starship Test Flight to Thursday After Abort Due to Four Engine Ignition Failures

Bram Berkowitz, The Motley Fool Mon, July 20, 2026 at 9:08 AM PDT | 4 min read

• SPCX
• NVDA

After aborting its launch on July 16, Space Exploration Technologies Corp (NASDAQ: SPCX) has rescheduled its 13th test flight for Starship to Thursday, July 23.

Starship is the company's heavy-lift, fully reusable rocket, in which SpaceX has invested over $15 billion to date.

The rocket is central to SpaceX's investment thesis, which depends on the company's ability to launch super-heavy payloads into orbit with rapid turnaround times.

With the stock struggling recently, the market will be closely watching the upcoming test flight. Here is what investors need to know.

What the Test Flight Will Seek to Accomplish

Starship's 13th test flight aims to achieve similar objectives as previous flights, specifically:

• A successful launch
• Ascent
• Stage separation
• Boostback burn
• Landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America

Additionally, SpaceX has made hardware and software changes to Starship to address issues encountered during test flight 12. The company has altered the startup sequence to improve directional control, as test flight 12 experienced a directional flip error of roughly 90 degrees.

Last Thursday, as Starship prepared for its 13th test flight, an automated abort command was triggered after four of the ship's 33 engines failed to ignite, according to Reuters.

On X, SpaceX Founder Elon Musk wrote that the company plans to replace two of the Raptor engines on Starship's boosters.

Everything Hinges on Starship

The market reacted negatively to the launch abort last week, erasing $100 billion of market cap that day—despite test flight setbacks being relatively common.

This reaction underscores how critical Starship is to SpaceX's future.

A significant portion of SpaceX's total addressable market—and therefore its valuation—is tied to the company's artificial intelligence unit, which is heavily focused on launching orbital data centers capable of capturing substantial AI compute market share.

In SpaceX's registration statement, the company states that Starship's fully reusable rocket is designed to carry 100 metric tons to Earth's orbit "while enabling rapid turnaround times akin to commercial aviation." Future Starship models are expected to double that capacity.

SpaceX also expects Starship to begin orbital payload delivery by the second half of this year, with orbital AI compute satellites potentially deployed as early as 2028. It remains unclear how close Starship is to reaching this milestone.

That said, Starship's importance to the thesis could become a tailwind if SpaceX proves skeptics wrong.

"If this is how the market reacts to a precautionary abort, I can't wait to see how it responds to a successful flight," Space Capital CEO Chad Anderson told Reuters, adding that he views the company as a long-term opportunity. "Zoom out and none of this changes the thesis: we're in the early innings of a multi-decade infrastructure cycle, and Starship is the centerpiece."

Anderson may well be correct, but no one can say for certain.