What is Starship V3?
The future of SpaceX revolves around their Starship Superheavy rocket. It is by far the biggest and most powerful flying machine ever built. And in 2026, it only gets even bigger and more powerful. This is Starship V3.
You've got two main parts here, or stages. The first one is the Super Heavy booster. That's the entire lower half of the rocket. And this is what gets us off the ground. There are 33 rocket engines crammed into the bottom that are fueled by liquid methane and combined to generate more than twice as much power as the old Saturn 5 rocket booster that landed men on the moon. This booster can also return to Earth after doing its job and land itself into the waiting arms of a giant robot tower.
Then there's the top half. That's the actual ship stage. So when we say Starship, we're generally talking about this part specifically. It only has six engines, but you'll notice that three of them look much bigger. Those are special engine nozzles that are designed to power the ship through the vacuum of space, where it's going to be able to put 150 metric tons of payload into Earth orbit. For context, that's the equivalent payload to orbit of about 7 and 12 SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.
And then after reaching orbit, Starship can do one of two things. It can use its heat shield to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and then fly through the air using wing flaps at the nose and tail of the rocket before also landing on a giant robot tower. Or option number two, it can dock with another Starship in orbit to refuel, then use that extra power to fly deeper into space. From here, Starship can fly to the moon or even Mars, depending on where SpaceX chooses to go first.
And that is still not the final form of Starship and Superheavy, but consider this the last evolution that we're going to see for a little while. So, it's worth getting familiar with. V3 is the product of 11 Starship test flights conducted over 2 and 1/2 years.
A 2025 Paved with Explosions
Now, one thing that you might have noticed by now is that the road to get here has been paved with explosions. Starships blow up a lot. Even when everything goes according to plan, the rocket still manages to end up in flames. So let's talk a bit about the learning process behind all of this.
2025 began with the introduction of Starship V2. And again, that's just the upper half of the rocket we are talking about. The booster remained mostly the same from 2024. And back in January, we were promised that this V2 ship would be a big upgrade, but it certainly didn't feel like one.
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The first launch went badly. Just a couple of minutes after separating from the booster stage, the ship experienced a series of engine failures that quickly resulted in it flying out of control, falling back into the atmosphere, and breaking up into hundreds of pieces of flaming debris that rained down over the islands of the West Indies. SpaceX explained that the reason for that failure was harmonic response, which basically just means the rocket vibrated itself to death. So, they made some design changes to prevent that from happening again.
Then, on the next flight, just 2 months later, a shockingly similar thing happened again. One of the ship's engines blew up. It went spinning out of control, fell down, burnt up, and made a nearly identical fireworks show in the evening sky. SpaceX explained that even though they looked the same, this second incident was actually caused by a different problem that created a fuel leak and led to an explosion. So, they made some design changes to prevent that from happening again.
Then on the next flight, just 2 months after that, the Starship actually survived all the way through its full engine burn and things were starting to look much better for about 30 seconds. Then the ship started to slowly wander off course a little bit. Then it started flying backwards and pretty soon it was violently spinning out of control and burning up in the atmosphere somewhere over Africa. SpaceX explained that this one was actually caused by a loss of pressure in the fuel tank and the ship's steering thrusters actually need that pressure in order to work properly. So they basically had no control over the rocket after this point. So they made some design changes to prevent that from happening again.
And then just one month later, SpaceX is undeterred. They're bringing yet another Starship V2 out and preparing it for launch. The rocket is going through its final engine testing phase and it blew up. This one didn't even have a chance to fly into space and become flaming debris. It just exploded on the ground in a pretty spectacular fireball. SpaceX explained that this time it was actually a tank of pressurized gas that is stored in the rocket's nose cone that just spontaneously burst and took out the fuel tank along with it. So again, they made some design changes to prevent that from happening.
Finally, Success (Mostly)
And that gets us finally to Starship Flight 10, which did not blow up. Not entirely at least. It did explode a little bit, but the effect was negligible. Which means that for the first time, we got to see a V2 ship re-enter the atmosphere and land on the water in the Indian Ocean. This landing site is just off the northwest coast of Australia.
That left just one Starship V2 remaining. One last chance to show us what this thing was actually capable of. And in October 2025, SpaceX finally delivered an explosion-free Starship test flight. The rocket flew into space on a suborbital trajectory, meaning that it's not quite going fast enough to make it all the way around Earth without falling back down. That's intentional. It's a safety feature. It means that the rocket can't get stuck in orbit. But while it was up there, it deployed a payload into space, which was a handful of simulated Starlink satellites. And then after re-entering the atmosphere, Starship uses its wing flaps to steer itself through the air and practice for one of next year's big events, the first Starship tower catch.
The 2026 "Year of Action"
Now, we've already seen this done several times with the Superheavy booster, which is really impressive. But at the same time, we can acknowledge that this is pretty much the same thing that SpaceX has been doing with their Falcon 9 booster for the better part of a decade now. They've just made everything bigger and now instead of landing legs coming out of the rocket at the end, catching arms come out of the launch tower.
Trying to get a rocket to come back from orbit and do the same thing is going to be a whole new experience for everyone involved. And this is something that SpaceX is going to attempt in the first half of 2026. But that's what the V3 ship has been made for. All of that exploding and testing with V2 has led up to this.
Goal 1: Orbital Refueling
The tower catch is awesome to watch. But there's actually a much more important test that SpaceX is going to conduct with Starship in 2026. That is orbital refueling. This is one of the biggest design challenges with Starship. It is incredibly heavy, which means that it has to burn an incredible amount of fuel just to get itself and its payload into low Earth orbit. That's what we call an altitude of around 400 km or 250 mi. It's where the International Space Station hangs out and it's not actually very high in terms of outer space. We have plenty of satellites that are up in geosynchronous orbit of over 30,000 km.
So, if Starship wants to get all the way up there, then it actually has to refuel along the way, which means that a second Starship acting as a fuel depot also needs to be launched into space. Then the two ships need to meet up, dock together, and transfer rocket fuel. It's similar to what the military does with jet airplanes, but the thing is that this has never been attempted in space before. It's probably not as hard as it looks or sounds, but there's only one way to find out.
Goal 2: Get to Mars
And another thing that SpaceX actually wants to do in 2026 is send their first Starship to Mars, where it's going to attempt to land on the red planet. But in order for a ship to be able to fly that far, it would actually need several of those orbital docking and refueling maneuvers to happen.
So before we can do Mars, we have to get the fuel transfer to work. And before we can do too much refueling, we need to get the tower catch to work because we have to catch Starship in order for them to be reused. And if we can't reuse the ship, then this all starts to get really expensive and time-consuming. So everything is always about getting to Mars. It's just a complicated process that needs to happen along the way.
Goal 3: Pay for It All with Starlink
Speaking of money though, how is SpaceX paying for all this? That's a lot of giant rockets to build and then explode, which is another major goal for 2026. Starlink.
Before Starship can build a city on Mars, it has to do some heavy lifting here on Earth. That's what we saw SpaceX practicing for on flight 10 and 11, deploying these new Starlink V3 satellites, which just like the Starship itself, are much bigger and more capable.
So, it's a bit of a conundrum here. SpaceX needs the bigger and better Starlinks to continue growing their revenue as a mobile internet provider, which they need to pay for Starship, but they also need Starship to deploy those same satellites.
In the 5 years since Starlink was first deployed, the service has grown to include 7 million users across 150 countries, and the existing network is able to provide an average download speed of over 200 megabits per second. That is amazing for satellite internet. But SpaceX is really counting on this service to become as good or better than ground-based 5G connections. So they need to grow and they need Starship to be the workhorse of that growth. So we'll expect to see the V3 ship deploying real Starling payloads into a real low Earth orbit in 2026 as well.
An Ambitious Year Ahead
And that is a lot to accomplish in one year. Each of those milestones are unprecedented and insane in their own right. But to be working towards all of these things all at the same time is a whole other level of ambition for SpaceX. That's on top of trying to run an already successful and existing rocket business with the Falcon 9.
But as of right now, NASA is basically non-existent. And there's a good chance that things might get worse before they get better. So, in many ways, Starship is the only thing that we know for sure we can look forward to when it comes to spaceflight in 2026. Now, it might not be entirely successful, and it probably won't be, but that's half the fun anyway.