SpaceX has rolled another Starship super heavy booster to the launch pad as the company’s boss, Elon Musk, admits the first launch of Starship V3 had slipped.
The Super Heavy booster arrived at SpaceX’s new Pad 2 in its Texas facility earlier this week, ready for more preflight testing and pad commissioning ahead of a launch attempt in April (at least according to a post made by Musk on his social media mouthpiece, X).
The billionaire wrote, “Starship V3 first flight in about 4 weeks,” which means a launch next month. Unless Musk’s emissions are, er, a little too optimistic.
On January 26, Musk posted, “Starship launch in 6 weeks,” which means the test flight should have happened by now. It hasn’t.
While there is sport to be had comparing Musk’s promises to reality, NASA, for which SpaceX is to provide lunar landing services with the Human Landing System (HLS), is unlikely to be amused. Starship has yet to reach orbit, and previous iterations of the rocket have proven unreliable, to say the least. Of the five suborbital tests performed in 2025, only the last two met with success.
The Block 3 version of Starship features new engines, the Raptor 3, as well as design changes aimed at handling refueling in space, tweaks to the thermal protection, and aerodynamic updates. SpaceX will also have to repeat the sub-orbital mission from the last of the Block 2 boosters before it can move on to orbital operations.
In November 2025, SpaceX demonstrated just how robust its design changes were… by rupturing a booster during testing.
Still, as the saying goes, this is why we test. That said, SpaceX has a long way to go if they want the HLS variant of Starship ready for NASA’s 2027 Artemis III mission and an Apollo 9-style shakedown of the Moon landing technology in Low Earth Orbit. Although the company expressed support for NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s plan to increase the cadence of SLS launches while also reducing risk, a casual slip of a month (according to Musk) doesn’t inspire confidence that Starship will be ready in time.
The consequence could be an opportunity for the Jeff Bezos venture, Blue Origin, whose landers feature prominently in NASA’s promotional materials. ®