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Moon & Mars Mondays · Flight 13

For the first time, a Starship came home from space, lit its engines, stood itself upright over the Indian Ocean, splashed down — and stayed in one piece.

That happened Saturday. It is the single most important thing that happened to the Artemis program this week, and it happened about 9,000 kilometers from the nearest NASA facility.

Flight 13: a good day with an asterisk

Starship Flight 13 lifted off from Starbase, Texas at 5:51 p.m. EDT on July 25 — the third-generation V3 vehicle, and the second attempt after a post-ignition abort scrubbed the try on July 16. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster lit and ran. Staging was clean. The upper stage climbed on all six of its engines.

Then it did the things that actually matter for the Moon:

• It deployed a real payload. Twenty third-generation Starlink satellites out of the nose dispenser. Six of them carry cameras, whose job is to inspect Starship's heat shield tiles — a payload that exists to grade the vehicle carrying it.
• It relit a Raptor in space. This is the unglamorous prerequisite for everything. No in-space restart, no orbital insertion, no deorbit burn, no lunar descent.
• It survived reentry and landed upright. Belly-first through the atmosphere, then a powered, upright splashdown northwest of Australia, one hour and five minutes after launch. Spaceflight Now reports the ship remained fully intact after splashdown — the first time that's happened.

The asterisk is the booster. SpaceX didn't attempt a tower catch on this one, opting for a deliberate Gulf splashdown while V3 is still in test. On the descent burn, only 10 of 13 planned engines relit, and only five were still running at the water. It came in faster than intended and hit hard.

I want to be fair about what that means. A landing burn is a sequenced ignition problem, and 10-of-13 with a hard arrival is a real anomaly, not a rounding error — but it's also exactly the failure you want to find on a flight where you'd already decided to throw the booster away. That's what an expendable test article is for. The engines that mattered for ascent all worked. The engines that failed, failed during the part of the flight SpaceX had pre-declared it was willing to lose.

Why this is a Moon story

Because the Artemis lunar landing runs through this vehicle. Starship HLS is the crewed lander, and the version of it that puts people on the surface needs something Flight 13 didn't test: cryogenic propellant transfer between two Starships in orbit. The GAO has flagged SpaceX's progress on cryogenic fuel management as the program's top risk, with schedule slips already exceeding a year.

Every flight that proves restart, reentry, and controlled landing chips away at the rest of the mountain. None of them are the refueling demo. That's still ahead.

Artemis III, redefined and now documented

Meanwhile, NASA spent the month filling in the details of what Artemis III has actually become — and it's worth restating plainly, because the name still carries the old meaning for a lot of people. Artemis III is no longer the landing. It is a roughly two-week low Earth orbit demonstration in 2027, in which the crew will rendezvous and dock with test articles of both commercial landers: about two days docked with Blue Origin's Blue Moon, about one day with the SpaceX Starship pathfinder. The lunar surface landing moves to Artemis IV, targeted for 2028 at the south pole.

The crew: commander Randy Bresnik, pilot Luca Parmitano of ESA, and mission specialists Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, with Bob Hines backing up.

Two things landed in the last two weeks that make it feel real:

July 15 — the docking book. NASA released operational documentation spelling out, for the first time, the precise docking sequence, approach geometries, and software control assignments governing the demonstration. This is the least exciting-sounding and most consequential kind of document in human spaceflight. Two vehicles from two companies, plus Orion, have to agree on who is in control of the closing rate at every instant. Getting that wrong is how you turn a rendezvous into a collision. Publishing the control-authority handoff is how you stop arguing about it in the sim and start training to it.

July 16 — Orion gets lasers. NASA selected SpaceX to mount two Starlink mini laser terminals on Orion's exterior, downlinking 4K imagery and live video straight to Mission Control at Johnson. Optical links carry far more data per downlink than radio. The practical result: the first live, high-definition broadcast of a crewed ship-to-ship docking, in real time.

I'll admit a bias here. I've spent a lot of hours reconstructing what a vehicle did from telemetry and a handful of compressed frames arriving after the fact. Live 4K of a docking is not a PR feature to me. It's the difference between reviewing a maneuver and watching one.

Also on the board

• CLPS lost one. A CLPS task order was cancelled this month following lander development delays — Draper's far-side mission — with its payloads potentially rehomed onto other landers. Meanwhile NASA has awarded nearly $600 million for four commercial Moon landings targeted at late 2028.
• Astrobotic's Griffin remains in the queue for a Falcon Heavy ride to the south pole region near Nobile Crater and Mons Mouton.
• Chang'e 7 is still tracking to the second half of this year, aiming for the lunar south pole to survey the environment and hunt for water ice.
• On Mars, Curiosity is past sol 4,900 and working layered outcrops, and Perseverance crossed a full marathon — 42.195 km — on sol 1,890 last month, imaged from above by MRO's HiRISE camera. Opportunity took eleven years and two months to cover the same ground. Perseverance took five years and four months.

Full standings on the Lunar Race tracker.

References

• Spaceflight Now — Super Heavy-Starship rocket chalks up mostly successful test flight
• Spaceflight Now — Launch preview: SpaceX ready for 2nd attempt at Starship Flight 13
• NASA — NASA Marches Toward Artemis III Mission in 2027, Names Crew Members
• NASA — NASA Taps SpaceX's Starlink to Deliver Artemis III Imagery from Orion
• SatNews — NASA Details Docking and Software Protocols for Revised Artemis III LEO Demonstration
• Phys.org — How NASA's Artemis III lander test will pave way for moon landings
• NASA Science — HiRISE Captures Perseverance Marking a Milestone on Mars
• Space.com — Moon rush: private spacecraft attempting lunar landings in 2026

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