SpaceX lanza Starship V3 con ambiciones lunares y terrestres en juego

SpaceX was preparing to launch Starship V3, the twelfth test flight of its massive rocket and the first of a new generation of enlarged prototypes. An earlier attempt on Thursday had been scrubbed due to last-minute technical issues, but the company was ready to try again.

The ambitions wrapped up in this single vehicle are almost impossible to overstate. SpaceX envisions Starship not merely as a way to move people and cargo across the solar system, but as a hypersonic aircraft capable of ferrying passengers between any two cities on Earth in under an hour. A theoretical flight from London to Hong Kong would take thirty-four minutes. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president, had promoted this vision enthusiastically in 2018, predicting it would become reality within a decade. Elon Musk has mentioned it less frequently in recent public remarks, but the company kept the idea alive on its website and, more significantly, in official documents filed Wednesday ahead of a planned initial public offering. SpaceX acknowledged the obstacles: supersonic flight restrictions over land due to sonic booms, and the economic viability of shorter routes. Yet the company stated plainly that it believed itself "strategically positioned to win market share in the logistics and ground transportation market."

But before Starship could revolutionize travel on Earth, it had to prove itself in space. The immediate competition was with Blue Origin, which is developing a simpler lunar lander called Blue Moon for NASA—a vehicle more closely resembling the Apollo-era modules like the Eagle. SpaceX proposed Starship for the same job. Two space investment experts offered cautious assessments. Andrew Chanin, CEO of ProcureAM, said it would not be surprising to see Starship lead the race, but that anything remained possible. Phil Scully of Balerion Space Ventures was more direct: Starship V3 still had to reach orbit, deploy payloads, demonstrate reusability of both stages, and master in-space refueling. Blue Origin currently held a clear advantage, he said. Yet even if SpaceX did not land on the moon first, Scully argued, the long-term perception of the company would likely remain intact, anchored to its current scale, business diversification, and Starship's potential to reshape space operations.

The financial stakes were enormous. SpaceX had spent roughly three billion dollars on Starship research and development in 2025 alone, a year in which the company posted a total loss of four point nine billion dollars. In the first three months of 2026, it had allocated another billion dollars to the test program. The company was burning cash at a rate that demanded results. SpaceX had told investors it expected to launch satellites to orbit aboard Starship in the second half of 2026. The rocket had been a heavy financial burden, and the company needed it to start generating revenue.

Yet SpaceX framed these enormous expenditures as part of a long-term strategy. Once Starship became operational, the company said, it would have a transformative impact and serve as "the key enabler of our long-term growth strategy." The company's financial disclosures also revealed details about Elon Musk's compensation. His annual salary had remained unchanged at fifty-four thousand eighty dollars since 2019. But he would receive stock compensation in fifteen tranches of sixty-six million six hundred sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-five shares, delivered in increments tied to valuations rising from five hundred billion dollars to seven point five trillion dollars, contingent on SpaceX achieving certain milestones. One of those milestones was explicit in the company's documents: the establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.

NASA's safety advisors had raised serious concerns. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel noted worries about Starship's complexity and the enormous technical risks of using it for lunar landings, given its intricate operational design and challenging test program. The NASA Inspector General's office reported gaps in testing strategy and crew survival analysis. If the lunar lander suffered a catastrophic failure, the report stated, NASA would lack the capacity to rescue stranded astronauts in space or on the lunar surface. SpaceX had not directly responded to these criticisms, though the company had emphasized in an October 2025 statement that it was financing over ninety percent of the Starship system's costs itself, including production facilities, test sites, and launch pads. The NASA contracts, valued at up to four billion dollars, were fixed-price agreements—meaning SpaceX received no additional funding if development slipped or costs overran.

During the test flight itself, SpaceX was pushing the vehicle to its limits. The company planned structural stress tests, including a maneuver to fully deploy the aft flaps during reentry to test the structural integrity of that section. The propellant tanks were fuller than expected, which would add extra pressure on the forward flaps during reentry. SpaceX would also attempt to deploy twenty-two simulated satellites and have two of them scan Starship's heat shield—the hexagonal black tiles covering the exterior—to send images back to mission control. This data would help engineers understand how to analyze the shield and eventually capture and reuse the entire vehicle using a metal tower. Reusability was the ultimate goal: if Starship could fly multiple times, the cost per mission would plummet. The vehicle had also been redesigned at the connection point between Starship and its Super Heavy booster. An integrated hot-stage system replaced the previous single-use interstage section, intended to reduce the amount of refurbishment required after each flight.