SpaceX is preparing its 12th Starship flight, with a lot riding on its success. It’s the official debut of the Starship V3, which the company has been actively testing since November 2025.
The launch is scheduled for Thursday opening at 3:30 p.m. PT and lasting for 90 minutes. It’s seen by Wall Street investors as a make-or-break scenario ahead of SpaceX’s upcoming initial public offering, announced this week.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is launching the rocket from its Starbase test site in South Texas. It will ascend into low orbit, coast for a while and then splash down, with the entire test expected to take about an hour. The booster will fall into the Gulf of Mexico, and the upper stage into the Indian Ocean. SpaceX intends to eventually land the Starship for reuse, but for this test, everything will end up in the water.
This test flight will also feature a satellite launch. Per SpaceX, Starship V3 is carrying two modified Starlink satellites that will analyze the spacecraft’s heat shields to ensure that they’re functioning correctly. Several of the Starship’s tiles were painted white to simulate missing tiles and will act as targets for the satellite imagery. One panel is also being removed to measure the aerodynamic differences between adjacent tiles during spaceflight.
Coverage of the launch starts at 3:30 p.m. PT and will last throughout the flight. The official streams are on SpaceX’s website and on X. You can also watch it on YouTube via third-party channels.
The flight path is simple
Not your normal test launch
SpaceX test launches are fairly common. The company has done thousands of engine hotfires and hundreds of full-scale flight tests. It also launched over 160 missions to orbit in 2025, setting a company record for most production flights in a single year.
The Starship V3 test flight has extra weight behind it because big things are happening in the rocket’s future. It’s the rocket that’s expected to carry the Artemis IV crew to the moon’s surface and back to Earth in 2028, and it’s also the rocket that SpaceX plans to use to deploy Starlink’s V3 satellites into orbit in the second half of 2026.
The biggest underlying story is SpaceX’s plans to go public, potentially the largest IPO in stock market history. In a filing dating back to April, SpaceX says it wants to raise $75 billion, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s previous record of $29.4 billion in 2019. SpaceX plans to use the money raised to fund AI, space exploration and satellite ventures.
If the Starship V3 fails its launch on Thursday, it could shake shareholders. Should everything go off without a hitch, including the IPO next month, it could make SpaceX one of the most valuable companies of all time, with a possible valuation at around $1.75 trillion.