Starship aborts at ignition carrying 20 Starlink V3 satellites
What happened
SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 launch attempt from Starbase, TX ended in an automatic pad abort during Super Heavy Booster 20's ignition sequence — some (reporting varies 2 to 4) Raptor engines failed to start. The 20 production Starlink V3 satellites carried as payload — the first attempt to deploy functional Starlink hardware from Starship's payload bay — never launched and remain in storage, undeployed. Musk said two engines will be swapped and the next attempt is "in a few days," most likely early next week.
Read-across for SES
Resolves the standing carry item from the 07-16 brief ([D7]), which explicitly withheld this as a capability data point pending outcome. The outcome is now confirmed negative: Starlink V3 — SpaceX's next-gen high-throughput, D2D-capable bus — is not yet flight-proven via Starship deployment, pushing back the timeline on the specific capability edge SES's O3b mPOWER/meoSphere roadmap is racing against. Per the routine's Lane 0 rule, any Lane 0 hit involving a watchlist entity (SpaceX/Starlink) escalates to EXISTENTIAL-class regardless of thread.
As the brief filed it
[AGE: 8h] SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 aborted at ignition — 2-4 Raptor engines failed to start, and the 20 production Starlink V3 satellites that would have been the first deployment from Starship's payload bay never left the ground; next attempt "in a few days" per Musk.