SpaceX’s latest milestone arrived on May 11 when the Starship V3 completed a full wet‑dress rehearsal, lighting all 33 Raptor engines for the planned launch window. The test follows a tumultuous year that saw the company pour roughly $15 billion into the Starship program while striking multimillion‑dollar deals in satellite broadband, AI compute, and chip manufacturing. Success now feels essential to justify those bets today.

After seven months of silence, engineers have spent the interim reinforcing Starbase’s launch infrastructure and iterating the V3 design, which incorporates lessons from the troubled V2 flights that suffered three consecutive loss‑of‑control events in early 2025. February’s pressure test aborted after a ground‑side shutdown damaged half the Raptors, but a May static fire finally held full thrust for the intended duration.

With the static fire now validated, SpaceX aims to use Starship V3 to loft large batches of next‑generation Starlink satellites and to demonstrate in‑space refueling—a capability NASA counts on for the Artemis lunar gateway. Delivering those payloads would finally tie the company’s multitrillion‑dollar valuation to a proven launch system, turning speculative hype into operational revenue.