Elon Musk's Starship Tries Again Today After Engine Abort, Weather Scrub: What Prediction Markets Say About Flight 13

Daragh Thomas

Sat, July 25, 2026 at 7:30 PM GMT+3 5 min read

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Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp., aka SpaceX, will attempt to launch Starship for the third time in nine days this evening, after an engine abort on July 16 and a weather scrub on Thursday kept the rocket grounded.

The window for Flight 13 opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT at Starbase, Texas.

Neither stage will be recovered, with the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage targeting controlled splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean.

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Traders See Launch as Near Certainty, Splashdown Less So

On Polymarket, traders assign an 81% chance of a successful launch today, and roughly a 91% chance that Starship flies by July 31.

Traders price a 72% chance of a controlled Starship splashdown, meaning the ship survives reentry and comes down where SpaceX aims it.

Starship will attempt to deploy 20 V3 Starlink satellites, next-generation broadband units that are reportedly too large to fly on Falcon 9.

Starlink already generates the bulk of SpaceX's revenue, but the bigger V3 satellites that would expand the network's capacity can only reach orbit on Starship.

Six of the satellites carry cameras that will scan Starship's heat shield prior to reentry and beam imagery to operators. SpaceX has painted several tiles white to simulate missing ones, testing whether it can verify from orbit that a ship is safe to fly home, a prerequisite for catching and reusing Starship.

Why It Matters for SPCX

Full reusability is what underpins Musk's promise of dramatically cheaper launches, the assumption baked into much of the SpaceX bull case.

The launch comes at a delicate moment for SpaceX. The stock is trading near $117 this morning, roughly 13% below its $135 June listing price, and touched an all-time low this week.

The wider Musk complex is also under pressure. Tesla Inc posted a huge second-quarter earnings miss Wednesday, and its GAAP results leaned on an unrealized gain from its SpaceX stake.

Short interest reportedly grew to 32% as Musk warned short sellers they won't survive, and the Aug. 4 earnings call is followed by an Aug. 6 lock-up expiration freeing roughly 900 million insider-held shares.

"Starship becoming operational is the critical path to the SpaceX investment thesis," Raymond James analyst Brian Gesuale wrote recently.

photo: Kemarrravv13 via Shutterstock

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