【AI前沿】The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver?

All roads lead to StarshipThe US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver?“This is such a wild ride. The highs are high. The lows are low.”Eric Berger–May 18, 2026 7:00 am|143Starship V3 completes a successful wet dress rehearsal on May 11.Credit:

      SpaceXStarship V3 completes a successful wet dress rehearsal on May 11.Credit:

      SpaceXText
    settingsStory textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth*StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers onlyLearn moreMinimize to navThese days, one would be forgiven for forgetting that SpaceX is, at its core, a rocket company.Consider the company’s mega deals over the last year. SpaceX paid $17 billion—more than it has spent developing every one of its rockets—to EchoStar for wireless spectrum to boost its Starlink network. It revealed plans to launch 1 million orbital data centers. SpaceX merged with xAI in a deal that valued Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm at $250 billion, and it announced plans to becomea major computer chip manufacturer. And earlier this month, SpaceX sold an enormous amount of ground-based compute to Anthropic.As a result of all this activity, an impending IPO will value the company at something like $1.5 or $2 trillion. That’s trillion, with at.So yes, one might reasonably ask what SpaceX does these days. Because all the buzz, all the Wall Street euphoria, and all the financial frisson are only tangentially related to what SpaceX cut its teeth on during its first 25 years: becoming the globally dominant player in launch. It largely concerns telecommunications and AI data services.And yet everything SpaceX aspires to accomplish in the next quarter of a century, all of its enormous valuation, is predicated on a new launch vehicle. A rocket that, to date, has a decidedly mixed record of success. A rocket that has not flown in seven months. A rocket that, finally, may return to the skies on Wednesday.We are speaking, of course, of Starship—a truly revolutionary rocket. If it works. And after a long period of development and three years of test flights and setbacks, it kind of has to.“Test Like You Fly”A few weeks ago, SpaceX released avisually stunning videothat takes viewers inside its massive new Starfactory in South Texas and provides up-close views of its rockets and engines.The “Test Like You Fly” video also outlines the development of the third iteration of the Starship rocket, V3, highlighting both advances and setbacks encountered along the way. SpaceX is distilled to its core as the exceptional engineers who are designing and testing a radically new rocket talk about the very difficult problems they’re trying to solve.“We are not breaking laws of physics; we are just trying to leverage them as effectively as we can,” explains Jacob McKenzie, the company’s vice president for the Raptor rocket engine that powers both the first and second stage of Starship.McKenzie says SpaceX built 600 Raptor engines as part of its V2 Starship program, a remarkable number that underscores the investment the company is making to develop a rocket that has yet to reach orbit or deliver a single payload. (To put this into perspective,NASA is spending $3.5 billionto procure two dozen comparably powered, expendable rocket engines.)By some estimates, SpaceX has now invested $15 billion in the Starship rocket program over the last decade, funding 11 test flights, a sprawling spaceport in South Texas, a massive new factory there to support a high production rate, and expanding facilities in Florida alongside the company’s existing infrastructure in the state.It has not gone particularly smoothly. The company conducted its initial Starship test flight in April 2023. I’m not sure anyone expected that, three years and nearly a dozen flights later, the company would still be firmly in test mode.But it turns out that building the world’s largest and most powerful rocket and optimizing it for rapid reuse is a difficult, time-consuming task. Even for a company that prides itself on moving fast and trying to achieve the near impossible.A very difficult 2025SpaceX performed six test flights in 2023 and 2024, and by November of the latter year had made substantial progress. The company demonstrated the ability to launch and capture the Super Heavy first stage and completed a safe flight of the upper Starship stage, including re-lighting its Raptor engine in space, before making a controlled splashdown in a precise location.That month, the then-general manager of the Starbase facility in South Texas, Kathy Lueders, said the company aimed to dramatically increase the vehicle’s launch cadence in 2025. “Elon would say, next year, he would love to have us have 25 missions a year,” she saidduring a community event. The company also planned to “capture” a Starship upper stage and conduct an orbital refueling test in that time frame.Debris from Starship falls back into the atmosphere in this view over Hog Cay