SpaceX fuels up Starship V3 megarocket for 1st time ahead of crucial test flight (photos)

SpaceX has fueled up the new variant of its Starship megarocket for the first time ever, preparing for a crucial test flight that could launch as soon as this week.

The company assembled a Starship Version 3 (V3) vehicle for the first time over the weekend, stacking a Ship upper stage atop a Super Heavy first-stage booster at its Starbase site in South Texas. That set a new record for the world’s tallest rocket at about 408 feet (124.4 meters), besting Starship V2 by 4 feet (1.2 m).

Then, on Monday (May 11), SpaceX announced it had conducted a successful launch rehearsal with the vehicle, a milestone that centered on the loading of huge amounts of liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant.

“Launch rehearsal complete. During a flight-like countdown, more than 5,000 metric tonnes (11+ million pounds) of propellant were loaded on the fully stacked Starship and Super Heavy V3 vehicles for the first time,” SpaceX wrote Monday in a post on X that featured four photos of the rehearsal.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, finish deploying its Starlink broadband megaconstellation and perform a wide variety of other spaceflight tasks.

The giant vehicle debuted in April 2023, on a test flight that ended in a dramatic explosion just a few minutes after liftoff. Starship has flown 10 more suborbital test missions since then, most recently in October 2025. The last two flights have been completely successful.

All 11 missions to date involved Starship V1 or V2. The upcoming Flight 12 will mark the debut of V3, the first Starship variant that’s capable of exploring deep space.

So there’s a lot riding on Flight 12, for both SpaceX and NASA. The space agency picked Starship to be one of the two crewed landers for its Artemis program of moon exploration, along with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon.

One or both of those private landers could launch as soon as next year, on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission to low Earth orbit. That flight will test rendezvous and docking operations using Artemis’ Orion capsule and Starship and/or Blue Moon, agency officials have said.

If all goes well with Artemis 3, Artemis 4 will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole as early as late 2028. It’s unclear which private vehicle will fly on that mission — likely whichever one is ready in time.

SpaceX has not yet announced a target date for Starship Flight 12, but the suborbital test could apparently launch as soon as this Friday (May 15). The company had already conducted “static fire” engine tests with both Ship and Super Heavy, clearing the way for Monday’s launch rehearsal.

Starship will still need to tick a lot of boxes after that flight before it gets fully up and running. For example, the vehicle does not have a life-support system, and it has yet to reach orbit or demonstrate off-Earth propellant transfer.