Starship flies and deploys the first 20 Starlink V3 satellites
What happened
Starship Flight 13 launched from Starbase and flew a "mostly successful" mission: Super Heavy booster survived ascent/separation but suffered a hard splashdown (booster reuse likely compromised this flight); the Starship upper stage was nominal through orbit and deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites via its payload dispenser — the first time production V3 hardware has flown on Starship rather than Falcon 9.
Read-across for SES
Closes the "Starship Flight 13 still NOT flight-proven" open item carried in priors.md since the repeated weather scrubs began. A flight-proven Starship carrying V3 hardware is the mechanism behind the "Starlink pricing aggression: CONFIRMED INDEFINITE" base rate — V3's higher per-satellite throughput plus Starship's payload mass advantage over Falcon 9 is what lets SpaceX keep dropping consumer/enterprise ARPU while scaling capacity. The booster's hard splashdown is a genuine caveat: full reusability (the other leg of the cost curve) is not yet re-confirmed post-anomaly.
As the brief filed it
[AGE: 6h] Starship Flight 13 flew for the first time since repeated scrubs — ship stage nominal, deployed 20 production Starlink V3 satellites (first-ever V3 deployment via Starship's dispenser); booster suffered a hard splashdown. Resolves the standing "not flight-proven" open item for SpaceX's core launch/deployment cadence.