SpaceX has pushed back the next test flight of its latest Starship vehicle by about a month, CEO Elon Musk said on Friday, moving the long‑anticipated launch into May instead of April. Musk posted on social platform X that the next flight of the V3 Starship is “four to six weeks away,” putting a likely window in the first two weeks of May after earlier comments that had pointed to an April attempt.
The V3 iteration of Starship has been under development for months, and Musk and SpaceX engineers have been working through a dense package of upgrades aimed at improving reliability and preparing the vehicle for missions for customers including NASA. SpaceX has described the changes as a set of “dozens” of modifications intended to make the fully reusable heavy‑lift rocket suitable for demanding tasks such as landing on the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX’s most recent Starship test, the company’s 11th, took place in October. Since then the company has been iterating on the vehicle’s design and systems at its Starbase complex in Boca Chica, Texas, where the Starship campaign is based. Starship is designed to carry far larger payloads than SpaceX’s Falcon family while being fully reusable, a capability central to Musk’s long‑term goals for space transport and human missions beyond low Earth orbit.
The delay comes as SpaceX is also moving forward on a major corporate milestone. Reuters reported this week that the privately held company has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in the United States, and has been discussed in market reports as targeting potential valuations in the multi‑trillion dollar range — figures Reuters cited above $1.75 trillion. That filing, and investor attention on the firm’s commercial prospects, have increased scrutiny of SpaceX’s technical timetable as it prepares demonstrations intended to show Starship’s readiness for both commercial launches and government contracts.
For NASA, a reliable Starship is a critical element of plans to return humans to the lunar surface under Artemis. SpaceX has been selected as the prime contractor for the Artemis Human Landing System using a version of Starship, which makes the vehicle’s development schedule and demonstrable safety and performance milestones especially important to the agency. SpaceX has said the V3 upgrades are specifically meant to meet the sorts of requirements NASA will expect for a crewed lunar lander.
Musk’s updated timing leaves observers a month between now and the planned window to assess readiness and regulatory clearances. The Starship program has faced a series of technical and regulatory hurdles during its rapid development and test campaign, and a successful May flight would be the next major public benchmark for the next‑generation vehicle. With SpaceX’s IPO process now under way and Artemis schedules looming, the outcome of the upcoming test is likely to attract significant attention from both markets and mission planners.