What's next for Starship? Musk's comments offer some clues People watch SpaceX's Starship launch from South Padre Island, Texas, on Tuesday. Gabriel V. Cardenas/Reuters Today’s flight did not go exactly as expected. And the fact that SpaceX lost contact with Starship and left it to spin out of control as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere is a strong indicator that federal regulators will require SpaceX to open an investigation into what went wrong. That was the case after the last two mid-flight Starship mishaps in January and March. Before the FAA gives SpaceX the go-ahead for another test flight, the agency typically requires SpaceX to file paperwork demonstrating the company understands the issue, has a plan to protect public safety, and either finish its own investigation or make the case for why the rocket is safe to launch again. For his part, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that he expects to get regulatory approval at a faster rate going forward. “Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns. Musk has captured outsized attention for his participation in politics as of late, and his deep ties to the Trump administration and its government reform initiatives have elicited stark criticisms about conflicts of interest. But Musk has said he’s now taking a step back from politics and is perhaps refocusing on SpaceX. Broadly speaking, Starship needs to achieve some of the testing milestones it has chased during the past few test flights but hasn’t quite reached, including relighting its engine in space and testing out how it will deploy satellites. From there, SpaceX may be able to move on to loftier goals, such as figuring out how to recover and refly the upper Starship spacecraft, refuel the vehicle with a Starship tanker once it reaches orbit, and generally work to hash out how the vehicle might one day support missions to deliver cargo or humans to deep space. Link Copied!