BOCA CHICA, Texas — With its next Starship vehicles rolling through final testing, SpaceX is setting its sights on Flight 13 and the milestone that will define Starship's year: the first transfer of propellant between two ships in Earth orbit.
The next test flight is expected to lift off from Starbase in the coming weeks, and it opens the door to a two-part demonstration that SpaceX has said it wants to complete in 2026. The plan calls for one Starship to launch and spend extended time on orbit gathering data on propulsion and thermal behavior, followed by a second Starship that rendezvouses with it to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer.
Why Orbital Refueling Is the Whole Game
In-orbit refueling is the capability everything else depends on. Any Starship mission to the Moon, Mars, or deep space will require a dozen or more tanker flights to top off a single vehicle's propellant, so proving that two ships can dock and move fuel between them is the gate to the entire exploration roadmap.
That is why SpaceX built the latest Ship upper stage with larger propellant tanks and dedicated docking ports. The company's relentless launch machine, which recently pushed Starlink past 10,700 satellites at a record 2026 pace, has given it the operational rhythm to attempt increasingly ambitious tests in quick succession.
A Full Production Pipeline
SpaceX is not short on hardware. Elon Musk has said the Starship production pipeline is full and will complete roughly 10 more ships and about half that number of boosters this year, giving the company a deep bench of vehicles to fly. That stockpile is what makes a rapid-fire test campaign realistic rather than aspirational, and it is a key reason SpaceX keeps prioritizing flight testing as the fastest way to mature the hardware, as laid out in SpaceX's official updates.
The cadence dovetails with the company's broader launch operations, including dedicated rideshare missions like the Transporter-17 flight now on the manifest. Every additional flight adds data, and every data point brings the refueling demonstration closer.
The Road to the Moon and Beyond
The stakes reach well past Starbase. NASA selected Starship as a crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, with Artemis 3 targeted for mid-2027, and an orbital refueling capability is a prerequisite for that mission. Musk has set the long-term bar even higher, describing a future in which Starship launches more than 10,000 times a year while carrying over 200 tons of useful payload to orbit per flight.
Flight 13 is one step on that path, but it is a pivotal one. If SpaceX can string together the two flights needed to prove orbital propellant transfer this year, it will have cleared the single hardest technical hurdle standing between Starship and the deep-space missions it was built to fly.
