WASHINGTON — As SpaceX prepares for the first flight of version 3 of its Starship vehicle, the company is facing a new legal challenge from local residents who claim its launches damage their homes.
Airspace advisories filed last week show SpaceX is planning the 12th test flight of its Starship vehicle from its Starbase, Texas, test site as soon as May 12. The advisory indicates daily launch opportunities planned through May 18. SpaceX has not announced a launch date for Flight 12 yet as testing of both the vehicle and ground infrastructure continues.
This will be the first launch of Starship v3, with upgrades to both the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster. It will be the first Starship launch since an October 2025 flight.
SpaceX had planned a first flight of Starship v3 early this year. That schedule, though, was postponed by a November test incident that damaged a Super Heavy booster. Immediately after the incident, SpaceX said it still expected the first Starship v3 launch to take place in the first quarter of 2026.
That schedule has slipped further. After Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive, posted in late January that the launch would take place in six weeks, he said in early March that the launch would be in about four weeks. In early April, he said the launch was four to six weeks away, or the first half of May.
While Flight 12 will be a suborbital flight, like previous launches, it is critical to SpaceX’s ambitions to start orbital launches of the vehicle for both its next-generation Starlink satellites and for NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration efforts.
The environmental impacts of Starship launches from Starbase, located on the Gulf Coast of Texas near the Mexico border, have been scrutinized for years. SpaceX has secured environmental approvals from the federal government for Starship launches, although some local residents as well as environmental advocates have opposed the launches.
The latest salvo in that debate was a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas April 30 by dozens of residents against SpaceX. In the suit, they claim their homes suffered damage from previous Starship launches.
The plaintiffs, who primarily live in the cities of Port Isabel and South Padre Island, the two closest communities to Starbase, argue that the intense engine noise of both Starship’s liftoff and the return of the Super Heavy booster, along with sonic booms, caused damage to their homes.
The complaint does not give specific examples of the damage caused by Starship but does discuss noise and overpressure levels the plaintiffs said exceed thresholds for causing structural damage. Measurements made by researchers during an October 2024 launch recorded peak launch noise levels of above 110 decibels, a level where structural damage is possible, at distances as far as 35 kilometers from the launch site.
The same flight also created sonic booms from Super Heavy’s return to the pad, with overpressures of more than five pounds per square foot within 15 kilometers of the pad, enough to cause damage to windows and structures, according to some assessments.
The complaint does not specify damages the plaintiffs seek beyond “economic and non-economic damages in an amount to be determined at trial.”
Damages from launch noise and sonic booms have been concerns for Starship launches elsewhere. In a November 2025 decision allowing SpaceX to construct a Starship launch site at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37, an environmental assessment cited “relatively high-level noise and overpressure environments” from launches and landings there. The primary concern was “community annoyance,” but the report found some structures within the spaceport itself could suffer damage.