Rocket Report: Lightning strikes in China; Starship launch on deck

SpaceX's thirteenth Starship test flight had to pause for an engine swap after a last-second abort on July sixteenth, but the fully-stacked booster is back on the launch pad and ready for liftoff Friday evening. A successful launch and reentry would put SpaceX in position for an orbital flight later this year. Meanwhile, India celebrated a spaceflight milestone: Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket, the nation's first fully commercial satellite launcher, successfully reached a two hundred eighty-mile-high orbit, Ars Technica reports.

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