Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
spacex.com
spacex.com
My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August.
If they can demonstrate in-space refueling by the end of 2026, then they have a shot at a lunar-landing demo in 2027 and a crewed-landing in 2028. But a lot has to go right for that to happen. Here's hoping it does.
A crewed Moon landing before 30 is really implausible. Everyone is late, but the latest NASA OIG report put the Axiom suits very late (somewhere ~2031 if everything holds, but it notes it might not hold).
Effectively, SpaceX lost 9 months due to problems with V2.
Sure, one could argue that it's still research (no customer was affected), and there was no way to know V2 would fail until it was tested.
But watching the stream, it was clear that the SpaceX team was very disappointed with the outcome. I remember watching Flight 1, which nearly destroyed the launch pad and didn't make it to SECO, but still SpaceX was ecstatic with the results.
2025 was supposed to be the year SpaceX tested in-space refueling. The V2 failures delayed that, and whether or not a different company could have done better (my guess is no), SpaceX still felt like they failed.
The Soviets were not better, the Luna program failed 11 missions in a row out of 12 missions. The N1 rocket went 0 for 4 and its failure ended the Soviet lunar program.
SpaceX Falcon 1 failed three of its first five launches, which nearly bankrupt the company. The rocket's successor, the Falcon 9, ended up becoming the most reliable rocket ever produced.
The fact that Starship even functions with so few test flights is an engineering marvel.
I'm just saying that SpaceX themselves expected V2 to work better than it did. I don't think they would disagree that the first three launches of V2 were failures relative to their expectations.
But none of that contradicts your point that, even with failures, Starship is an engineering marvel. I do agree with you on that.
But I don't think I ever seen any insiders comments here, even anonymously.
Why do you say that? I'm sure they'd love to have everything go right, but I doubt they're going to go out of business if it doesn't.
Furthermore they don't have a lander. Landing on the moon is hard. So hard that almost everybody who tries it fails, especially if the lander is top-heavy. And the SpaceX lander idea is very top-heavy.
Finally, the NASA budget has been hollowed out. Even if the two big show stoppers above were easy, the lack of money would stop the project.
They haven't strung everything together yet and it's clearly much more complex than that. Still, pieces are coming together. Why couldn't they do it a dozen times in the next year? They could have an orbital ship launched in Q3 (flight 14), test a tanker and refueling in Q4, and start fueling in the next 3 months.
That implies all the test flights go well which is a pretty long shot, but not out of the realm of possibility. Although I think it will ship reuse that will be the problem keeping them from that within a year, rather than in-orbit refueling which I suspect won't take them more than a couple of tries to get right. Reentry still looks like a beast of a problem. It's one thing to have enough of your vehicle hanging together to land it, quite another thing again to have it back in a condition you'd be able to start fueling it up again ready for the next launch and reentry to do it all again, even in days or weeks instead of hours like Space X are aiming for.
Even if it was put in orbit, debris are not an issue because orbital decay at Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is significant. A satellite orbiting below 250km will fall back to earth within a few hours, and at 400km within a year. LEO below 500-600km has enough atmospheric drag to be self-cleaning.
Orbital debris are more significant issue at higher orbits 800km and above.
No. What is the mechanism through which you suspected this could happen?
It's also worth considering that they have demonstrated cryo propellant pumping between two tanks within a ship, so, AFAIK, transfer between two ships is more about testing the docking systems, than it is about the pumps. They could probably rig the system to first pump some inert gas to verify the quality of the docking, then try to pump propellants.
There could be some odd failure modes I would think. Failure to pump the liquid, broken pumps, who really knows? My guess would be that a failure mode would be a big spill, a failure to pump, only partially refilling, or broken turbopumps before an explosion.
1. Connect the two ships
2. Connect the liquid valves from both cryo tanks together.
3. Spin the ships about the short axis
4. Open the vent valve for the cryo tank to receive liquid.
5. Lock closed the vent valve for the cryo tank to supple liquid.
Steps 2, 4 and 5 are how you normally transfer cryo fluids between dewars on earth. You just to create pseudo gravity / acceleration in the body frame of the ships to make it work in space.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGMtnP...
* And supposedly with a 20% power increase to boot!
I show someone and then I tell them, that's not the rocket exhaust. That's the exhaust for the engine that runs the fuel pump for the rocket.
Because weight is so critical, there's no luxury of "another component". If something can be repurposed, it is!
And the power opportunities afforded by continually dumping that much fuel through are mind boggling. Even regenerative cooling with combustive fuel blows my mind.
Hope we get to see those images. Would be awesome to see a 3rd person view of starship in space.
Congratulations, everyone, at being alive at the best point in human history so far!
They're already highly confident that if they have sufficient control over the booster trajectory they can execute the chopstick catch, so they don't particularly need to demonstrate that part more. Executing a pseudo-landing at sea lets them validate their booster flight controls perfectly fine without risking the launch tower and associated hardware. They can also do stuff like stretch the trajectory and control mechanisms to their limits to see how much they can handle, and not too big a deal if something goes wrong. Presumably any actual landings will be well within the known safe limits on all parameters.
I bet this first booster also has a lot of minor weird things associated with shaking out the manufacturing process, and they don't entirely mind testing to destruction the first one to get rid of it permanently and use the ones coming from a more proven manufacturing process for important work.
And they won't attempt a catch with the first V3 booster because it's not worth the risk. They can build a new booster every couple of months. It takes much longer to build the launch/catch tower, and they don't have any spare towers yet. A catastrophe during a booster/ship catch would set them back a year, so they'll only attempt a catch if they're confident it will succeed.
Super Heavy: 200000 to 280000 kg
Falcon 9 first stage (without Falcon Heavy side boosters): 25600 kg
That and there's no way for it to stand without a catch tower.
I.e. if they cut a hole in the middle of a barge and it was burning at touchdown "against" the ocean
I imagine water doesn't have the kinetic problems that chunks of concrete do, but also that's a LOT of energy for even water, so maybe there'd be steam issues?
Reminds me of the line from The Naked Gun "Doctors give him a 50% chance of living, but there is only a 10% chance of that."
Time will tell!
Here's the definition from the NWS: https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=probability%2...
[0] https://www.ktvh.com/news/weather-wise/weather-wise-so-there...
And a number of long form videos (like "Test Like You Fly").
IPO time: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4pe2953q1o and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933 (in the last few hours)
https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/B4150BF393BC9/media%2FHIyEI...
What is incredible is that rocket engines traditionally looked like this:
https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/styles/896_x_50...
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SXEOVufxOyY/sddefault.jpg
These new Space X engines look so minimalist that the CEO of another orbital rocket company mistook them for being incomplete. This is despite them being the most technologically advanced rocket engines ever made.
It's probably not that other companies necessarily would be incapable of doing similar (previous iterations of this same Space X engine architecture looked similar to the "traditional" engine category). But I think the cost structure for other rocket engines never supported a significant push to optimize for manufacturing and unit costs, hard tooling, cost optimization, etc.
https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/abi/goesEastfullDiskband13...
The engine was designed to fire once, so they couldn’t test every engine. They tested samples in batches, to the terrible results of the N1 rocket.
Every engine at SpaceX is thoroughly vetted.
But I cant separate space-x from elon. He is, for want of a better word, evil; supporting trump, supporting extreme right party in Germany, DOGE illegally and irresponsibly causing chaos, flouting the law at every turn. He is a tech-fascist. If we want democracy and egality its imperative that people like him are stopped.
I want everything elon does to fail more than I want starship to succeed. It's fine, the rocket tech genie is out of the bottle now, someone else will make a good rocket.
If Flight 12 blows up in space, they've already got Flight 13 almost assembled. It might delay them a month, maybe. But if a returning booster destroys the launch pad, it would delay them much longer--maybe a year.
With those stakes, it makes sense to not try a booster catch until they're sure it's going to work.
He occasionally mentions the aspirational 100x reduction in launch costs.
AI slop. Yuck, Youtube. Surely Google could have AI moderators catching this crap.
My very first exposure to "AI spam" was trying to watch one of the Starship test launches, the second one if I remember correctly.
That was around the time that Elon bought Twitter, so he removed all publicity video streams from third-party platforms like YouTube and moved them to Twitter's streaming service.
I wanted to watch this on my big TV, so I was hunting through YouTube for the stream. I found the most likely looking one and watched as Elon got up on a stage, started waffling on about how this is the "future of humanity" and then with 40 seconds to go before the launch the (entirely realistic) AI voice was dubbed over and started offering "double your Bitcoin if you transfer to this account", with the obligatory QR code in the corner.
I was actually impressed by the audacity!
The really frustrating thing was that YouTube then promptly blocked all content even vaguely related to the launch! It was impossible to keyword search for anything that said "starship", "spacex", etc.
It was a scary preview of instant corporate censorship.
I'm sure the person (or bot!) at YouTube "meant well", but sheesh... they just erased the online presence of dozens of legitimate space-fan channels like NASA Space Flight. And NASA. And SpaceX's official channel too!
Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.
I am wondering if some of this is unmarked paid advertising. I can't imagine any other incentive for Youtube to effectively align its brand with Ick.
Ads, as one of the prophets said, are the Devil.
When you consider how lucrative scams are, you will realise that the advertising budget of scams is high enough to outbid legitimate ads and since the ad platform only cares about money, they'll deliver said to you.
I find it hard to identify the incentives. It isn't simply playing anything for pay.
There are blurred lines or hidden effects between the situation they see vs. the apparent situation we see.
Silicon Valley built this machine. Many tens of thousands of software engineers worked on this.