Starship Flight 12 - V3 Debuts with Max Power, Fatal Flips, Fast Landings and Exploding Raptors

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:04]Hello, it's Scott Manley here and after a couple of delays, we've finally seen the first flight of Starship V3, an upgraded design with all sorts of new features. We weren't sure exactly how it would perform, but many Starship watchers predicted that this whole thing would end in a bang. And of course, well, that's what we were expecting. I mean, sure, the SpaceX haters were saying it's going to explode, but SpaceX actually did not flinch, and they showed us the explosion this time because they know what they're doing. The real space nerds out there were really the ones that were debating whether this was going to be a successful debut or a failure. And it had successes. It had some failures. Overall, it's the most successful debut of a new version of Starship, but it has yet to complete all the requirements to uh proceed to a fully orbital launch.

[00:01:04]And we will get to that, but let's just rewind a little. This is Starship Superheavy V3. What does that mean?

[00:01:12]Well, it's about 5T taller. It has about 400 500 extra tons of propellant on board. The new Raptor V3 engines are a bit more powerful. We have a new integrated hot staging system. The grid fins are bigger. There are only three of them now. They're in a T-shaped formation. There is large changes to the tank with a much wider transfer tube down the middle which is the same diameter as a Falcon 9. There's a new V3 Raptors which are more powerful and integrate the shielding making everything lighter and more powerful.

[00:01:44]Starship V3 is also slightly larger and it of course uses the new V3 Raptors. It has more room for cargo, but more importantly, it has these new transfer uh docking hardware so that the two Starships could in theory dock together and deliver propellant to each other.

[00:02:00]And then there's also a lot of changes and upgrades to the ground hardware, the ground service equipment. The whole launch site is a completely new launch site, completely new design with a proper flame diverter for all 33 engines. When this thing is going to start up, it is going to fire all 33 engines simultaneously. Previously, the booster would use a staggered startup to I guess reduce the load on the plumbing.

[00:02:24]And that meant that took a little bit longer to get off the pad and get going.

[00:02:29]And so the initial plan to get going, if you will, uh that was supposed to be on the Thursday. They had some cool announcements about Starlink around the moon. Chun from FRAM 2 wants to go to Mars and Nicki Minaj turns up. Yes, Starships are meant to fly. However, uh as they counted down to zero, it seems that they should have really brought in TLC for that whole no scrubs energy. As they counted down, they got to the 40 hold. Every time they counted past that, something would cause a reset. It was ground equipment related. They because they use densified propellants that is they use extra cold propellants. They can't leave the rocket sitting in this sort of state for very long. They have a limited window once they start fueling.

[00:03:14]If they don't get it, they have to scrub the launch. And indeed, they had to scrub the launch. Apparently, the explanation was there was a hydraulic pin that was locking part of the the arm mechanism and that was not retracting correctly. So, uh, yeah, they canled that and then they came back or for the Friday and this time apparently uh Nikki was not available for the live stream.

[00:03:38]So, they had to settle on this guy. Uh, you know, he's from NASA apparently. He was supposedly flying around in his F5 carrying the deputy administrator of NASA who'd been sworn in just a couple of days ago. So, that was a you know, hell of an interesting way to uh start a new job. But look, yeah, you're not interested in this. Let's get to the launch. But first, a word from the sponsors. Last year, I went full-time with this crazy professional content creator thing, which let me go on my trip to see Artemis 2 in person. It let me make better, more polished content.

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[00:06:57]Okay, so I want to put flight 11 on the left and flight 12 on the right because remember I said that there is a difference in the way this starts up.

[00:07:04]The old V2 system because of the plumbing, they had to slowly turn on those engines to be careful to the rocket to make sure they didn't pull too much propellant too quickly. Whereas the new V3, they can go from 0 to 8,000 tons of thrust much more quickly. So watch this thing on the right basically starts moving right away. They've just turned it on, put it in high gear, and it is starting to move away. Whereas the one on the left, yes, it's slowly starting to rise. Now, there's other changes. The new launch site also had the ability to hold down the booster and then let it release much more quickly. So, uh, it takes it leaves the pad with much more, uh, urgency. So, the launch time was about 3:30, which is slightly earlier than I think we've seen. Also, because it's in the middle of summer, the sun was definitely higher. I think the color in the cameras was a whole lot better, which is, you know, it's a nice improvement. Uh, from this Starship viewpoint, you can see the new uh, catch lugs right on the bottom uh, right of the image here. Uh it also the new design because of the extra thrust it going to hit max Q a little bit earlier based on the numbers that I'm seeing in the telemetry it's accelerating at about 1.6G those V3 Raptors initially they are performing excellently all of them are firing all of them lit in sequence and yeah it's it's moving through the air driven by more thrust than any rocket in history more than the V2. So anyway, next of course we're getting ready to go towards stage separation and there's some changes here. One of the things they're going to do is they're going to light three the three vacuum engines and then they're going to light one of the sea level engines and that's supposed to produce some deflection thrust which will help them flip the booster. But before they get to that point, this is where we actually see the first engine failure of a V3 Raptor. So the booster, if you'll look in the bottom left, that's where they have the telemetry, and you'll see that one of the engines has now failed. Now, that leads by a few seconds, and you actually see a flash on the back of the booster around that same time. But just keep in mind that telemetry is leading the imagery by about 4 seconds. So when you see something happen on the telemetry, look a few seconds later and you'll see the same event on the booster. But for now, having a single Raptor fail this far into the launch is not a big deal. They have plenty of redundancy. They've already burned a lot of repellent. But now we're coming up to the stage separation sequence. And this is where the sort of limited success uh definitely takes a little bit of a step back. So now we see the engines on the booster start to spool down. And we'll see the engines on the upper stage start to light. So there they go. Bang. and the booster sort of flips to one side.

[00:09:59]But if you paid attention to the engine diagram, it lit a bunch and then it shut down some and now the booster is sort of just floating around. It doesn't seem to be holding the correct attitude and then they just shut the engines down. So the booster basically completely failed on the boost back, but it's not dead yet.

[00:10:17]But let's go and look again. So, I'm running this again at one quarter speed, and this time I'm h synchronizing the telemetry display to make things more obvious. So, you'll be able to see as they're shutting down those engines there on the back, and then on the bottom right, you're going to see them start to light those engines. Now, remember on the Starship, they're going to light the vacuum raptors and then a single seale raptor. So, you can see that happening. And as that happens, that's supposed to produce an asymmetric thrust which pushes the booster. I think the booster is moving the wrong way here for that. So, I'm a little confused because that engine that lights should have pushed it downwards. Regardless, the booster is now flipping away and it's starting to relight the engines.

[00:11:02]So, watch this. Those engines start to light up and then just as it's about to cross here, there's a flash.

[00:11:11]And uh following that a lot of the engines start failing. And again, if we run this a little closer, you know, you can see the flames from the exhaust from Starship bouncing over it. That's not relevant. What is relevant is this moment where something lets go and it must have damaged the ones next to it.

[00:11:30]So, I'm going to speculate that the flip didn't work as planned. If you look at flight 11 on the left, flight 12 on the right. Uh the previous flights have flipped in the vertical plane and they got great control over that with uh you know modifications to the interstage. In this case it flipped to the left and it did this faster. Now I know that they have changes inside the structure that's supposed to allow for faster flips, but this flip was at 90° to the others. And if you remember, I said one of the sea level raptors was supposed to fire. That was the top one. So I would have imagined just looking at that pattern that was supposed to flip in the vertical axis, but instead it flipped to the left. So I think that the flip went wrong somehow and that may have led to unanticipated fuel slosh, which ultimately led to the engines, you know, getting gas. And another thing to note is that as it goes to the right, one of the grid fins really catches the exhaust from the Starship and that causes the roll to accelerate. Again, I think it was supposed to flip downwards based upon the engines because there's no grid fin there to catch this and make this kind of motion happen, but the booster's expanded. That doesn't threaten the mission. However, there's another engine failure. Do you see one of the vacuum Raptors fails? And again, if you wait a second, you'll see the flash at the bottom there. Yeah, that is the vacuum Raptor going. And while that looked pretty energetic, it clearly wasn't enough to damage the engines next to it.

[00:12:59]Starship still has five engines. And you see it adjusting its attitude. It is pitching itself up, pointing its butt closer towards the Earth so that it gets more vertical lift. They have an onboard navigation system which is automatically correcting for the lack of thrust. It's going to burn the engine longer and it's still going to be able to get to its final target orbit.

[00:13:23]So, I'm pretty sure the SpaceX propulsion people are going to be looking hard at what caused these failures because the ideally you don't want to have failures. SpaceX engineers are justifiably proud for their improvements they've made to the Raptor V3 with the integrated shielding and the higher performance. That higher performance, however, requires higher chamber pressures. And when those higher chamber pressures will escape, that means there's a little more explosive energy. And clearly in the case of the booster, that energy was directed and the integrated shielding wasn't able to cope. So anyway, the the booster is heading down, but it does orient itself like you know, engine side first. Watch the roll orientation as it hits the atmosphere. It manages to get control and flip itself around. That's the grid fins starting to work here, I think. And if you watch that camera on the left, look at the engines vibrating in the airream. Here we switch to this other camera that's slightly higher up the booster. Watch the pipe at the top that's vibrating in its mounts. Flies by those clouds faster than I think we've seen. Gets low enough in supersonic speeds that it generates a vapor cone.

[00:14:30]And uh yeah, then it does actually attempt to light its engines. Of course, at this point, the number of engines that are still working, well, we don't actually know because the telemetry, the layout changes seem to be timed based on the expected mission timeline, and they weren't expecting to be landing this at this point. Then it switches over during the expected landing time, and we see one engine showing in the telemetry, and that is not enough to slow a booster down from Mark 5. So anyway, while all this is happening, Starship is continuing its ascent to suborbit while the booster landing happened a little bit earlier and faster than intended.

[00:15:10]The ascent to orbit is going to take a little bit longer, but we do get this particular shot as we're on the way up.

[00:15:16]One thing to note is the skirt jamage due to that engine shutting down. It wasn't just like a puff of hot gas as it shut down. It must have thrown debris out or something and caused damage.

[00:15:27]Also, if we compare to a previous image, you can see that the center nozzles have moved because they need to adjust the thrust axis to compensate for the missing engine.

[00:15:38]The effect is kind of subtle, but we know that it has to happen because the, you know, the center of the thrust line has to pass through the center of the mass of the vehicle. And this is going to change slightly as, of course, it's ascending into orbit. Now, as it gets towards the end of the flight, it also shuts down those vacuum raptors. And as it does that, it will reorient the the engines again to accommodate. So if you watch this, uh, we're getting close.

[00:16:04]It's going to re adjust the direction the spacecraft is pointing and adjust the orientation of the engines. So there, the telemetry shows us down to three engines. The image should catch up in a few seconds. And there it goes. You see, notice the engines adjusting as they become the only propulsion. And then they finally shut down. And the spacecraft is in sub orbit. And you'll notice that it did this a little later than planned, which is to be expected when you've lost, you know, a small fraction of your engines. So yeah, even losing one engine soon after stage separation, they were able to take the spacecraft into their target trajectory, into their suborbit. But I fully believe this could have reached orbit. But uh they did however decide that they were not going to perform the engine relight test on orbit. And that is pretty significant. First of all, I suspect that they might have done this because using only five engines meant less thrust, which means they had to fire at an angle to their trajectory, which means they wasted stuff. This is called cosign losses where you're not firing exactly along your trajectory. That meant they used a bit more propellant.

[00:17:12]And so they took the decision not to fire the engine on orbit. And the implication of this means is that we are absolutely going to see another suborbital test flight. I I am pretty sure we are because I don't think SpaceX wants to launch multiund ton piece of hardware into orbit without knowing for sure that those engines are going to relight. And with two engine failures and no relight test on this flight, flight 13 is going to be a very similar flight profile. They might try and catch the booster, but given that they had a problem on this one, they might uh again try to drop it in the ocean until they're sure.

[00:17:49]But they did still include the test to launch the Starlink satellites. And this is actually what many of us were looking forward to because while on previous flights these Starlink satellites have been dumb pieces of metal that do nothing, on this one they included two new ones which were nicknamed the Dodger dogs. So these are basically Starlink satellites which uh they they've changed some of the stuff to make them more consistent with the size that they would be in a Starship launch factor. But most importantly, they gave them cameras. And even more importantly, because it was going to be nighttime when they were doing this, they gave them big, big flashlights.

[00:18:29]Yeah. I mean, this has always seemed like such a no-brainer that you should be able to, if you're launching stuff out, you should be able to take a picture of the spacecraft that is just leaving and get a view of this thing in orbit. Um, and so here it goes. Here's the final one going out. And this is my favorite one because it immediately you turns on its light and wow, it absolutely dazzles the camera which turns down its gain and it just suddenly looks like pure science fiction again.

[00:18:58]Look at that lens flare. And I believe that we already have the imagery from this. Now, we didn't get it in real time, but I think the satellite must have connected to the Starlink network, perhaps using the laser cross links, and then sent it via that. And we did get it later during the stream. And so, this is what that looked like from the point of view of the Dodger dog as it headed off into space for a brief free flight, turns on the light, and yeah, you you see the outside of the spacecraft as it's slowly pulling away. You see those anchor points that are going to be used to hold spacecraft together for fuel transfer. Now, as it goes a little further out, it decided to turn the light off again. I'm not sure why. Uh, but notice on the left side there. See that? Oh, there. There it is. That's it turning the light out and it's now getting dazzled from the lights for the other side. So, I guess at least we do get to see that. But yeah, look at the left there. There's this white deposit there. That certainly looks like a frost or something. I'm thinking it's water, but it could actually be like a deposit of oxygen that ends up getting on there because it's dumping a lot of oxygen overboard during this these uh you know propellant dumps while it's sitting in orbit. Now, as someone who's played a few space video games in my life, I thought it would be cool to reverse the footage. Yes, I know if you've played Elite or Elite Dangerous, you'll know what that's like. If you've watched 2001, there there we go. Look, there's the docking slot, turning the spacecraft to it, aligning it, coming in, turning on the flashlights. Yeah. Uh I'm not playing the walts of the blue Danube because I couldn't find a guaranteed copyright free version that I could use for this. So, I I expect a lot of you have this playing in your head anyway.

[00:20:52]Yeah. You know, some of you may even be hearing your call sign getting read out as you cross the docking uh the docking threshold into the landing bay. Yeah, I'm hoping that we get more footage released from the Dodger dogs. For now, we do know that they were flying information and illuminating the spacecraft for quite a while because we actually saw lots of internal shots showing the flaps moving or sorry, the control surfaces moving and also seeing the spacecraft rotate. Now, if you think about it, the these were launched out the backside, but if it was going to inspect the heat shield, the spacecraft was going to have to perform a roll to expose the belly, show its belly so that it can be inspected. And you see that actually seems to continue this roll around. So, I hope we get a look at the heat shield from the other side. I kind of want to know uh what the state of it was before it goes through re-entry cuz there's always the question what tiles are lost during the re-entry versus what tiles are being lost on ascent. Speaking of which, um well re-entry was the most routine we have seen it in a Starship flight. Obviously they didn't do their uh you know engine relight so they would have to fly a particular trajectory to make sure they reached their launch site. I wasn't even sure they were going to reach their launch their their landing site. Sorry. Uh because I wasn't sure what kind of cross- range capability they would have regardless. Yeah, we got to see the the whole entry. There was some flashes and stuff. Now, we think that a lot of these flashes are related to small fragments coming off the heat shield and it's always a question of like how critical is that? Uh there is a white tile by the way that is in front of those attach points seeing the left side that was there during t ascent that is not a tile that is broken off. A lot of people were pointing to that and say look they've lost a tile actually no that was that was there but as they get further down they do a very important test. uh as they start to fall through the denser parts of the atmosphere uh and they get lower down they start to enter into again maximum dynamic pressure again it's called max Q but they never call it max Q this time because max Q is on ascent but during that they want to test the do do basically a test of the control surfaces so they want to do extreme movements of it as they reach this point where it is feeling the maximum aerodynamic pressure. Uh, and this is them doing that now. So, they're basically making sure that the actuators are able to handle the extra loads they would feel. At this point, look at the red glow between those tiles on the left side. It's like there's lava underneath these things. I I'm not sure what causes that particular look, but um yeah, uh heat is definitely leaking through towards the surface, but hopefully not damaging the surface underneath.

[00:23:57]So those extreme motions were merely to test the hardware. Later on, it was going to actually have to demonstrate a particular flight path that will follow.

[00:24:06]So they've already planned the way that they will arrive at Bokhica after they return from orbit so that they can cap, you know, land correctly and get captured by the tower. And so it has to perform this particular curve that brings it around. I I as I understand it, I think this is all to do with trying to minimize the sonic boom that is being produced over populated areas and approach Bokeh Chica from a safe angle. And that means they're required to turn this around, carve this thing through the air, basically skid this thing, you know, handbrake turn, whatever you want to call it. basically drift its way into the landing site trying to control its energy and make sure it arrives in the correct place with the correct altitude and speed so that it can get itself exactly on target.

[00:24:57]And so how well did they do with the onargetness? Was there a set of drones there waiting to get imagery? Well, yes, there was. And I think one of the drones was placed in such a way as it would be uh essentially watching the spacecraft come in as if it was targeting the tower. So I think there was a drone sitting there that was pretending to be a catch tower. And that's what this angle is from. Notice the thing is coming straight in. Now obviously the drone is higher up than the top of the tower, but it was looking straight at that booster coming towards it. One of the reasons why I think it was a lot higher than the tower would be is because the drone is going to end up looking straight down on the booster underneath it as the booster falls over and then explodes.

[00:25:44]And I was worried with SpaceX doing this whole IPO thing that would they would become a little more explosion shy, but no, they're just like, there it is. The booster is headed direct to Valhalla.

[00:25:57]So, mad respect to SpaceX for giving us the explosion that we wanted. This angle also gave us great views of the heat shield as it killed over. And you can see coloring on it uh due to the airflow. I'm not sure if that is more like uh you know the kind of deposits you would see on a Falcon 9 or if it's actual damage to the heat shield being done over time. I think to really understand that they will actually have to catch a Starship. That's certainly I don't think that's going to happen on the next flight. I think they have a bit more to do. And so when that might that be? Well, we've already seen the hardware for the next flight in uh various states of readiness. I I'm pretty sure based on what I'm hearing that I I won't be surprised if we actually see a flight in July. August is more likely. Um it could be sooner. You never know. I think this flight was far from perfect. It showed that the Raptor V3s may need a bit more work, but it also showed that the the onboard guidance on Starship is versatile and is able to handle this uh you know off-nominal situation. And the booster, it actually tried to land even though it was way off course. The FAA has not yet declared this a mishap, but that will be highly likely given how far the booster was off course. But SpaceX doesn't need the FAA to tell them what they need to fix. They almost certainly have engineers already thinking about what might have gone wrong with those Raptors and how they will fix them going forwards, whether it's a manufacturing or a design issue or something else.

[00:27:29]Also, SpaceX's sign maker has some work to do. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe.