It's mind-blowing! What SpaceX Starship Flight 12 just Did Shocked whole Industry. Musk Declared...

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]Oh, we have set you down range.

[00:00:33]Mr. Raptor, chamber pressure nominal.

[00:00:41]All right, we are T plus 30 seconds into flight. See a 33 out of 33 Raptor 3 engines on booster V3 ascending over the Gulf now. Coming up on maximum aerodynamic pressure.

[00:00:56]>> Booster and ship. Avionics power telemetry nominal.

[00:01:01]Systems looking good. We're just passing through the period of maximum dynamic pressure.

[00:01:11]Little over a minute into flight now.

[00:01:15]Vibrations chilling out here at Star Factory as we continue to watch Starship flight 12 arc out over the Gulf. The next major thing coming up is going to be hot staging >> booster proposal.

[00:01:29]>> Reminder, we do what's our version of MCO. Most engines cut off. So, we're going to shut down all but five of the Raptor engines on the booster.

[00:01:40]And then after that happens, we're going to ignite the six engines on ship while it is still attached.

[00:01:48]We have clamps that hold the two together. Those are going to retract inside of that hot stage ring. Kind of protect them.

[00:01:57]Look like we had one of the engines go out. Still flying on 32 of the Raptor engines. But again, once we get the hot staging, those six engines on the ship are going to ignite.

[00:02:10]We're going to do it in a little bit different of a of a of a sequence on version three. Essentially, those three Arvac engines will ignite first. Almost immediately after, just one of those central engines is going to ignite. And that's going to give the booster a bit of a kick, sending it in a known direction, followed shortly after by the other two.

[00:02:37]>> We're through Mo. separation.

[00:02:48]There you go. Successful hot staging separation.

[00:02:54]We are not seeing as many booster engines ignite as we expected for boost back, but we are seeing six good engines lit on ship.

[00:03:03]It looks like we just had an early boost back shutdown. Again, a reminder, the booster was planned to essentially head into the Gulf uh for a splashdown, but it has shut its engines down early on into boostback.

[00:03:21]And we just see one of the Arvac. So, we're now running on five engines on ship.

[00:03:31]We do have engine out capability, so it's going to continue into its ascent.

[00:03:39]You got booster on the left there, ship on the right.

[00:03:44]>> Get avionics power.

[00:03:46]>> Not planning on bringing the booster back for this flight as this was the very first time.

[00:04:00]All right, so we're about 3 minutes 50 seconds into today's flight. Uh just a reminder, the the ship planned to burn its engines uh for about 8 minutes and change. Uh about 8 minutes and 11 seconds was our planned timeline for today. Uh that could shift slightly as we do have one engine out running on one fewer Arvacs.

[00:04:30]Again, continuing to watch. So booster did not complete its boost back burn. We would not see all of the engines ignite that we expected.

[00:04:39]Are continuing to get some views from it though. That's going to make a splash down somewhere in the in the Gulf.

[00:04:46]Reminder, we clear air, sea space, everything uh for these launches.

[00:05:03]All right. So, we are coming up on T + 5 minutes.

[00:05:10]Ship continuing to fire. Five of the six.

[00:05:18]Standing by for callouts. Making sure ship's on its planned trajectory. Again, we are planning a suborbital trajectory for the ship today.

[00:05:30]booster giving us some views as it continues to make its way back down towards the water.

[00:05:40]All right, so a little over five and a half minutes in flight. Kate, Jake, you guys with me? Looks like boosters starting to come in hot.

[00:05:48]>> Yeah, we had a the opportunity to stand outside to watch launch and wow that was incredible. Yeah, that was really loud, really shaky, and I was actually surprised how fast the booster got off the pad or the whole stack. That was that was quite incredible.

[00:06:03]>> Absolutely. So, we have views here from the booster coming back down, making its way into the Gulf.

[00:06:11]Pretty cool to see.

[00:06:12]>> Healthy chamber pressures on five out of six ship engines.

[00:06:15]>> Great news there for Starship.

[00:06:24]Once again, we were not going to bring the super heavy booster back to the tower. We were planning on having it land in the Gulf >> on the ship orbit insertion, but we have shut down again. We did run longer as we were engine out. We were flying with five of those six Raptors pretty much the whole time. So, the fact that we're seeing all these tiles still on the flap right now is really good because that actually was one of our experiments.

[00:06:55]>> As you can tell, the teams are stoked to see this demonstration happening. Uh it's it's pretty incredible to see this happening live from space. Now, as we noted earlier in the show, but worth repeating, this Starship version 3 is built to deploy up to 60 of Starlink's more advanced V3 satellites.

[00:07:16]Everything's V3 designed to offer 60 terabits per second of down link capacity per satellite. Now that is 20 times more than each Falcon 9 does today. Incredible.

[00:07:30]All right, I think that's number 10 going out the door.

[00:07:37]Yeah, there it goes.

[00:07:43]So yeah, the camera view you have on your left screen there is basically right at the bottom of the payload volume. So the kind of dome-shaped uh structure you see there is that's actually the top of the fuel tank.

[00:07:59]Then the camera view that you have on the right is an external camera that we have positioned so that you can see basically the light through the open PEZ dispenser door um that you see that's that sliver of light. We can see the Starlinks uh here deploying as each one comes through.

[00:08:27]As we mentioned, we have 20 of these Starlink simulator satellites and then we have two of these specially modified um as we call them dodger dogs here around here. Uh those as Dan mentioned earlier, they have some V3 tech on them, some solar arrays and uh those will be the last two that will be deployed today.

[00:08:50]>> Yeah, that's right.

[00:08:51]And uh seeing this like as I think Dan called him turbocharged or supercharged uh PEZ dispenser uh it's definitely coming out much faster than our previous flights. So that is really good to see.

[00:09:04]Uh yeah, look at that.

[00:09:11]And especially once we, you know, fill Starship up all the way with around 60 or so of these Starlinks, being able to deploy them fairly expediently, uh, you know, is going to be important for designing the overall mission profile.

[00:09:25]>> Yeah.

[00:09:27]Now, fans of Starship may know that Starlink enables lots of unprecedented views both from space, as we see here, and on Earth. In addition to the dozens of cameras on Starship itself, we also have mobile Starlink camera kits deployed in the Indian Ocean.

[00:09:45]>> Yes, Starlink also connects our aerial cinematography units on the ground at Starbase and at other strategic camera spots around Texas.

[00:09:55]>> It's all part of how it all comes together to tell the incredible story of Starship both on and off planet.

[00:10:04]>> Yep.

[00:10:08]All right, we're we're getting low on the stack. It looks like we got two more of those simulators to go out and then it will be time for our Dodger dogs, those modified Starlink satellites.

[00:10:23]Just a couple of updates while we continue to watch payload deploy. did get confirmation we're going to be skipping that relight of the Raptor engine um just due to everything that we saw on the way uphill. Uh those sea level engines, we're going to use them for a landing burn though. They are still capable uh to be used for that.

[00:10:43]So, we'll still look to do a controlled landing in the Gulf, but no inspace relay.

[00:10:54]All right, I think that's 19 and 20 headed out the door.

[00:11:04]And then coming up are our Dodger dogs.

[00:11:07]So, these are modified V2 Starlink satellites.

[00:11:12]We do have a number of cameras on these that are going to attempt to look back at Starship. We're not going to get this video in real time, but we're going to try and turn it around if we do get some video down. So, we don't worry if we get views of Starship from these satellites, we will be sharing.

[00:11:36]And these these will be exciting because again, they're really a tech demo getting our chance to test out some of the the technologies for version three.

[00:11:46]All right, I think that's 18 and 20. My basic math skills are failing now. All right, here we go.

[00:12:15]We're standing by for Starship, basically to serve the first Dodger dogs to low Earth orbit.

[00:12:31]And one out the door.

[00:12:37]And from this view, you can kind of see on the right side of the satellite, you see some bright white spots. Those are our flashlights beneath them. The camera is going to attempt to look back and image Starship's heat shield as it flies slowly away from the vehicle.

[00:12:54]And there it goes.

[00:13:03]Let there be light.

[00:13:05]>> Yeah, it almost looks like the light is just shining right at us there.

[00:13:15]>> If you couldn't tell, we're pretty excited.

[00:13:18]>> Yeah, >> it is always sunny in space.

[00:13:22]>> Always sunny in space. And that looks like an empty payload bay. So, sure does.

[00:13:26]>> That's exactly what you want to see there. That's great.

[00:13:30]So yeah, with payload deploy complete.

[00:13:32]Oh, you can see the door closing there.

[00:13:35]All right, there we go.

[00:13:57]Amazing.

[00:13:59]Amazing.

[00:14:19]Again, this is a view from from one of those satellites as we deployed. It looks like this was from the last one out. flashlight turning on, taking a look at Starship in space.

[00:14:34]The way this system is set up is the satellites are essentially recording it, then making contact with our Starlink constellation, and then transferring that video back down to us on the ground.

[00:14:49]That's a starship in space.

[00:14:54]So, aside from just being really cool, this was our test to try and develop a free flyer that we could fire outside of Starship's payload bay, look back at it, and then do essentially a powette with Starship to get a look at the heat shield where re-entry is an extremely demanding portion of flight where we essentially have to scrub all of the energy we use to launch the rocket. And again, the data gathering is really the main reason why we're doing these flight tests. So, Starlink provides us just one more path to collect that data.

[00:15:27]>> Now, we do anticipate that it might be a little bit of a spicy re-entry. So, we'll see how far we get.

[00:15:34]>> And you can see in the bottom left right now, we're at >> Yeah. And aside from just looking cool, all these camera views providing just really critical data on how the heat shield, how the flaps themselves are holding up. It's why we've got these in the flaps. and then all scattered all around the ship so you can see how they hold up. There's some internal to the vehicle too that and we're getting all of this video back via Starlink. Even as we're just enshrouded in plasma, we're able to kind of operate at a high enough frequency to punch through. And that is blue ocean and sunlight you're seeing just beyond the flap. So, we are coming down into daylight, hopefully splashing down in the next 6 minutes or so in the in the Indian Ocean. Uh we've we've still got a couple maneuvers lined up where we're going to be really stressing the flaps on the ship. So, >> ship has passed through the peak heating region. External temperatures are coming down.

[00:16:32]>> Wow, that is incredible news. As Dan mentioned, we were expecting this re-entry to be super spicy. Uh but excellent news that we're now past that period of peak heating and that now the external temperatures are starting to decrease.

[00:16:48]>> All right, we heard there dynamic pressure coming down and >> landing burn startup.

[00:16:54]>> Landing burn startup.

[00:16:57]>> Two engines lit.

[00:17:04]Successful flip.

[00:17:14]Good shot.

[00:17:19]>> Oh, heat.