SCRUBBED: SpaceX Starship Launch | May 21, 2026

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[00:07:14]All right. All operators only count one.

[00:07:18]Flight directors go for launch.

[00:07:32]Stage separation.

[00:07:45]Booster has landed.

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[00:08:01]Hello star people and welcome to Starbase, Texas. It's currently 5:46 p.m. Central time, and we are just over 43 minutes away from the first flight of SpaceX's next generation vehicle, Starship version 3. I'm Kate Ty, senior manager of quality systems engineering.

[00:08:21]>> And I'm Jake Burkowitz, a lead propulsion engineer. And today, we're coming to you live from just outside the production floor at Staractory, where the team's preparing for Starship's 12th test flight. Yeah, it's been a few months since our last update, and in that time, the team has been working hard to completely redesign the entire rocket that you see there from the ground up.

[00:08:43]>> Yeah, that's right, Kate. Starship version 3 has undergone significant upgrades, taking everything we've learned from the previous 11 flights to make a vehicle capable of full and rapid reusability. This includes everything from a new booster, new ship, new engines to a new launchpad, new avionics, new software, and so much more. All of that hardware is just down the road at pad 2, a little over a mile and a half away from Jake and myself.

[00:09:10]And in over in our viewing area outside of outside on the lawn, Starbase employees are excited and already starting to gather to watch today's flight.

[00:09:21]>> Yeah. And right behind us are three generations of Raptor engines. And today will be the first flight of the newest generation, Raptor V3. And the 33 Raptors on Super Heavy booster combined to generate 18 million pounds of thrust.

[00:09:37]You can see them all there.

[00:09:38]>> That's a lot.

[00:09:39]>> It's a lot. And it makes Starship by far the most powerful rocket of all time.

[00:09:44]And for comparison, we have over twice the thrust of the Saturn 5 rocket that carried astronauts to the moon. And then here, of course, you can see on ship, we have another six engines, and three of them feature the larger vacuum optimized nozzles called Arvax. And as a member of the Raptor team, I can tell you that we're all incredibly excited to put V3 to the test today and demonstrate the capabilities of our most advanced engine. And we'll get into all the exciting new details in just a few moments.

[00:10:10]>> Yeah, that excitement is well warranted, Jake. Raptor and Starship V3 are designed to be foundational for the future of the program. They're designed to enable us to send payloads and eventually people all the way to the moon and Mars, ultimately helping us make life multilanetary and extending the light of consciousness to the stars.

[00:10:32]Yeah. And in the meantime, we're planning to put Starship to work shortly by launching bigger and more powerful Starlink version 3 satellites. These new satellites aim to substantially increase capacity in orbit, strengthen the network, and deliver an improved experience for customers on Earth.

[00:10:50]Starship will also carry our upcoming V2 Starlink mobile satellites, which are expected to provide direct 5G connectivity from space straight to mobile phones worldwide. Now, as a reminder for all of you watching at home, what we're doing today is a test.

[00:11:07]Like we mentioned earlier, we've redesigned the majority of this rocket and its systems. From the outside, for those of you that have tuned in before, it might look pretty familiar, but beneath the surface, it's all new. And the primary objective today is to put it all together in a real live flight environment. In order to learn, we got to launch.

[00:11:27]>> Yeah. And really, it's the data we're expecting to get back from today's flight that's going to bring us closer to making Starship operational and unlocking the next generation of our future in space. So, no matter the outcome of today's test flight, excitement is guaranteed.

[00:11:43]>> Most definitely. And speaking of excitement, Dan Hwitt is in a pretty exciting place. He's stationed just outside of the launch control center, a couple floors above us. How's it going up there, Dan?

[00:11:54]>> Kate, it it couldn't be going better. We have a blue sky outside. I'm beyond psyched. Hello everybody. I'm Dan Hwitt with SpaceX Communications. It's been far too long. Welcome back for another Starship launch. Things are looking good. We are counting down. We moved into our window a little bit, but we are looking good right now at this moment.

[00:12:11]Behind me, you see the flight control team. They're on console looking at the rocket, the pad, the range, the weather, everything. As we countd down to liftoff, we're going to be getting into prop load in just a couple of minutes.

[00:12:22]And we are counting down to a liftoff at 6:30 p.m. Central time. The weather is great. We haven't had a blue sky all day. There you can see almost nothing but that. We were fighting some upper upper level winds a little bit earlier.

[00:12:37]That's why we moved into our launch window. But the great news is we are looking go for launch. Also, we're monitoring the range. So air and sea space out in the Gulf and also in the Indian Ocean on the other side of the world, not tracking any issues there.

[00:12:50]Now, today's countdown functionally going to look pretty similar to most people. There's a couple of differences in timing for some of those major milestones like when we start loading propellant, when the diverter turns on and the water's flowing, when the engines start up, but otherwise, other than that, all of the hardware brand new, new booster, new ship, new engines, new pad. Let's nerd out. Let's let's dive right into it. So, there it is in the pad. Say hello to Starship version three. As Kate noted, some of the outside might look familiar, but we've made extensive upgrades across every single system. Start with the big picture because Starship still very, very big. Just over 407 ft tall, fully stacked, a little bit taller than version two. With that extra stretch, we can carry even more propellant. Uh, but big rocket. The bottom half is our super heavy booster, and there are some pretty visible structural changes on the outside. We'll jump in. You've got version three on the left there, version two on the right at the very top. We've changed from a one-time use hot stage adapter that used to pop off to one that's fully integrated for reusability.

[00:13:59]And Starship's Raptors are actually going to be igniting directly on top of the booster's fuel tank. The fuel tank pressure itself and then a nonstructural layer of steel. It's what's protecting the top of that booster when we do hot stage separation. Moving down a little bit, we went from four grid fins to three. We made them 50% bigger and higher strength. Just a reminder, that's what booster is using to kind of steer itself as it's flying back to for a catch. We're also now going to use those grid fins for lift and catch itself. We zoom in a little bit and you can see new catch points now on those grid fin structures.

[00:14:37]Moving inside the rocket, we redesigned the fuel transfer tube. This is the really big tube inside the rocket that's moving all of that liquid methane down to the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines.

[00:14:48]It's going to help us flip faster and we can now start up all of the engines simultaneously. This thing is big. It's about the size of a Falcon 9 first stage which gives us the fun realization that we kind of put a rocket inside of our rocket. The very bottom of the booster looks very different. You've got those new Raptor 3 engines that enabled us to delete the bulky heat shields, the engine shrouds that we had on the previous generation. And then all of the propulsion avionics hardware for those engines are super tightly integrated now and protected by much slimmer shielding.

[00:15:22]Move on up second stage. This version of Starship is designed to carry massive orbital payloads. We're talking up to 100 metric tons to Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars. The biggest changes are pretty much all under the hood. We gave the propulsion system a clean sheet redesign, increased the propellant tank volume, and improved our reaction control system, our steering while we're on orbit. When we X-ray inside, the PEZ dispenser is now supercharged, a little bit of turbo, and that's going to allow us to increase the deploy speed for each of those satellites. Today we're actually flying the heaviest payload we've ever carried on Starship, but eventually we're going to launch with up to 60 of those Starlink V3 satellites.

[00:16:02]Just below that, just below the payload bay near and also down in the aft part of the ship, we've added new docking ports that's going to enable us to link up into orbit between two starships, do propellant transfer. We also modified that main connection point where we load propellants into the vehicle for those future prop transfer missions. So, lot of upgrades tiptotail on the rocket, but powering everything, the Raptor 3.

[00:16:34]There they are, ripping in real time.

[00:16:36]These engines manufactured in Hawurn, California. Tested at our site up in McGregor. We redesigned their entire ignition system. We bumped up the thrust, so putting out more force. went from 230 to 250 tons for us on those sea level engines, 258 all the way up to 275 on the vacuum optimized ones. When you look at all the generations of Raptor lined up, all of those fiddly bits, the sensors, feed lines, controllers, everything that you were used to seeing around Raptor 1 and two, a lot of those have either been deleted, best part is no port, or they're internally integrated and protected inside of the engine itself. That'll let us dramatically cut down on the weight of the engine, make it easier to manufacture because we are going to be mass-producing these things. Now, we make these Raptors in Hawthorne. We got There's our Hawthorne manufacturing team getting ready to see their engines fly in space for the very first time. Huge shout out to you guys. You're all wizards. Appreciate you getting us some vehicles on the pad today. But incredible amount of effort. World's best engineering team works here at SpaceX. get this rocket to that pad ready to launch. And we've been trying to follow more of it and document some of it. And if you haven't seen it, check out our new docu series Starship.

[00:17:54]We really, you know, built this rocket from scratch, but we've also built the pad from scratch. So, it's all kinds of new systems. This will be the first time that we bring together the pad and vehicle pieces to make sure that they all work.

[00:18:08]static fire vehicle is uh in prep clear about to get to our static fire pad clear opt.

[00:18:13]>> We run 60 seconds on ship because you get to see how the vehicle thermals all shake out and just general vehicle performance >> that if you can make it through that that you are in a reasonable position to go fly.

[00:18:29]Start it up.

[00:18:36]>> Throttle up.

[00:18:45]>> The journey of SpaceX is a journey to give humans access to the solar system and beyond, which is really the goal for Starship.

[00:18:52]>> Plus 20.

[00:18:55]The impact that this rocket is going to have on the world, I don't think most people can really comprehend the change it's going to happen.

[00:19:03]>> This is such a wild ride. The highs are high, the lows are low as we like really work to get to ultimately launching people, which is going to be amazing.

[00:19:12]>> Plus 40.

[00:19:13]>> It is not impossible just because it's far beyond what has been done before.

[00:19:17]We've proved that time and time again.

[00:19:21]plus 50ation.

[00:19:32]>> Oh man, like Dan said, we've got the world's best engineering team and I love this docky series because it's allowing us to get a peak behind the curtains.

[00:19:40]>> Yeah, it's the full thing is 25 minutes long and I think I've watched it four or five times already. That's how good it is.

[00:19:46]>> Same. But yeah, so just as the team has been working hard on a brand new rocket, we've also redesigned the ground systems. The brand new pad 2 that you can see on your screen here is making its big debut today. We took everything we learned from operating on pad 1 to create this totally new launchpad. Pad 2 is optimized for full and rapid reusability. We've upgraded our propellant farm with much more storage and more pumps to enable super fast filling for launch and relaunch. On the tower, we changed two shorter chopsticks, which enable even faster motion to better track vehicles flying in for catch.

[00:20:26]>> Yeah. We also changed the actuators driving those chopsticks from hydraulics to 100% electromechanical, increasing their speed, redundancy, and reliability.

[00:20:37]On the ground, the launch mount was completely redesigned. And if I had to describe it in one word, I'd say it's robust. With the extensive concrete and steel cladding, it almost feels like you're looking at a battleship, not a launchpad. But it's also smarter. We've separated the fuel and ox systems into different compartments and reposition the booster quick disconnects to be out of the vehicle's plume during liftoff.

[00:20:59]>> Yeah. And perhaps the most obvious change, we've now got a birectional flame diverter. We said goodbye to the pancake and a new top deck flame deflector to eliminate metal wearing down which will help us get to zero refurbishment between launches. In fact, that new flame trench and the new chopsticks are featured here on our new pad 2 launch shirts. This launchpad is built for maximum safety and fast turnaround because making life multilanetary will require launching a lot of Starships.

[00:21:32]And as the countdown continues, let's change gears for a moment and head over to Tyler Lanquist in Hawthorne to talk about Starlink. How's it going over there, Tyler?

[00:21:43]>> Hey, Kate, and thank you. We're back in Hawthorne and we have a crowd forming outside of mission control, ready to see some Starships fly today. And like Jake mentioned earlier, on today's flight, we're deploying 20 Starlink simulators, plus two modified Starlink satellites, which our team internally refers to as dodger dogs, because we stretch that V2 mini satellite propellant tank so that it sticks out from both ends of the satellite. You can see it right there.

[00:22:08]It is just missing some mustard onions.

[00:22:12]So, the Dodger dog serves as a tech demo between the V2 and the V3 Starlink satellites and will act as a platform for testing those V3 components. So, the larger V3 satellites aim to greatly expand the network's capacity while V3 hardware is designed to support faster Wi-Fi and improved broadband speeds to customers while providing a significant capacity upgrade from the V2 Mini. And in addition to delivering future V3 satellites to the Starlink network, we believe Starship will enable us to launch our AI satellites. As you may have seen during the Terapab event in Austin a few months ago, Elon laid out the path to revolutionize cloud computing and AI infrastructure, leveraging the unlimited power of the sun, targeting 100 gawatt to one terowatt of AI computing power annually.

[00:22:58]And from there, we're looking at connectivity beyond our planet, too.

[00:23:03]Building on the technologies used to connect people on Earth, the Starlink team is exploring using Starlink to enable high bandwidth connectivity around the moon. With a with a constellation of satellites designed to connect to user terminals on the lunar surface, we could relay data back to our Starling constellation in Earth orbit.

[00:23:21]So, traditionally, deep space comms have relied on radio frequency transmission.

[00:23:26]This new design would use lasers to relay data back to Earth, which can massively increase the bandwidth available to future lunar missions. We currently have thousands of lasers operating in our Starlink constellation around Earth. Deploying that technology around the moon could connect it with hundreds of terabytes of capacity.

[00:23:44]Together, this could provide the connectivity backbone between the Earth and the Moon and enable gigabit connectivity anywhere on the lunar surface, providing data for rovers, habitats, and astronauts, and hopefully some incredible views for us back on Earth, too. So, all of that adds up to a lot of satellites. But the good news is is that there's still plenty of space in space. But that said, the Starlink team takes space safety extremely seriously, and we work hard to encourage best practices across the entire industry, so space stays open for as many people as possible.

[00:24:20]There are tens of thousands of known space debris in low Earth orbit right now. All of that debris comes from man-made activities.

[00:24:29]A lot of people talk about space being really congested and they show this dust cloud around the earth of all these points and it looks like space is super super crowded. I think if you take all the spacecraft that are in orbit, it's equivalent to about three aircraft flying over California at one time. So space is so much bigger, so many dimensions that are much beyond what we can comprehend. But even though it's big, there still is a potential that these satellites could collide and could hit each other if we don't proactively share information.

[00:25:01]>> The orbit of objects follow Kepler's laws of motion explained by Newton's laws of gravitation. So they orbit the Earth in very predictable trajectories as long as another force doesn't act on them. So you can reasonably fit millions of satellites into an orbital shell with that math. Obviously to make that happen, you have to have really tight coordination between all those satellites and everything has to work really well together.

[00:25:25]Starlink satellites make something like a thousand collision avoidance maneuvers on a daily basis.

[00:25:31]We predict that a close approach will occur between another satellite or a piece of space debris. We use the thruster of the satellite to make a maneuver and keep away from the trajectory of that object and reduce the probability of collision to effectively zero.

[00:25:46]Because most of the actual collision risk comes from the surface area of the solar panels. We lower the solar panels to reduce the cross-section in the plane of the close approach to further reduce risk.

[00:25:58]On Starink, I'm also excited to talk about a program we call Stargaze.

[00:26:02]Cameras on the satellites looking up into space measuring the starfield. You can imagine 10,000 satellites staring up into space and detecting all the objects in lower Earth orbit. you effectively almost have a real-time view of what's happening in the low earth orbit environment.

[00:26:18]So we began detecting objects and fitting orbits to those objects and currently we're tracking about 50% of the objects with pariges below 600 km.

[00:26:28]This project has opened our eyes a bit to the activities that are occurring in space that are not being published. So, we have many examples in Starlink satellite footage where an object came within tens of meters of a Starlink satellite. Yet, this was not predicted.

[00:26:44]This is extremely concerning because this type of incident could have resulted in a collision.

[00:26:51]Last year, we flew 165 missions to space. As an industry leader, we would like to create a community where all industry providers share data back and forth. They tell us where their spacecraft are. They track their spacecraft as soon as they're deployed.

[00:27:05]They make them available to others so we know where everyone is. You know, there's some thought that if I keep my satellite position confidential and I don't share that with anyone, no one will know where my satellite is. I think that's really fictitious. So, we at SpaceX, we've taken the opposite approach. We've publish all our data. We put all our firmware data out. We show where our satellites are. We show where we're maneuvering. And I think we're now showing the industry there is no competitive advantage by not sharing your data. We're demonstrating to the outside world what good practices are.

[00:27:37]We as an industry have a tremendous obligation at this time at this formative state to actually communicate with each other, share best practices, and be good stewards amongst each other.

[00:27:47]It'll make us better as an industry.

[00:27:48]It'll give us an industry of the future that will continue to grow, continue innovate, and help every company to grow and and generate revenue >> to maintain safety in low Earth orbit.

[00:28:00]It's incredibly important that we work together as satellite operators and are very transparent in the activities that we are conducting. I think that an irresponsible satellite operator is one who either doesn't know where their spacecraft is or where it's going to go or isn't broadcasting that to the world.

[00:28:17]Space is big, but operators are not always predictable. We want to enable other missions, the moon and Mars and interplanetary exploration. So ensuring that activities like that can persist for the duration of humanity is is incredibly important. You know, fundamentally, I think the message to operators is to be transparent about what you're doing in space. You know, transparent about where your satellite is and where it's going and make sure you have the tools to ensure that that information is accurate all the time.

[00:28:51]>> Starlink's future is bright and helping ensure space safety for all. operators along the way. Now, let's take a look into the flight profile for today's test. As we've mentioned a few times already, there are numerous redesigns making their debut today across the entire launch vehicle. Uh, in light of this, we want to keep our learning focused on all that new hardware and software. So, we're running a flight profile similar to our last two Starship flights in order to minimize new variables.

[00:29:19]>> Yeah, we'll start with liftoff where Superheavy ignites 33 brand new Raptor 3 engines. We power through a scent ahead of hot stage separation. Booster shuts down all but five sustainer engines.

[00:29:29]Stage 2 lights its Raptor engines while still attached to Superheavy. We get to see stage separation debuting the integrated hot stage directional booster flip engine relight and boost back using 33 engines. And after coasting for a few minutes, the booster today will target a landing burn and soft splashdown a few miles off the coast from Starbase.

[00:29:46]>> Yeah, ship does a bunch of fun things like deploying 20 Starlink simulator satellites. Two of them dodger dogs as we affectionately call them. uh single engine Raptor relay and then re-entry.

[00:29:55]Everybody's favorite part. Lots of fun technicolor colors that will be brought to us by Starlink. And if all of that goes as planned, we will finish with the we will finish the test with a flip, a landing burn, and a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. And actually, in just a few moments, thanks to Starlink, we'll be going live to the Indian Ocean and chatting with the ship recovery team stationed out there.

[00:30:20]>> I'm so excited for that. That's going to be awesome.

[00:30:22]>> So cool. Uh but sit tight. Uh first we're going to go to Dan for a quick status check.

[00:30:27]>> Yeah, thanks guys. Uh everything's still looking good. We are not tracking any issues technically on the vehicle or on the pad. Range status continues to be good. Uh both the range out here in the Gulf and out in the Indian Ocean. As you can see, we have started our propellant load. Uh that happened at about 36 minutes before T0. Uh we're loading about 20% faster on pad 2 than we did on pad one. Our flight director, Ty Huntington's back in the chair again. He was there for Starship's first flight test and 11 back for V3. He did that final go no go at about T-minus 1 hour.

[00:31:03]Uh we do start loading on ship first.

[00:31:05]That happened at about T-minus 37.

[00:31:07]Booster follows about 1 minute later starting with its liquid oxygen and then its liquid methane and then ship fuel is the last one to kick off about T-minus 35. We're going to continue loading all of this propellant on board until about 3 minutes right before launch. 3 minutes 20 on ship, 2 minutes 50 on the booster.

[00:31:25]Uh so we go pretty much right down to the wire. But uh as of this moment, still looking good. T0 set for 6:30 p.m.

[00:31:33]Central time. Continuing to load prop, continuing to countdown. All right, if you've been following along with these launches, you know we've been sending these suborbital and they splash down in the Indian Ocean. How the heck do we see some of that? Well, we have our recovery team, our starship recovery team, and one of their primary jobs is to get those re-entry views and a whole lot more. We're going to take them now.

[00:31:56]We're joining them out in the Indian Ocean. We've got Senai standing by taking a moment uh from the recovery ops. He might be frozen. Let me know if you can hear me, Saren. How's everything looking out there in the ocean?

[00:32:11]>> Dan, I can hear you loud and clear.

[00:32:13]We're uh sitting in about 8 foot waves, but it's looking like a clear day, ready for a ship to come on through.

[00:32:19]>> All right, man. How many of these have you done? And like walk us through what's the recovery team's primary job out there?

[00:32:28]>> I've done I've done six and now seven seven of these missions. And uh like our with every mission, we've seen it evolve and uh like but our primary goal has always been to clear the range. So, just like we do over in the Gulf, the same kind of happens here. We send one to two boats out and we make sure there's nothing in the area so the rocket is clear to land. And then once we can guarantee that and have the rocket leave the pad, then we can proceed to imagery collection. So, we have like >> All right, we'll see if we can get him back. But they're out there in the Indian Ocean. I think everyone's familiar. They've got the buoy cams.

[00:33:06]They've got uh the drones that are going to be going up. So, we're going to be cutting back to them live uh once they get they've been doing some practice stuff. Uh we've been able to shoot some of this. There you can see Saren uh getting those buoy boats. So, they're basically out there. They're deploying these boats in the splashdown zone. Uh if you get a live view from one of these boats, that tells you that we're pretty much nailing our target on that. Uh and then Sen and a couple of our other recovery folks out there are going to be flying drones. So hopefully get that imagery of Starship coming back. It's it's super critical for us to see just how that heat shield performed after re-entry. Uh and just having them out there remote just in the middle of nowhere uh plays just a really critical role and just rapid iteration on Starship and its heat shield. So uh looking forward to hopefully seeing some views from them a little bit later. Uh but for now, let's head back down to Kate and Jake for the latest progress at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

[00:34:10]>> Thanks, Dan. Uh now, if we want to get to the moon and then Mars as fast as possible, there's really only one answer. Launch a lot more rockets.

[00:34:20]>> Yeah. And to do that, we're going to need a few more launch pads and support buildings, which is exactly what we're working on over in Florida. So, originally built for Apollo and then the space shuttle, launch complex 39A has flown 126 Falcon missions since SpaceX reactivated the pad in 2017.

[00:34:39]>> Yeah, it's crazy that it's that many.

[00:34:41]Uh, fun fact, I actually hosted the live webcast for our very first launch at pad 39A and it was so exciting to see that come back to life. It's also exciting to see how today, almost 10 years later, the ongoing construction and development that will bring a second launch tower to launch complex 39A. You can see it ongoing there on your screen. It's designed to expand our capabilities to support Starship launches in the future while also continuing to support Falcon Heavy missions from the original Apollo shuttle Falcon launch tower.

[00:35:16]>> Yeah. And we're also building a Starship launchpad at Slick 37. And to support the uptick in future launches, there's Gigabay, a giant assembly and maintenance facility designed to prep starships ahead of Florida launches. And when complete, this huge structure aims to hold 24 work cells in over 800,000 square feet of workspace. That's 24 rockets under one roof.

[00:35:41]>> Absolutely crazy.

[00:35:41]>> Going to be so many.

[00:35:42]>> Yeah. So SpaceX's future in Florida is quickly taping shape with our very first launches on the horizon.

[00:35:48]>> Yes. a horizon that aims for regular trips to the moon. Now, staying with the lunar conversation, we're gonna head back up to Dan, who has Starship vice president of engineering, Bill Riley, our favorite webcast visitor, to talk about the moon.

[00:36:04]>> That's right, Kate. Yeah, crashing the webcast again. Bill Riley, VP of Starship Engineering. Thanks for coming, Bill. We just we wanted like a couple of minutes to geek out about the moon. Like Artemis 2 just flew humans around the moon for the first time in like 50 years, more than 50 years. I personally was wildly caught up in it. I don't know how you felt about the whole thing.

[00:36:23]>> Yeah, I found it really inspirational. I think part of being a space fairing civilization is being out there exploring and I thought Armist 2 got us back to the moon and back exploring and being out farther than we had been before.

[00:36:34]>> It's always wild when you see space stuff kind of break through into the mainstream and like it felt like that really did it. And I mean that's going to continue happening. We're looking at a higher cadence of missions in Aremis and Starship's obviously going to play a pretty big role in the entire Artemis program, but like what's kind of next on the horizon?

[00:36:51]>> I think what's exciting about Artemis 3 is you'll see the landers introduced now. So it, you know, maybe we're talking to NASA about doing an Earth orbit rendevous where the the Starship base lander could be in proximity to Orion or even more. I think that's really the next step. prove out those landers close to home in Earth orbit and then looking ahead going to the moon.

[00:37:12]>> And we're debuting V3 now and just some of the stuff that's now on this version of Starship is going to directly enable some of that or it's planned to.

[00:37:21]Correct.

[00:37:22]>> That's right. So V3 is exciting because it really introduces a lot of it's designed to introduce all these fundamental foundational features that allow us to go out past the Earth. So, for example, there's many features, but some that are visible are the docking adapters below the pezdor that you'll notice on the the asbuilt uh ship. And then as we look out past V3, there's other configurations of Starship. There is a tanker that takes the propellant to to dock with the lander that will land on the moon. And that think of the the onorbit propellant transfer is sort of like the gas station in the sky. And then that gas station will be the what we call the depot. And then the plan now and the plan's been but it's really emphasized now we're not just going for flags and footprints. We're talking permanent infrastructure on the moon.

[00:38:07]Right.

[00:38:08]>> That's right. We have to build up to that capacity. So the first landers will be you know a new set of bootprints to uh kind of start a new generation of explorers. Then we'll build into cargo landers like you see here. Maybe bringing down a rover to the surface.

[00:38:23]Some infrastructure might even be staying inside the landers. And then as we look to an even brighter future, having a permanent presence in a in a moon base.

[00:38:32]>> Yeah, I'm I'm ready for the moon base. I I need to go to the moon. That's that's definitely in my It sounds like a hell of a week long vacation or one heck of a trip, but uh and I mean this is like this is the next step on making life multilanetary, right?

[00:38:46]>> Absolutely. It's literally the next planetary body we need to get to. So, >> all right. Well, thank you so much, Bill. I'm going to let you jump back in there as we get ready to launch this rocket. Thanks for nerding out on the moon with me for a couple of minutes.

[00:38:59]Uh, but we're not done. We got a little bit of more cool news. Stick around. Uh, last year the two crew made history.

[00:39:07]They were the first astronauts ever to explore Earth's polar regions from space in Dragon. I got to catch up with that mission commander from that Chun Wang.

[00:39:14]He was visiting one of the most remote places on the planet and he had some exciting news.

[00:39:25]Awesome to talk to you. Start me off.

[00:39:26]Where the heck are you right now?

[00:39:28]>> Thank you for joining me uh to uh FU Island and this uh uh isolated isolated island in the South Atlantic. Uh it's arguably uh the most remote island to the world.

[00:39:43]>> It looks super isolated. You're only there with a couple of people. Kind of feels like a space mission to me. So, let's just jump right in. You are going to be on the first interplanetary mission on a starship.

[00:39:58]>> So it's going to be a fly mission of Mars. So uh a lot of people talking about uh how uh uh Mark we like uh uh we're going to fly to Mar, we're going to land on Mark, we're going to do city on Mark. But uh let's get it started with with a flyby.

[00:40:19]>> Doing a flyby of ours. That's I mean that's a heck of a trip, but you're you're kind of you're kind of built for this kind of mission, right? Because if you're not landing on the surface, you're kind of you spend a long time going out there. You're going to fly by it. It's going to be like just an insane couple of hours and then it's a big trip back home. How are you kind of built to handle this kind of a journey? This actually my cell of fire.

[00:40:45]>> I can stare at the uh the map view uh on airplanes uh all the way uh from take off to landing. So I think I'm enjoying the trip.

[00:40:56]>> So it's not just a Mars flight. You're also going to be taking a trip around the moon, right? So kind of do that step before heading all the way out to Mars.

[00:41:05]>> Yes. Because even though it it's just a flyby, it's it will try a lot of things and never attempt before.

[00:41:11]>> How do you kind of see these types of missions in kind of the grand scheme of everything?

[00:41:18]>> It uh it will light the fire. It will ignite the imagin imagination and it will build the momentum. uh after we uh come back from Mar you have opportunity uh to take some real photos of food at Marity.

[00:41:41]>> Well Chun, thanks for calling in from you know the other side of the planet.

[00:41:46]Super cool location. Super cool to talk to you and I mean exciting. You're you're going to get on Starship. You're going to go around the moon and then do the first flyby of Mars. It's insanely exciting stuff.

[00:41:58]>> Yeah. Looking forward to that.

[00:42:01]>> Oh man, fireworks indeed. Just incredible to be one of the first humans to become an interplanetary traveler while also joining Starship's first mission to fly past the moon.

[00:42:14]>> Yeah, Chun is certainly a one-of-a-kind explorer. And it's even more exciting to know everyone can join a future Starship mission. Yeah, if what you just heard excites you, challenges you, inspires you, we'd like to hear from you. Come join our team. Be one of the people walking past us out to the lawn to watch the world's best rocket launch. Help shape the literal future of humanity.

[00:42:38]Now, we need the best and the brightest, and we need you right now.

[00:42:43]>> Yeah. And we have tons of openings all across the company where we're looking for talented engineers and technicians at all of our sites, including McGregor, Texas, where we test every single one of these Raptor V3 engines behind us.

[00:42:57]Bassrop, Texas, where we build and assemble Starlink user terminals. Uh we also need help up in Redmond, Washington. That's Starlink's global headquarters, where among other things, we manufacture Starlink satellites. If you like the fall weather, that might be the place for you. Uh, and as you've seen throughout today's show, there is a tremendous amount of activity happening right here at Starbase Texas here and everywhere. It's all part of the incredible opportunity that we have to build the future of humanity.

[00:43:31]>> Yeah. So, if you're interested, visit spacex.comcareers to see these and all of our other openings. Now, I can tell you that the crowd is certainly starting to grow. Uh behind us, you see the launchpad there uh for yourself. Once again, this is the first flight test of Starship version 3.

[00:43:53]Uh this will be the first time that we are debuting this booster, the ship, the launchpad that you see there. And you can see people walking over my shoulder here as our colleagues are moving in masses to go watch this liftoff in uh just over seven and a half minutes from now. It's uh it's pretty exciting stuff.

[00:44:14]>> It's pretty exciting. And as a reminder, we're only a mile and a half away here.

[00:44:18]So, we are very close about as close as you can be. And we're definitely expecting to feel it.

[00:44:24]>> Sorry to interrupt you, Jake. Hi.

[00:44:28]Do we have a mic?

[00:44:32]>> Um, hello. For those of you that might not know, >> you got >> Welcome, Nikki. It's so nice to have you here.

[00:44:40]>> It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:44:41]>> Oh my gosh. Um, what do you think the Barbs are going to say when they see you here at Starbase?

[00:44:46]>> They better say all good things, but they're going to be excited and they're probably going to want to come themselves next time. I mean, anybody can come and watch the launches. It's super accessible to the public, so we welcome that.

[00:45:02]>> Okay, Barbs, come on down because this is a lot of fun. I'm excited. Is it about to happen any minute?

[00:45:09]>> So, you see that number right there in the top left corner. 6 and 12 minutes.

[00:45:15]>> 6 minutes left. Oh my gosh. But this is historic. This is a major moment, y'all.

[00:45:20]It is.

[00:45:20]>> Is this your first rocket launch that you've seen live?

[00:45:23]>> Yes.

[00:45:24]>> Wow.

[00:45:24]>> Wow. How do you feel?

[00:45:26]>> Very, very excited. I'm h like I'm actually I'm happy it's a good day. I thought it might be like >> I just noticed your shirt. You've got the right swag.

[00:45:36]>> I love this shirt.

[00:45:37]>> It's It's a great shirt. I have one as well.

[00:45:39]>> And it's a great name. Starship.

[00:45:42]>> I mean, how did you predict the future?

[00:45:44]Starships are meant to fly.

[00:45:46]>> I do not know. Um but major shout out to Elon. Elon, thank you for everything that you're doing for humanity.

[00:45:55]>> He's the man for sure.

[00:45:57]>> Okay.

[00:45:57]>> Well, thank you so much. I'll see you.

[00:45:59]We got We want to watch the launch with you, so we'll um we'll take this back because this is too loud to take outside.

[00:46:07]>> Wow, what a moment. Um and with that, great timing. We're now at 5 and a half minutes. This brings us into terminal count. Dan, man, the anticipation is certainly growing here in the lobby and out on the lawn. What is it like up there?

[00:46:21]>> Yeah, we we are ready to go. Uh we are getting into the final phase of our propellant loading. We are almost entirely full on ship on our main. Still doing the header tanks and we're looking well in excess of 90% on the booster. So, we are looking good. Uh still not tracking any range, any weather issues today. Not tracking any technical problems on the vehicle on the launch pad. looking good for liftoff in just under 5 minutes. Once we're done with propellant loading on the booster, you have over 11 1/2 million pounds of that liquid methane, liquid oxygen on those two stages. After that, we have to essentially get the pad ready for launch. We'll do something called pushbacks where all of those lines running underground from the propellant farm up to the vehicle. Uh they're going to clear back. They're going to push all that propellant back into kind of the bunker area around the prop farm and just basically get the pad ready. We'll see the vehicles do their final thrust vector control checkouts. So when we snoop in, we should see the engines do kind of final wiggle checks. Uh that's how we steer the rocket. We're going to do those about tminus 100 seconds. So a minute 40. And then once we pass the t-minus 40 second gate, if we do need to hold, that is still built in at tminus 40 seconds. It's built into the countdown. We can pause if we need anything like those push backs to complete. Uh if we need anything on the rocket to get ready, we can hold there.

[00:47:51]We'll only stop if we have an issue. Not currently tracking one. We have one item that might hold us up a little bit just based off of what we've seen in recent static fires. Uh, but that's typically only been hanging out for a couple of extra seconds.

[00:48:11]And then once once we pass t-minus 40 seconds, a lot of things will happen in rapid succession.

[00:48:23]Yeah, that moment is called the QD or quick disconnect vent gate. That's when we clear all the gas commodity lines uh that connect the pad to the vehicles.

[00:48:33]Both the ship and the booster configure their comm systems for flight and are rapidly running leak checks on gas and fluid tanks. The booster goes to internal power and its engines get their final priming for launch while the ship's engines begin their ascent bleed profile and arms the automatic flight safety system.

[00:48:53]>> Yeah. And once we pass t-minus 40 seconds, we still have the ability to rapidly recycle the count under certain conditions back to t-minus 40 seconds and hold there to assess what happened, review the data, and decide if we can proceed again all the way down to t0. We estimate we have around 5 minutes of hold time there.

[00:49:13]The flame diverter on pad 2 activates at around tminus 17 seconds and it enters what is essentially the point of no return at tminus 10 seconds. And there's a chance we could recycle, but the closer we get to t minus 10, the lower that chance becomes.

[00:49:30]>> All right, we are coming up on 2 minutes. We have completed propellant loading on the booster. Just shut down the fuel pump for loading onto the ship.

[00:49:41]So, we're closing all of that out now.

[00:49:44]Two minutes to go. One kind of exciting aspect to V3, we're not going to start the engines up in kind of different sets. All 33 of those Raptors going to turn on all at once and you're going to see the booster move off the pad a whole lot quicker.

[00:50:02]Once again, if you've just joined us, this is the first flight for version three of Starship. the ship, which is the upper part, the the black part there at the top, the booster, which is the part below that, have been completely redesigned, as well as the launchpad that you see it sitting at, as well as the engines that power both the ship and the booster. Today's test flight is a massive step forward in our developmental program.

[00:50:32]>> All right, and we're coming up here on tminus one minute. So, let's go to the pad and let the rocket do the talking as V3 fully comes alive.

[00:50:46]TUS 1 minute All right. So, we did hit the hold at tminus 40. Again, this is something that is built into the timeline. Not surprising as we are doing this this first flight off of pad 2.

[00:51:26]Sounds like we might already be clear.

[00:51:28]We held for a second just to make sure that the quick disconnect vents were basically ready for their final throwbacks.

[00:51:39]So, we'll hang tight for a couple of seconds.

[00:51:42]I think we're about to reset. And the reset is in.

[00:51:47]>> Counting down first flight of Starship V3.

[00:51:51]Psych back to rapid recycle.

[00:51:58]All right. So, hold here for a second.

[00:52:02]Looks like we're still managing some pressures in the ship. Quick disconnect.

[00:52:19]All right. Still going to hang out for a couple of seconds here at Tminus 40.

[00:52:25]Again, not not surprising. This is new vehicle, new pad, doing all these things for the very first time.

[00:52:33]Right now, we are holding looking at some pressures in the quick disconnect and hold reset and we're rolling.

[00:52:46]>> Flight directors, go for launch.

[00:52:52]>> Back to rapid recycle. So, we're going to hold the t-minus 40 again.

[00:53:06]Hang tight for a second. We'll see what trip this last one.

[00:53:13]As a reminder, we can hang out for quite a few minutes at T-minus 40 if we need the extra time.

[00:53:19]You're not actively loading propellant onto the vehicle anymore. So, the main thing you're kind of keeping an eye on is all of the temperatures inside those propellant tanks.

[00:53:59]All right, we're continuing to hang out here at T-minus 40.

[00:54:16]and taking a look right now at our diverter. So that that water diverter underneath the system did trip a hold, but that basically just gives the team a the a chance to look at it, see if it's something that we need to troubleshoot in data or if it's something that we can clear this hold.

[00:54:38]So continuing to hang tight. T-minus 40 seconds. Starship and Super Heavy fully loaded on the pad.

[00:54:47]Clock is rolling.

[00:54:55]Two flight directors. Go for launch.

[00:55:05]And we kick back to rapid recycle again.

[00:55:13]Again, just a reminder, said it before, new pad, new rocket, learning new things about this hardware performing in the flight environment.

[00:55:27]Taking a look at some of the sensors on the arm that manages the quick disconnect to the ship.

[00:55:45]The promise we're not just trying to prolong the anticipation. Teams taking a look.

[00:55:56]We've got a couple more minutes where we can hang out here. Again, it's not an unlimited time to to pause at TUS 40.

[00:56:04]We're keeping an eye on the propellant temperatures inside the vehicles. So, we've got probably about three minutes or so left of hold time.

[00:56:18]Team's taking a look at the hold that tripped on that that arm for the quick disconnect on the tower.

[00:56:37]Continuing to hold. Got a couple minutes to try and clear this issue.

[00:57:31]Still holding tminus 40. Still troubleshooting this issue.

[00:57:38]Probably got about a minute or a minute and a half left of hold time.

[00:58:21]flight control team confirmed. Still working through the issue.

[00:58:28]Still have a short amount of hold time still remaining.

[00:59:06]still holding tminus 40.

[00:59:38]All right, still still continuing to hold here at T minus 40.

[00:59:59]While we do that, the team's looking at again looking at temperatures of the propellant inside those tanks. We kind of check that against simulations that we've run in the past. There's some margin in those. We're still holding. No decision yet.

[01:00:24]Sounding like we have the fix in place.

[01:00:28]Hold reset. Clocks is rolling.

[01:00:42]We're back into rapid recycle.

[01:00:55]All right, we're back at our Tminus 40 hold.

[01:00:59]Standing by to see what tripped us this time.

[01:01:27]All right, it is sounding like we are not going to be able to clear this issue in time today. So, we are going to be standing down from a launch.

[01:01:41]So, if you're if you're just now joining us, we got the vehicle totally loaded.

[01:01:46]We hit a couple of different holds as we work through that count. Again, new rocket, new pad. We're learning about a a lot about these systems as we execute them for the first time, and we're not able to basically troubleshoot all of these issues in those final seconds to get to launch. But that essentially makes this a wet dress rehearsal. We were able to fully load the vehicles and we're going to take the time now, figure out what tripped us up before launch, and then actually get into a flight tomorrow. We do have the ability to essentially rapidly recycle. We are expecting to be able to make another flight attempt tomorrow, but obviously stay tuned to our social media at SpaceX uh and our website spaceex.com for updates. So, no flight today. We will give it another try.

[01:03:11]Yeah. Yeah.

[01:03:15]Hey, hey, hey.

[01:03:39]Heat. Heat.

[01:04:13]Heat. Heat.

[01:05:18]Hey. Hey. Hey.

[01:05:59]Heat.

[01:06:09]Hey, heat. Hey, heat.

[01:06:40]you.

[01:07:00]Heat. Heat.

[01:07:28]Thank you.

[01:07:32]Heat. Heat. N.

[01:07:42]Heat. Heat.

[01:08:04]Heat. Heat.