SpaceX Reveals HUGE Clue! When Is Flight 12? — Transcript

Three Starships are now being built simultaneously inside Mega Bay 2. While booster 19 sits in Mega Bay 1, going through the final pre-flight checks for flight 12, the production line around it isn’t slowing down for a moment. Ship 39 is ready. Ship 40 is about to roll and ship 41 just started stacking. Today, we look at how close all of this really is. And there is still one big question hanging over Flight 12 that nobody has answered yet. My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It? Let’s dive right in. Starship updates. Let’s start at the launch site because there’s been a lot of quiet but important activity at Pad 2 this week. On Saturday, the tower event started indicating that teams were preparing to test the ship side of the tank farm all the way up to the ship quick disconnect arm. About an hour later, the lines on the SQD arm were visibly frosty, which means super chilled cryogenic propellant was running through the fuel lines.

[00:01:00] SpaceX was checking the entire flow path from the tank farm to the pad to the tower, looking for leaks, looking for anomalies, validating that everything works exactly the way it needs to before flight 12. This kind of testing matters because every single line, every single valve, every single connection between the tank farm and the vehicle has to be 100% leak checked before flight. The number of issues you can catch on the ground without a vehicle stacked is enormous. And this almost certainly isn’t the last test of this kind we’ll see before flight 12. Once ship 39 and booster 19 are stacked at the pad, the next big moment is the launch attempt itself. And here’s something worth knowing about how SpaceX operates. They don’t always do a separate wet dress rehearsal before a launch. The reason is simple. Every launch attempt is functionally a wet dress rehearsal anyway. You stack the vehicle, you fill it with propellant, you run the entire countdown sequence. If everything works,

[00:02:00] you light the engines and fly. If something doesn’t, you stand down, fix the issue, and try again. There is no real efficiency gain from doing a separate rehearsal first when the actual launch attempt validates the same systems. Compare that to NASA who absolutely does wet dress rehearsals on SLS before flying to the moon. And the reason is simple. The cost of a delay on an Aremis flight is enormous. Crew schedules, mission timing, lunar trajectory windows, all of it depends on launching when you said you would launch. SpaceX is doing test flights right now. If flight 12 slips by a week, no one cares. If Artemis slips by a week, that is a real problem. Different missions, different approaches. So whether SpaceX schedules a dedicated wet dress rehearsal for flight 12 or just goes for it on launch day, the testing they are doing right now at pad 2 with the SQD arm and the tank farm is what gets them ready for their pass. One small but interesting detail, a wonky vaporizer at the launch site was

[00:03:00] replaced on April 28th. The vaporizers at the tank farm convert liquid propellant to gas for pressurization purposes. If one of them was acting up, swapping it out before flight 12 is exactly the kind of thing you do when you’re cleaning up every detail before a major test. Over at the production site, something genuinely remarkable is happening. Last week, the PEZ dispenser for ship 41 rolled out of Star Factory into Mega Bay 2, and then ship 41’s nose cone and payload section followed it in. Stacking has officially begun on the ship for flight 14. And here’s the picture that creates inside Mega Bay 2. Ship 39 is inside, ready for flight 12. Ship 40 is inside, fully stacked with GPS tile work done, ready to roll out for cryo testing. And now, ship 41 is inside in active stacking. Three Starships, three different stages of readiness, one production bay. For years, SpaceX has been iterating on ship designs and losing vehicles. Now they

[00:04:00] are running a production line at a pace where three ships are simultaneously in different stages of flight readiness. That is not a test program. That’s an operational program emerging in real time. Flight 12 is next, of course, but behind it, flight 13 hardware is already moving fast. Let’s talk about that. Booster 20, the first stage assigned to flight 13 now has all its barrel sections inside me 1. The hot stage ring, which is the forward section and the F3 section, have both been rolled out to the bay. SpaceX can now stack the vehicle and start preparing it for its own cryo testing campaign at Massy’s. Ship 40 is even closer. It’s been sitting in Mega Bay 2 for a while now. The dog is looking at me. Ship 40 is even closer. It’s been sitting in Mega Bay 2 for a while now, fully stacked with TPS work done. and a wrote delay was announced from masses to production from late Wednesday night, April 29th into the early hours of April

[00:05:00] 30th. Rolling the ship cryostand over to production is direct preparation for a ship roll out. Give it a few more days and ship 40 will be testing at Masses. That means flight 12 and 13 will likely be much closer together than people are assuming. Not months apart, possibly closer to weeks apart once flight 12 actually flies. There hasn’t been a lot to talk about at Messi since ship 39 left, but the can crusher has been busy. Booster 18.3, the booster forward test article, conducted two tests this past week with a ship aft mockup on top. The reason this is happening now rather than months ago is that booster 18.3 had its own anomaly back in February. The common dome partially collapsed during testing, which knocked the test article out of the campaign. SpaceX repaired the tank and now they are finally getting to test the block 3 hot stage ring design that was originally meant to be validated on this hardware. Test articles like booster 18.3 do work that flight

[00:06:01] vehicles can’t. You can push them harder, fail them on purpose and get data you’d never gather from hardware you intend to fly. Every test on 18.3 is a test SpaceX doesn’t have to run on booster 19 or even 20. SpaceX has filed a new FCC special temporary authorization for flight 13. The two ground stations are both at Bokhica operating at 256 MHz and2 at 1 kilowatt of effective radiated power. The authorization is effective from May 29th through November 30th this year or until flight 13 concludes, whichever comes first. Now, that May 29th effective date is interesting. It doesn’t mean flight 13 launches on May 29th. SpaceX files these authorizations with conservative timelines, so the paperwork is in place well before they actually need it. But it does tell you SpaceX is planning for the possibility that flight 13 happens within that window, which lines up exactly with what

[00:07:02] I said about flight 12 and 13 being closer together than people expect. And here’s a quick story from the Baltimore Business Journal this week. SpaceX has reportedly purchased 1121 Independence Way, part of Westminster Technology Park in Maryland. You don’t know that place. Plans are to use the facility for Starship rocket parts manufacturing. This is a small story today, but it is an interesting one. And I don’t think the main reason here is what you might first assume. The obvious read would be supply chain distribution, multiple sites, distributed risk, the way mature aerospace manufacturers operate, and that might be part of it eventually. But my read is that the bigger reason is talent. Starbase is in a very remote part of South Texas, close to the Mexican border. It is not a particularly attractive place to live for everyone, and that limits who SpaceX can hire. Putting a parts manufacturing facility in Maryland gives them a foothold on the

[00:08:00] east coast where there is a much larger pool of aerospace engineers and technicians who are not willing to relocate to the Rio Grand Valley. If you want to scale up Starship production, at some point you have to go where the people are. There is another company that does a lot for the people. Let me tell you something. Remember this. In 1962, President Kennedy famously announced that >> we choose to go to the moon. NASA looked at their options and then they picked the rocket scientists for this job, not the accountants. Because when the stakes are that high, expertise isn’t optional. Think about it. You wouldn’t put a geologist in charge of a rocket launch, and you wouldn’t ask the pool boy to fly the capsule. Just like there’s a reason why Morgan and Morgan is America’s largest injury law firm. In highstakes situations, the wrong expert doesn’t just underperform, they can cost you everything. The same logic applies when you’re injured. Not all law firms are the same. Hire the wrong one and you may be beat before you even start. They have

[00:09:00] a proven track record of fighting for the people for over 35 years. That is why if you’re ever injured, you can see if you have a case by checking out Morgan and Morgan, America’s largest injury law firm with over 1,000 attorneys and more than $30 billion won for their clients. Their fee, it is free unless they win. For more information, you can go to forthepeople.com/whataboutit. Go to the link support whataboutit. Check it out today. All right, back to Starship now to the question I keep coming back to. In the documentary SpaceX released last week, we learned something that’s been on my mind ever since. The first static fire on booster 19 was a 10 engine attempt, and it aborted because of a ground support equipment issue. SpaceX disclosed that about half of those 10 engines took mechanical damage from the very fast shutdown. Engines were swapped from booster 20 to keep the program moving. The second static fire was a full 33 engine firing and at the time we

[00:10:01] celebrated it on the show as a success. But the documentary revealed something we didn’t know. The 33 engine static fire actually aborted at T + 1.88 88 seconds due to a sensor issue on the diverter ramp. SpaceX only shared that detail later in that documentary itself. So here’s the question. If a fast shutdown on 10 engines damaged five of them, what happens during a fast shutdown on 33 engines at T + 1.88 seconds? The documentary doesn’t tell us. We don’t know whether any engines on booster 19 took stress damage from that 1.88 second shutdown. If they did, SpaceX has to make a decision. Do they fly with what they have, or do they swap engines and run another static fire to confirm the new configuration? The documentary’s final card said, “Next up, flight 12, which implies SpaceX believes another static fire isn’t needed.” That is a strong implication, not a confirmation. What we’ll be watching for

[00:11:01] over the coming days are two specific signs. First, any roll out of booster 19 back to pad 2. That movement by itself tells you SpaceX is satisfied with the inspections in Mega Bay 1 and is preparing for what comes next. Second, road and beach closure filings. If new closures appear with spaceflight activities listed as the reason, we are looking at another major test or possibly the launch attempt itself. Either way, flight 12 is close, possibly very close, and the next two weeks are going to be a fascinating watch. Ah, welcome to the middle of the video. You made it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for watching and liking the video. If you’re among the 40% who haven’t subscribed yet, and there was at least one video you learned something new from, it would mean the world to me if you did. All right, I got to I got to record an episode. It is free and it genuinely helps more people find my channel to spread the word about spaceflight. Want to make my world even easier? There is only one place you’d

[00:12:00] rather be. The Y members club on Patreon and right here on YouTube. Click the card or the join button right here under the video. You are the reason we keep doing this. Thank you so much. You rock. Flight 12 is coming up. Ever thought of going to watch one live? Why just watch the launch when you can feel it? We are working together with the family oriented Raptor Roost and they have the closest public viewing of any rocket launch in the world. Boating and fishing from full range campsites on the scenic Rio Grand included. Call 956-561-5617 to get more info. See you there. On the morning of April 19th, 2026, Blue Origin had the best day the company has ever had. And then about 70 minutes later, it became one of the worst. Both of those things were true on the same flight, on the same rocket with the same team watching in the same control room. To understand why that matters, not just for Blue Origin, but for NASA, for Amazon, for the moon, and for the entire

[00:13:00] near future of American spaceflight, we have to talk about what actually happened up there. Because the part everyone cheered and the part everyone is now trying to explain are two different stories. And only one of them is going to define the next 12 months. When NG3, the third New Glenn mission, lifted off from Cape Canaveral, spirits were high. It climbed cleanly through the atmosphere. And about three minutes later, the first stage separated. Yes. Nine minutes after liftoff, it came down and landed on the drone ship Jaclyn floating in the ocean. A reusable booster flying a real mission and returning home in one piece. Jeff Bezos posted the landing video. Dave Limp, the CEO, was celebrating. It was by any reasonable measure a milestone. But then the upper stage tried to do its job. The first stage of a rocket is the one that delivers all the brute force to overcome gravity. The upper stage, on the other hand, has to do something very precise. It has to take your payload, your

[00:14:01] expensive satellite, and deliver it to exactly the right orbit. Exactly. Not close to the right orbit, the right orbit. And to do that, it has to fire its engines. Coast in space, fire them again, sometimes a third time with the kind of accuracy that doesn’t leave a lot of room for mistakes. New Glenn’s upper stage uses two engines called BE3U. They burn hydrogen and oxygen, which sounds simple until you realize that liquid hydrogen is the coldest, smallest, most difficult fuel in the entire rocket playbook. Only very few rockets have ever successfully used hydrogen in their upper stages because hydrogen punishes anything less than perfect engineering. A Falcon 9 upper stage is like a reliable family sedan with one engine, one fuel, hundreds of flights, boring in the best possible way. New Glenn’s upper stage is something completely different. A twin engine hydrogen sports car. More powerful, more capable, and much harder

[00:15:00] to tune. And on this flight, one of those two engines didn’t do its job. About an hour after launch, the upper stage was supposed to fire a second time for 68 seconds to push the Bluebird 7 satellite into its final circular orbit around 460 kilometers up. Instead, according to Dave Limp’s own statement, the next morning, one of the two BE3U engines did not produce enough thrust. The satellite separated anyway because that’s what the sequence was programmed to do. But instead of arriving at a nice clean 460x 460 kilometer orbit, it ended up in something closer to 154x 494 kilometers and weirdly at the wrong inclination. That is a bigger problem than a single weak engine can easily explain. And it’s one of the open questions the investigation still has to answer. Bluebird 7 by Space Mobile was doomed. Its perigee, the lowest point of its orbit, was too low to survive. The

[00:16:00] satellite powered on. It phoned home, but its little onboard thrusters could not possibly raise it out of that atmosphere in time. The next day, April 20th, Bluebird 7 burned up on re-entry, and it had very real onworld implications. A’s stock dropped. Roughly $2 billion of market value evaporated overnight. Future New Glenn customers will now also face increased insurance costs for their payloads. The FAA formally classified the flight a mishap, which is the regulator’s polite word for something went seriously wrong. It led to New Glenn being grounded until Blue Origin under FAA oversight figures out what it was and proves it won’t happen again. And now here is where it stops being a Blue Origin problem and starts being everyone’s problem. Blue Origin isn’t just building rockets. They are building lunar landers as well. Blue Moon Mark1 is the robotic cargo lander that has just left the thermmo vacuum chamber at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

[00:17:00] It was supposed to fly later this year on New Glenn to Shackleton Crater near the Luna South Pole. That schedule is now in serious doubt, a muchneeded Pathfinder mission. And Mark 1 is the easy one. It can fly to the lunar surface on a single New Glenn rocket. But the humanrated Mark 2 lander has a design choice that’s about to become very painful. Mark 2 doesn’t fly to the moon on a single rocket. It requires New Glenn to launch a space tug, then a tanker, and then multiple New Glenn flights. These are necessary to top up the propellant before a crew can ever leave for the moon. For a single moon mission, all these New Glenn launches have to work perfectly in a rapid sequence. Blue Origin has launched New Glenn three times ever. One didn’t reach orbit. One just failed. You can see the problem. NASA had already flagged Blue Moon Mark II as running at least months behind schedule. NG3’s mishap makes it a lot worse. And meanwhile, to make it even worse, NASA is accelerating its lunar endeavors. In March of this year,

[00:18:01] at an event called Ignition, the agency laid out a plan that fundamentally rewired the Aremis program. Aremis 3 was added. This is a crude demonstration in Earth orbit planned for 2027, ideally with both SpaceX’s Starship HLS and a Blue Origin crew vehicle. The first actual crude landing of the Aremis era slides to Aremis 4 in 2028. And whoever is ready first, SpaceX or Blue Origin gets the ride. But every week, Blue Origin spends grounded, the odds tilt towards SpaceX. And then there’s Amazon wanting to compete with Starlink. Their satellite constellation, now rebranded Amazon LEO, needs to have over 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 30th of this year by order of the FCC. Today, they have about 240. Amazon’s own paperwork projects they’ll have maybe 700 by the deadline. They have contracts for five launch vehicles to fix this. This sounds

[00:19:02] like a good strategy to keep relative independence, but things are not looking that good when you check the details. Atlas 5 is retiring. Vulcan has been grounded since February with its own problems. Aryan 6 just started flying. New Glenn is now grounded as well. That leaves one rocket flying routinely at the cadence Amazon needs and it belongs to SpaceX. Jeff Bezos is now effectively paying Elon Musk to launch Amazon’s Starling competitor. while Bezos’s own rocket sits on the ground. You couldn’t write this in a script and expect anyone to believe you. So, how long is New Glenn grounded? Nobody knows yet. Blue Origin’s last investigation after the NG1 booster loss took about 2 and a half months. SpaceX has closed some Falcon 9 investigations in as little as 2 weeks. ULA is still working on Vulcan months later. A realistic estimate puts the next new Glenn flight in late summer or fall of this year. If the BECU problem

[00:20:01] turns out to be something deeper than a single bad engine, like a design or manufacturing issue, it could stretch well beyond that. So, is this fatal for Blue Origin? No. Falcon 9 failed on its 19th flight in 2015, and SpaceX is fine now. Rockets fail, programs recover, but the timing of this particular failure could not be worse. Vulcan is grounded, Artemis is being rewritten, Amazon is missing its deadline. Blue Moon is already behind and every single one of those stories gets a little bit darker the longer New Glenn stays on the ground. The booster came home. The payload didn’t. That is the 2026 Blue Origin story compressed into a single sentence. And the next chapter doesn’t start until Blue and the FAA figure out why. Let’s move on to a much bigger and stronger rocket that just got a new assignment. Falcon Heavy. It’s set to deliver a Mars rover that was conceived before the iPhone existed. No joke. This story is truly crazy. Why? Because this

[00:21:01] is already the third launch vehicle that’s supposed to fly issa’s ExoMars Rosalin Franklin rover. The rover was proposed in 2001. I I was 21 years old at that time. A launch date was planned for 2018. I hadn’t moved to the United States yet. then 2020, then 2022, and now for 2028. The original plan was to ride with NASA, possibly on an Atlas 5, but NASA backed out in 2012. The new option, ride on a Russian Proton rocket. That arrangement died in March 2022 when Europe severed space cooperation with Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine. At this point, a new landing platform had to be built from scratch because the old one was Russian, too. Oh, and a new rocket had to be found as well. Now it looks like the solution is finally here. Airbus is now building the lander. Falcon Heavy will be the ride. If everything holds, Roselyn Franklin arrives at Mars around 2030, roughly two

[00:22:00] decades late. But then why bother with such an old design? This rover is on the smaller side. At just 310 kg, it’s roughly a third of Perseverance’s mass. But it does something no machine has ever done on Mars. It drills deep, 2 m into the surface, deeper than Curiosity, Perseverance, or any predecessor combined. That matters enormously. The top layer of Martian soil is sterile by cosmic radiation. If microbial life ever existed there, the evidence isn’t on the surface. It is underground. Roselin Franklin is the first mission designed specifically to go get it. This rover could become that tool that enables humanity finally getting to look under the surface of Mars. The deal itself is quietly historic. NASA is paying SpaceX $175.7 million to launch a flagship European science mission from launch complex 39A. The same pad that sent Apollo 11 to the moon. It’s also the first time SpaceX

[00:23:00] will launch anything to Mars, which given Elon Musk’s stated life goal is a noteworthy fact. And that’s it for today. Smash the like button, subscribe for more. This is what fuels the algorithm, and this is how you can help us for free. Check out our epic shirts in your favorite space nerd store, our brand new Raptor emblem design, and countless others are there for you to explore. Click the card or the US or worldwide link in the description. And if you want to know how SpaceX is planning to build a self- sustained moon base in the next 10 years, watch this video next to continue your journey. Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you again in the next