Something Big happening with Starship S39 just Delayed Starship Flight 12. No Launch This Month...

Something Big happening with Starship S39 just Delayed Starship Flight 12. No Launch This Month...
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#alphatech
#techalpha
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0:00 intro
0:30 Starbase New Updates
6:19Artemis 2 & Flight 12
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Lewis Knaggs: https://www.youtube.com/@LewisKnaggshttps://twitter.com/lewisknaggs42
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Evan Karen: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDN1X8Fz1oAXX-rBcOWjzmg
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Something Big happening with Starship S39 just Delayed Starship Flight 12. No Launch This Month...
SpaceX will not be launching Starship Flight 12 this month! And the reason isn’t because Ship 39 or Booster 19 ran into trouble. In fact, both vehicles are making better progress than ever right now.
So what’s the real reason behind this delay?
Let’s break it all down in today’s episode of Alpha Tech.
SpaceX has just had a really great week at Starbase, a week where they hit several key milestones in preparation for Starship Flight 12. First, on the 10th, SpaceX successfully installed all 20 booster hold-down clamp arm hoods. Just a few days earlier, they also finished installing a new actuator for the chopsticks on Pad 2. And most recently, the scaffolding around Ship 39 was removed, a clear sign that updates to the vehicle are now complete. Ship 39 is expected to roll out to Massey’s Site soon for cryogenic testing, where it’ll undergo cold-pressure checks.
Something Big happening with Starship S39 just Delayed Starship Flight 12. No Launch This Month...
But here’s the twist. Despite all of this sounding like great news, real progress that feels like a late-month launch is right around the corner, that’s actually not the case. So why not? To understand that, we need to connect the dots and walk through what’s really been happening.
Let’s talk about Ship 39.
Once the scaffolding was removed, we finally got a clear look at what SpaceX has been doing to this vehicle. And it turns out, a lot of the work focused on the heat shield system. More specifically, SpaceX spent several days painting strange white, three-dot markings onto the ceramic tiles.
These markings line up precisely with the tile mounting plates or attachment pins. Many people believe these dots are reference marks, possibly to guide drilling, or to inspect how well the pins hold up under extreme heat. The goal may be to test how securely the tiles stay attached when exposed to plasma during atmospheric reentry, without removing large sections of tiles like on previous flights. The same kind of markings were also spotted on Ship 40’s nosecone.
Something Big happening with Starship S39 just Delayed Starship Flight 12. No Launch This Month...
But here’s where it gets interesting. On Ship 39’s nosecone, there are vertical lines running down the center, almost like separation markers. On the left side, each heat shield tile has three white dots, while on the right side, each tile has just one dot, placed near the upper edge of the ceramic tile. What’s even stranger is that many of these marked spots don’t appear to have been drilled at all. And since the scaffolding has already been removed, it’s unlikely that more drilling will happen.
So what do you think these white markings on the heat shield are really for? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
And here’s the key takeaway: This marking process alone took nine full days inside Megabay 2, starting from when scaffolding first went up around Ship 39 on the 2nd. That timeline goes well beyond what we originally expected, and it’s a major reason why a Flight 12 launch this month is now looking increasingly unlikely.
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Subcribe Alpha Tech: https://www.youtube.com/@alphatech4966/?sub_confirmation=1
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