First Starship Flight 12 Launch Attempt SCRUBBED. New Massive Upgrade revealed...

T-minus one minute. All right, so we did hit the hold at T-minus 40. Again, this is something that is built into the timeline. Not surprising as we are doing this this first flight off of pad two. Sounds like we might already be clear. We held for a second just to make sure that the quick disconnect vents were basically ready for their final throwbacks. I think we're about to reset and the reset is in. Counting down the first flight of Starship V-3. Psyche back to rapid recycle. All right, so hold here for a second. Looks like we're still managing some pressures in the ship quick disconnect. Right now we are holding, looking at some pressures in the quick disconnect and hold reset and we're rolling. Flight directors go for launch. Back to rapid recycle. So we're going to hold at T-minus 40 again. Hang tight for a second. We'll see what tripped this last one. A reminder, we can hang out for quite a few minutes at T-minus 40 if we need the extra time. 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. All right, we're continuing to hang out here at T-minus 40. Just taking a look right now at our diverter so that water diverter underneath the system did trip a hold but that basically just gives the team the 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. So continuing to hang tight T-minus 40 seconds. Starship and Super Heavy fully loaded on the pad. Clock is rolling. Flight directors go for launch. We kick back to rapid recycle again. Again, just a reminder, set up a forward new pad, new rocket, learning new things about this hardware performing in the flight environment. Taking a look at some of the sensors on the arm that manages the quick disconnect to the ship. The promise we're not just trying to prolong the anticipation. Team's taking a look. We've got a couple more minutes where we can hang out here. Again, it's not an unlimited time to pause at T-minus 40. 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. Team's taking a look at the hold that tripped on that arm for the quick disconnect on the tower. All right, still continuing to hold here at T-minus 40. 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 on those. We're still holding no decision yet. Sounding like we have the fix in place. Hold reset. Clocks is rolling. We're back into rapid recycle. All right, we're back at our T-minus 40 hold. Standing by to see what tripped us this time. 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. So if you're just now joining us, we got the vehicle totally loaded. We hit a couple of different holds as we worked through that count. Again, new rocket, new pad. We're learning about 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 to 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 on X and our website spacex.com for updates. So no flight today. We will give it another try tomorrow. And today we're coming to you live from just outside the production floor at Star Factory, where the team's preparing for Starship's 12th test flight. 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 launch pad, new avionics, new software, and so much more. 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 combine to generate 18 million pounds of thrust. You can see them all there. 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 RVACs. 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 multi-planetary and extending the light of consciousness to the stars. We've made extensive upgrades across every single system. Start with the big picture, because Starship is still very, very big. Just over 407 feet tall, fully stacked, a little bit taller than Version 2. With that extra stretch, we can carry even more propellant, 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 3 on the left there, Version 2 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. 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 non-structural layer of steel, it's what's protecting the top of that 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 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. 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. 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. 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. Just below that, just below the payload bay 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 in 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 a lot of upgrades tip to tail on the rocket, but powering everything, the Raptor 3. There they are ripping in real time. These engines manufactured in Hawthorne, 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-force 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 2, 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. 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. Static fire vehicle is in pre-pad clear, about to get to our static fire pad, clear to upstate. 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're in a reasonable position to go fly. Start up. Throttle up. The journey of SpaceX is a journey to give humans access to the solar system and beyond, which is really the goal for Starship. Plus 20. The impact that this rocket is going to have on the world, I don't think most people can really comprehend the change that's going to happen. 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. Plus 40. It is not impossible just because it's far beyond what has been done before. We've proved that time and time again. Plus 50. 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 stretched that V2 Mini satellite propellant tank so that it sticks out from both ends of the satellite. You can see it right there. It is just missing some mustard onions. 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 TerraFab 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 gigawatts to one terawatt of AI computing power annually. And from there, we're looking at connectivity beyond our planet, too. 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 constellation of satellites designed to connect to user terminals on the lunar surface, we could relay data back to our Starlink constellation in Earth orbit. So traditionally, deep space comms have relied on radio frequency transmission. 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 terabits of capacity. 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 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. There are tens of thousands of known space debris in low Earth orbit right now. All of that debris comes from man-made activities. 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. 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. Starlink satellites make something like a thousand collision avoidance maneuvers on a daily basis. 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. 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 approach to further reduce risk. On Starlink, I'm also excited to talk about a program we call Star Gaze. Cameras on the satellites looking up into space, measuring the star field. You can imagine 10,000 satellites staring up into space and detecting all the objects in low-Earth orbit. You effectively almost have a real-time view of what's happening in the low-Earth orbit environment. So we began detecting objects and fitting orbits to those objects, and currently we're tracking about 50% of the objects with perigees below 600 kilometers. 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. This is extremely concerning because this type of incident could have resulted in a collision. 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. 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 published all our data, we put all our ephemeris data out, we show where our satellites are, we show where we're maneuvering, and I think we're now showing the industry that there is no competitive advantage by not sharing your data. We're demonstrating to the outside world what good practices are. We as an industry have a tremendous obligation at this time, in this formative state, to actually communicate with each other, share best practices, and be good stewards amongst each other. It'll make us better as an industry. It'll give us an industry of the future that will continue to grow, continue to innovate, and help every company to grow and generate revenue. To maintain safety in low-earth orbit, 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. Space is big, but operators are not always predictable. We want to enable other missions, Moon and Mars and interplanetary exploration. So ensuring that activities like that can persist for the duration of humanity is incredibly important. Fundamentally, I think the message to operators is to be transparent about what you're doing in space, 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. 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. 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. Yeah, we'll start with liftoff where Super Heavy ignites 33 brand new Raptor 3 engines. We power through ascent ahead of hot stage separation. Booster shuts down all but five sustainer engines. Stage 2 lights its Raptor engines while still attached to Super Heavy. 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. Yeah, ship does a bunch of fun things like deploying 20 Starlink simulator satellites, two of them dodger dogs as we affectionately call them, single engine Raptor relight, and then re-entry, 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. 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. We're joining them out in the Indian Ocean. We've got Sorensen and I standing by, taking a moment from the recovery ops. He might be frozen. Let me know if you can hear me, Soren. How's everything looking out there in the ocean? Dan, I can hear you loud and clear. We're sitting in about eight foot waves, but it's looking like a clear day, ready for a ship to come on through. 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? I've done, I've done six and now seven, seven of these missions. And like, with every mission, we've seen it evolve. And 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. They've got the drones that are going to be going up. So we're going to be cutting back to them live once they get... They've been doing some practice stuff. We've been able to shoot some of this. There you can see Saran getting those buoy boats. So they're basically out there. They're deploying these boats in the splashdown zone. If you get a live view from one of these boats, that tells you that we're pretty much nailing our target on that. And then surrounding 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 super critical for us to see just how that heat shield performed after re-entry. And just having them out there remote just in the middle of nowhere plays just a really critical role in just rapid iteration on Starship and its heat shield. So looking forward to hopefully seeing some views from them a little bit later. But for now, let's head back down to Kate and Jake for the latest progress at Cape Canaveral in Florida. 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. Yeah, and we're also building a Starship launch pad 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. Absolutely crazy. So many. So SpaceX's future in Florida is quickly taping shape with our very first launches on the horizon. Yes, a horizon that aims for regular trips to the Moon. Now, staying with the lunar conversation, we're going to head back up to Dan, who has Starship Vice President of Engineering Bill Riley, our favorite webcast visitor, to talk about the Moon. 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, correct? That's right. So V3 is exciting because 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 PES door that you'll notice on the as-built ship. And then as we look out past V3, there's other configurations of Starship. There is a tanker that takes the propellant to dock with the lander that will land on the Moon. And think of the on-orbit propellant transfer as sort of like the gas station in the sky. And then that gas station will be 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, right? 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 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. 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 Moon base. Yeah, I'm ready for the Moon base. I need to go to the Moon. That's definitely, in my mind, it sounds like a hell of a week-long vacation or one heck of a trip. But, and I mean, this is like, this is the next step on making life multi-planetary, right? Absolutely. It's literally the next planetary body we need to get to. 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.