First Orbital Starship FULL STACKED for Launch, WDR Test TODAY! Can It Become the Biggest Leap?

Well, would you look at that, the largest rocket ever built is coming together. Both booster and ship are now rolled out, and Starship could be just days away from its next major test. Testing is expected within hours, with a launch potentially coming next Monday. So the countdown is officially on. And if everything stays on schedule, we could be watching Starship fly again very soon. But that's only the beginning. We've also got the latest Crew-13 schedule and a bizarre new crater discovered on the moon. Let's get into it, because the road to Flight 14 has already been full of surprises. In our previous update, B-21 had moved to the launch pad and been lifted onto the OLM. A ship rollout schedule had also appeared, but then nothing happened, S-41 stayed inside Megabay 2. And that caught a lot of people, including me, off guard. Because with SpaceX, schedules can change fast. The original plan was to roll S-41 out around noon on the 22nd. SpaceX later pushed the move to late afternoon. Fortunately, there were no further delays. On September 22nd, S-41 finally left Megabay 2 after sitting there for several weeks. It was then rolled directly toward the launch pad, and the journey took several hours, giving us one of the best looks yet at S-41's heat shield. It looked remarkably flight ready. Among those tens of thousands of tiles are also two recovered from S-40. If they fly again, they could become the first hexagonal Starship tiles to return to orbit. Once S-41 reached the pad, the chopsticks opened to receive it. Shortly afterward, ship was lifted onto B-21. And just like that, the Flight 14 stack was complete. We also got a clear look at S-41's six Raptor 3 engines, which had only recently been installed. SpaceX then released its own rollout and stacking update, and the stacking footage was pure Starbase. A giant Starship stack rising against the night sky, looking almost like a launch trailer before the actual launch. Then on September 23rd, SpaceX shared more images of the completed vehicle at sunrise, and this time we got something even more important. The plan for what happens next. SpaceX wrote, Sunrise at Starbase. Opportunistic, full-stack testing is planned ahead of Flight 14's launch, which is on track for Monday, September 28th, pending regulatory approval. So now Flight 14 has two major milestones left, testing and launch. And the first one is already scheduled. The vehicles reached the pad roughly five days before the target launch. That gives SpaceX something it hasn't always had before launch, a little breathing room. If testing uncovers a problem, there's time to troubleshoot it, make repairs, and run another check before launch day. The test schedule calls for roughly 12 hours of testing from 6am to 6pm on September 24th, with the 25th available as a backup. By the time you're watching this, testing may already be underway. Those huge clouds of white vapor around the pad are part of the process as SpaceX conditions the ground systems and propellant lines before loading fuel. The tanks, pipelines, QD system, and engines all have to be checked under realistic launch conditions. The fueling sequence also has to happen quickly, with the full process expected to take roughly 30 to 35 minutes. But the goal isn't simply to do it fast, it's to make sure everything works together reliably. And that's where the early rollout becomes important. SpaceX now has time to find problems before the countdown reaches its final minutes. After all the delays, there's finally a date to aim for, September 28th. Regulatory approval is still required, but SpaceX says the mission remains on track. Musk has also emphasized preparing for launch on Monday. So the stage is set for Flight 14. B-21 and S-41 are stacked, testing is underway, and September 28th is getting closer. But while Starship is preparing for its next flight, NASA is also getting ready to send another crew into orbit. Let's move on to Crew 13. After weeks of uncertainty, NASA has finally set a new launch date for its 13th crew rotation to the ISS. The four-person mission is now targeting October 1st, as NASA announced on September 22nd, with SpaceX also confirming the new date. Crew 13 had been delayed since August 29th when NASA discovered an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of its Dragon spacecraft. That forced NASA to abandon the original September 12th launch date. For several weeks, there was no firm replacement. Now there is. Crew 13 is targeting 11.10 a.m. EDT on the 1st of October from Cape Canaveral Spaceport Station in Florida. A Falcon 9 will carry Dragon into low-Earth orbit, with the crew expected to reach the ISS roughly nine hours later, around 8 p.m. EDT. The four astronauts are NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Josh Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergei Tataryatnikov. Once aboard, they'll spend roughly seven months living and working in orbit. Their mission will include scientific research, station maintenance, and the daily operations needed to keep the ISS running. Crew 13 will also take over from Crew 12, which has been on board the station since February. The two crews are expected to overlap for several days before Crew 12 returns to Earth. That crew includes NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adeno, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrei Fadjiev. And this handover is more important than it might sound. The ISS can't simply hit pause. Crew rotations, cargo deliveries, maintenance, and scientific operations all have to keep moving. That's one reason Dragon has become such an important part of NASA's transportation system. NASA has already ordered three additional Dragon missions to support ISS operations through 2030. So after weeks of uncertainty, Crew 13 finally has a target, October 1st. Now the question is whether everything stays on track and Crew 13 finally gets off the ground. But while NASA is preparing to send another crew into orbit, its spacecraft are also helping uncover something remarkable much closer to home. Because something happened on the moon that scientists almost never get to see this clearly. A brand new crater appeared on the lunar surface. And thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have images from before and after. The crater is called Magechen. It's about 728 feet or 222 meters across and roughly 141 feet or 43 meters deep. That's about two football fields across. And according to NASA, it's the largest newly formed impact crater ever identified in the solar system. The impact happened between April 11th and May 22nd of 2024, when a comet or asteroid fragment slammed into the moon. An impact this large is expected only about once every century. So scientists didn't just find a new crater, they caught an exceptionally rare event in the act of leaving its mark. And the really remarkable part? They know what the site looked like before it happened. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been studying the moon for more than 17 years. That gave researchers a huge archive of older images to compare with newer ones. The crater was first identified in October of 2025, when scientists spotted the change in LRO imagery. They then used the LRO camera to examine the site in much greater detail. And that's when the scale of the impact really became clear. The collision didn't just punch a hole into the moon. It threw material across the surrounding landscape. The LROC revealed a massive ejecta blanket around the crater. An ejecta blanket is the layer of material that gets thrown outward when an impact creates a crater. When an asteroid or meteoroid hits the moon, the impact excavates enormous amounts of lunar soil and rock. Some of that material is blasted outward and lands around the new crater, forming a roughly circular blanket of debris. But in any case, the impact changed even more than what we can see. Data from the LRO's Diviner instrument revealed a much larger thermal anomaly surrounding Magechen. Scientists found a cold region roughly 4 miles or 7 kilometers across. During the lunar night, that area is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit or roughly 8 to 9 kelvins colder than the surrounding surface. So how does one impact make several kilometers of lunar soil colder? It comes down to the dirt, or more accurately, regolith. The impact disturbed and decompacted the upper layers of lunar soil, essentially fluffing them up. That makes the regolith less dense and less able to retain heat. So the crater itself is only part of the story. The impact also changed the physical properties of the surrounding surface. And that's what makes Magechen so valuable. Most lunar craters are ancient. They've been sitting there for millions or even billions of years, gradually modified by later impacts and space weathering. Magechen hasn't had that time. It's fresh. And because LRO was already watching the moon, scientists have something extremely rare. A before and after record of a major lunar impact. As Tyler Powell, lead author of one of the studies explained, Magechen crater is exceptional because it's the largest newly formed impact crater that has been identified to date. A crater of this size is expected to form on the moon only once per century. So we're extremely lucky it formed during the lifetime of the LRO mission and that we are able to observe the region both before and after impact. There is another detail that makes the crater especially useful. Magechen sits near the boundary between the moon's darker basalt-covered maria and its brighter highlands. That means scientists can study how the same impact affected two very different geological environments and eventually we might be able to study the crater from the surface. A future rover or crewed mission could examine Magechen up close. Instead of relying entirely on orbital images, scientists could directly measure the regulus texture, map the ejecta, and study exactly how the impact altered the surface at much smaller scales. Powell put it this way, Observations from the surface would be really valuable because they would allow us to correlate what we see and map from orbit with small-scale changes to surface texture, the distribution of ejected material, and other properties that can only be studied in detail from the surface. And that could become even more important as lunar exploration accelerates. Future landers, rovers, and astronauts won't just be looking at the moon. They'll be landing on it, driving across it, digging into it, and eventually building on it. Understanding how impacts alter lunar soil could help scientists predict how that terrain would behave under real hardware. So Magechen isn't just another crater, it's a natural laboratory that appeared right in front of us. The moon has been recording impacts for billions of years. But this time, we were watching. Speaking of watching, we hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you really did, please don't forget to leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. I'll see you in the next one.