The Gamble: Starship Flight 12

Everything was riding on this launch. SpaceX has struggled to achieve success with the first flights of it’s previous versions of Starship, until Flight 12. The first V1 failed to make it to stage separation, and wasn’t successful until the 3rd flight. The first V2 launch met a similar fate, and wasn’t fully successful until the 4th flight. With this inaugural launch of Version 3, SpaceX skipped ahead to success in spectacular fashion.

The launch was a magnificent spectacle, with the highest thrust of any Starship before at 18.1 million pounds of thrust, Version 3 leapt off the pad heading skyward on it’s maiden flight.

Photo: Matthew T.

Now the launch wasn’t perfect, there were several issues during the mission. Booster 19 lost an engine on ascent, failed to perform a full boost back burn, and was lost over the Gulf of America. Ship 39 also encountered an engine loss of a vacuum optimized Raptor, leaving it only five engines to insert itself into the correct trajectory.

But it did make it to it’s designated landing spot in the Indian Ocean, and I believe this showed the resilience and redundant capabilities of the hardware, despite the problems it faced. SpaceX hopes to increase cadence of Starship launches, and it needs too in order to maintain the schedule NASA has for the Artemis program. Starship has become the critical path for the Program, and Version 3s success on Flight 12 was a step in the right direction.

Photo: Matthew T.

Never before has humanity launched something so huge, so powerful. The new Space Age is upon us and Starship is going to enable humanity to reach further into the solar system than ever.