Mission Highlight: Starship Flight 12
EDITOR’S NOTE: SpaceX has officially revealed its target for Starship Flight 12 to NET Tuesday, May 19. This mission was included in this week’s article based on earlier reporting that indicated a May 15 target date. We are retaining the full mission highlight below with the corrected timeline.
SpaceX is targeting Tuesday, May 19, for the 12th flight test of its Starship megarocket — the first for the new V3 configuration and the inaugural launch from the newly completed Pad 2 at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.
V3 is a significant step up from the Block 2 vehicles that flew test flights 9 through 11. According to a SpaceX vehicle summary released in August 2025, the V3 booster carries 400 more tons of propellant than V2 and produces 1,140 more tons of liftoff thrust. The upper stage (which SpaceX refers to as “Ship”) has also grown, carrying 100 more tons of propellant than V2. The result: Payload capacity to orbit jumps from roughly 35 tons on V2 to over 100 tons on V3. A SpaceX representative described V3 as “basically a clean sheet design of the ship” in SpaceX’s “Test Like You Fly” video released April 24, built by taking lessons from V1 and V2 and directly addressing what was “really problematic either from a performance perspective or from a reliability perspective.” The new Raptor 3 engines — 33 on the booster, six on Ship — have been redesigned for simplification with fewer parts, lower cost, and higher reliability.
The road to the pad wasn’t smooth. Booster 18, the first V3 booster ever built, was destroyed during a nitrogen pressure test last November — an anomaly that caused minimal pad damage and no injuries since propellants weren’t loaded. SpaceX built Booster 19 as its replacement, which required two aborted static fire attempts before successfully completing a full 33-engine, full-duration fire on May 7. Ship 39 completed its own static fire on April 14.
Flight 12 will follow a suborbital profile with Ship targeting a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Booster catch is not planned. Key objectives are likely to include validating the Raptor 3 engines, heat shield performance, and overall V3 systems for the first time in flight.
In “Test Like You Fly”, one SpaceX representative called V3 “the foundational design” that “will be the one that puts humans back on the Moon” and “the first bootprints and then city on Mars.” But there’s a long road before that: Orbital flight and in-space refueling — both prerequisites for deep-space missions — remain ahead.
Other missions this week
Tonight, Monday, May 11, SpaceX launches NROL-172 at 10:13 p.m. EST from Vandenberg — another classified NRO reconnaissance satellite joining the agency’s growing proliferated constellation, with the Falcon 9 first stage landing at Landing Zone 4.
On Tuesday, May 12, the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) launches an unannounced payload on a Long March 6A from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center at 7:55 a.m. EST, per NextSpaceflight.
Also on Tuesday, May 12, SpaceX launches the CRS SpX-34 Dragon cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station at 7:16 p.m. EST from Cape Canaveral. Watch live on YouTube.
Tuesday night, May 12, private Chinese aerospace firm Landspace’s methane-fueled ZhuQue-2E rocket lifts off at 11:00 p.m. EST from Jiuquan with an unannounced payload, per NextSpaceflight.
Friday, May 16, CAS Space, a commercial firm operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, targets 12:30 a.m. EST for a Kinetica 1 launch from Jiuquan, also carrying an unannounced payload per NextSpaceflight.
Also on Friday, May 16, SpaceX launches Starlink Group 17-37 at 10:00 a.m. EST from Vandenberg, with the booster landing on Of Course I Still Love You; watch at SpaceX.com.
On Sunday, May 18, SpaceX launches Globalstar 2-R Mission 1 at 8:50 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral, replenishing the low Earth orbit satellite phone and data constellation, with the booster landing on A Shortfall of Gravitas; watch at SpaceX.com.
Also Sunday, May 18, CASC launches an unannounced payload on a Long March 8 from Wenchang at 10:40 a.m. EST, per NextSpaceflight.
Last week’s recap
Last week was quiet, with just two launches. On Monday, May 5, SpaceX launched the Starlink Group 17-29 mission from Vandenberg. The week closed on Sunday, May 10, when China successfully launched Tianzhou-10 — an uncrewed cargo spacecraft — on a Long March 7 from Wenchang. According to state-run news agency, Xinhua, the craft successfully docked about five hours after lift off with China’s Tiangong space station’s core module. The Shenzhou-21 crew onboard will transfer the supplies as scheduled.
Looking ahead
The week of May 18 brings a standout science mission: SMILE (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer), a joint European Space Agency–Chinese Academy of Sciences spacecraft, is targeting May 18 at 11:52 p.m. EST on a Vega-C rocket from French Guiana. SMILE was originally set to launch April 9 before a technical issue in a Vega-C subsystem production line forced a postponement; ESA has since cleared the rocket for flight. The spacecraft will study how Earth’s magnetic field responds to the solar wind, including making the first X-ray observations of Earth’s magnetosphere.
Also next week, Rocket Lab targets May 22 at 5:30 a.m. EST for the Viva La StriX mission from its Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand — the ninth dedicated Electron launch for Japanese Earth-imaging company Synspective, deploying another synthetic aperture radar satellite to the company’s growing observation constellation. SpaceX has two Starlink missions on the schedule as well: Starlink Group 17-42 from Vandenberg on May 18, and Starlink Group 10-31 from Cape Canaveral on May 22.
