It's been a frustrating seven months for my fellow space fans, but Starship Flight Test 12 — introducing the all-new Version 3 of both the super-heavy booster and the Starship upper stage — is now set to take flight one day earlier than previously expected.
Liftoff is scheduled for Thursday, May 21, during a 90-minute window opening at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. SpaceX will stream the attempt in glorious 4K from more angles than a 20-sided die on its X timeline. Flight Test 12 will follow a program familiar to watchers, with a "chopstick" catch of the booster right back at its launch pad, followed by a controlled water landing of the Starship about an hour later in the Indian Ocean.
This isn't just another, long-delayed flight test. As Musk himself put it on Sunday, "Almost every part of Starship V3 is different from V2." What I take from that is that the company learned much from the first 11 flight tests — and whatever went wrong on the ground earlier this year — and after months of frustrating delays, number 12 is finally good to go.
Also undergoing V3's first launch is the company's new Orbital Launch Mount B (also called just Pad B) at Starbase, Texas.
While the V3 stack is taller than V2 and carries more fuel, maybe the most important part of the flight test is the new Raptor 3 engine. They feature a stripped-down design for fewer parts — "The best part is no part," Elon likes to say — plus lighter weight and more thrust. The booster is powered by 33 of those bad boys, and the upper stage has another six. Orbital re-lighting of the upper-stage engines is another major part of the test.
Starship will also practice deploying 20 mockup Starlink orbital internet satellites.
There's even more:
Starship Flight 12 goals:
— Dima Zeniuk (@DimaZeniuk) May 17, 2026
• Debut next-generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles
• First launch from Starbase’s newly redesigned launch pad
• Demonstrate upgraded Raptor engines in flight
• Deploy 20 Starlink simulators and 2 modified Starlink satellites
• Test… pic.twitter.com/jxq4uYIYWE
There's so much riding on this one flight. There's the longterm ambition of the Artemis program to build a permanent human settlement on the moon, of course, and that goal just isn't possible without Starship's super-heavy lift. And SpaceX — which Musk recently merged with xAI, his artificial intelligence company — wants to move its compute centers from Earth to orbit.
How grand are Musk's orbital compute ambitions? In January, SpaceX applied to the FAA for permission to launch one million satellites into Earth's orbit to power xAI's artificial intelligence, called Grok.
"One million satellites is a lot," he wrote, totally deadpan.
Nobody has launched more of anything than SpaceX has put Starlink internet satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and they just cracked 10,000 a little while ago. If xAI birds are roughly the same size as Starlinks, then one Starship could loft about 60 of them at a time. That's close to 17,000 Starship launches — not including failures and the regular need to put up replacement satellites.
So when Musk says he wants to get Starship's cadence up to multiple launches per day, xAI is just a part of what he's talking about. Or as SpaceX put it earlier this year, xAI in space would be the first step towards "becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization — one that can harness the Sun's full power."
"That's big," he wrote, still totally deadpan.
Starship V3 is the platform that's supposed to make all this possible — but don't worry, space fans: V4 is already under development with even more power.
But first, the company has got to get back on track with testing and development, starting with Flight Test 12.
Godspeed.
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