The plan for Starship flight test 12 was pretty simple. Do all the things you did on flight test 11 but with a new ship, new booster, new engines and a new launch pad. The goal is to see how all the new hardware performs under essentially the same conditions as the last test flight. That means no catch of the booster, just a plan for a water landing. The ship is intended to enter orbit, deploy some mock satellites, and then water land in the Indian Ocean.
The biggest change this time around was the use of the all new V3 raptor engine which is more powerful and uses a much more streamlined design that version 2. Here's how Elon Musk described it back in March.
Raptor 3 has almost twice the thrust and much higher reliability than Raptor 1, despite costing about four times less! https://t.co/KfqMafJVKi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2025
The new engines are also lighter by 105 kilograms or 230 pounds. And since there are 33 of them on the booster plus six more on the ship that's about four tons less weight.
The launch was originally scheduled for yesterday and the countdown got down to about 30 seconds several times but kept having to be reset. Finally the launch had to be scrubbed. Today Space X explained the problem had to do with the retractable arm which fuels up the ship. There's a pin that has to be removed so the arm can swing away from the rocket during launch. Yesterday the pin was not retracting cleanly and then there was a related problem with the arm putting pressure on the ship to maintain a seal. So the launch was scrubbed but changes were made last night and today to solve those problems.
Today's launch took place at 5:30 and initially everything looked great. The rocket seemed to come off the launch pad a bit quicker than previous test flights thanks to the new engines. Midway through flight, one of the 33 engines went out. The hot stage separation, in which the ship fires its engines to separate from the booster, also went well.
However, not long after there was a problem. The booster was supposed to do a boost-back burn in order to fly back to a predetermined spot a few miles off shore where it would perform a water landing. But the engines didn't seem to relight or, if they did, they didn't stay lit. So at that point the booster was just falling over the Gulf.
The ship itself continued on into orbit, but it also lost one of six engines. This is something Space X hadn't planned but was prepared for, so the burn lasted a bit longer to compensate.
Once in orbit, the payload deployment appeared to go perfectly. The ship pushed out 22 dummy satellites including two with lights and cameras that are designed to view Starship's heat shield while it's in space.
As I write this the ship is still approaching the landing point. The plan is to relight engines and do a controlled water landing. And the relight is a success! The water landing seems to have worked. At the last moment the ship flopped into the ocean and exploded. I'm not sure but I think that was the extra fuel they were talking about. The landing itself looked good.
So not a perfect test flight but a lot seems to have gone right. Here's the full video.
Watch Starship's twelfth flight test https://t.co/caRB1thMlg
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 22, 2026
Update: It looked like version 3 cleared the tower a lot quicker than the last flight. This video seems to confirm that.
Flight 11 and 12 synced at ignition by @DeffGeff pic.twitter.com/uqxwrQe0qx
— Zack Golden (@CSI_Starbase) May 23, 2026
Update: Not confirmed yet but sure looks like this is what happened to the booster. One engine seems to have exploded during the boost-back.
I think we got to see the consequences of the lack of full blast shielding. Boostback probably would have gone fine minus one engine had this single engine, either E5 or E6, not had an energetic event and took out 16 of its neighboring engines. pic.twitter.com/puLfZBA8jC
— TheSpaceEngineer (@mcrs987) May 23, 2026
Boost back burn in slow motion.
— 𝙎𝙄𝙉𝙏𝙍𝙊𝙋𝙄𝘼 🗽🪐 (@sintropia_acc) May 22, 2026
It looks like an explosion in a central raptor, which disabled the next ones. pic.twitter.com/UZgj42ndYd
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