SpaceX Starship Flight 12 launch updates: 1st-ever Starship V3 test gets new launch date

SpaceX Starship Flight 12 will now launch on May 20

Hello, Space Fans, and welcome to our coverage of SpaceX’s newest Starship rocket, the Starship V3 booster, which will launch the much-anticipated Flight 12 test flight this week.

We were expecting the launch to occur on Tuesday, May 19, but over the weekend SpaceX updated its plans and pushed the launch back by 24 hours. SpaceX’s Flight 12 Starship V3 launch is now scheduled for no earlier than Wednesday (May 20) from Pad 2 at the company’s Starbase, Texas test site. Liftoff is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT).

It’s been seven long months since SpaceX’s Starship Flight 11 launch last fall. In 2025, SpaceX launched five Starship test flights, but Flight 12 will be the first Starship mission of 2026.

A lot is riding on this flight. NASA needs Starship to work in order to serve as the lander for its Artemis 4 astronauts during a lunar landing mission in 2028. SpaceX is relying on the fully reusable Starship to dramatically lower launch costs for its human spaceflight projects, Starlink internet satellites and plans for orbital data centers.

SpaceX has yet to launch a Starship into orbit or on a mission with an actual payload (though recent flights have carried dummy Starlink satellites).

Flight 12 will do much the same as its predecessors. It will launch a Starship upper stage on a suborbital flight that will make a water-based landing and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. During the flight, the Ship will deploy 20 dummy Starlink satellites, and two modified probes that will use cameras to beam photos of the Ship back to Earth.

The Super Heavy booster, meanwhile, will return to Earth to make a water-based landing and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast from Starbase.

Future Starship launches will likely attempt to return both the Super Heavy and Starship upper stage to the two pads at Starbase, where they will be caught by the giant metal arms of SpaceX’s “Mechazilla” pad structure. Those landings and captures are a core plan of the reusability of the Starship system, and SpaceX has already captured Super Heavy on its Pad 1 several times.

Tariq Malik