Starship Flight 12 targets mid‑May, will fly a revised trajectory
- SpaceX is targeting Starship Flight 12 for May 12 at 5:30 p.m. Central, using Booster 19 and Ship 39 from Starbase’s new Orbital Launch Pad 2. (nasaspaceflight.com) - The big change is the route: Starship now heads south between Jamaica and Cuba, avoiding busier airline corridors near Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. (nasaspaceflight.com) - That matters because Flight 12 ends a 211-day gap, while Florida’s broader launch tempo keeps rising and NASA already has Crew-13 lined up for mid-September. (nasaspaceflight.com)
Starship is back on the schedule — at least on paper. SpaceX is now targeting May 12, 2026, for Flight 12, the next integrated test of Starship and Super (nasaspaceflight.com)uiet for 211 days, bring in the upgraded Version 3 hardware, and do it on a route that reduces risk if something goes wrong. (nasaspaceflight.com)nching? Flight 12 is set to use Booster 19 and Ship 39, the first orbital test pairing of the upgraded Version 3 Starship system, launching from Orbital Launch P(nasaspaceflight.com)ies running through May 18. (nasaspaceflight.com) ### Why is this flight a bigger deal than a normal test? Because the gap has gotten long. If Flight 12 goes on May 12, it will come 211 days after Flight 11 — basically matching the longest pause SpaceX has had between early Starship flights. That matters beca(nasaspaceflight.com)s the opposite of that. (nasaspaceflight.com) ### What changed about the trajectory? The flight path moved south. Earlier Starship tests tracked just north of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Leeward Islands. The new corridor th(nasaspaceflight.com)o steer the risk envelope away from denser air traffic and more populated areas if the vehicle fails in ascent. (nasaspaceflight.com) ### Why does that matter so much? Because Starship is still a test vehicle, not a routine launcher. Recent failures showed that a bad breakup can scatter debris over a wide(nasaspaceflight.com)r major airline lanes linked to Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. It is a practical change, not a cosmetic one. (nasaspaceflight.com) ### Is this still an orbital mission? Not really in the full stay-in-orbit sense. The profile remains suborbital, with splashdown planned in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is still using these flights(nasaspaceflight.com)tack is. A booster catch is not planned for this mission. (nasaspaceflight.com) ### So where does Florida fit into this? Florida is showing the other half of the story — cadence. Cape Canaveral just set a monthly record in April by hosting five different kinds of orbital rockets in the same month, b(nasaspaceflight.com) 9, and Falcon Heavy activity. So while Starship has been paused in Texas, the broader U.S. launch machine has been getting faster. (witness.usatoday.com) ### And what about Crew-13? NASA also u(nasaspaceflight.com)kins will command, Luke Delaney will pilot, and Joshua Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov will serve as mission specialists. It is a reminder that SpaceX now runs two very different space businesses at once — one mature enough to rotate station crews, one still very much in crash-test mode. (nasa.gov) ### Bottom line Flight 12 matters less because of(witness.usatoday.com)f it slips again, the real story becomes how hard that rhythm is to recover. (nasaspaceflight.com)
