SpaceX is now targeting no earlier than Tuesday, May 19, for the long awaited debut of the third major iteration of its Starship-Super Heavy rocket. The announcement came the day after it completed an integrated tanking test on Monday.
The mission, dubbed Flight 12, will not only be the first launch of what is collectively referred to as Starship V3, but also the first launch from Pad 2, the updated version of the launch infrastructure supporting both launch and catch capabilities. Starship V3 will also use a new iteration of the Raptor engines, referred to as Raptor 3 engines.
“The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time, with each element of the Starship architecture featuring significant redesigns to enable full and rapid reuse that incorporate learnings from years of development and test,” SpaceX said on its website.
The flight profile of the mission is similar to previous Starship test missions, in that it will be a suborbital flight. However, because of all the new elements at play, SpaceX will not attempt a catch of either the upper stage, called Ship 39, or the first stage, called Booster 19.
SpaceX will have Booster 19 perform a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (referred to as Gulf of America by the U.S. Government) about seven minutes after liftoff. Meanwhile, Ship 39 will aim for its own aquatic landing a little more than an hour into the mission out in the Indian Ocean.
Launch rehearsal complete. During a flight-like countdown, more than 5,000 metric tonnes (11+ million pounds) of propellant were loaded on the fully stacked Starship and Super Heavy V3 vehicles for the first time pic.twitter.com/e9oZlzc0yz
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 11, 2026
Unlike the previous iterations of its Super Heavy booster, this time around, SpaceX is using an integrated hot stage, which exposes the forward dome of the poster’s fuel tank during hot staging. Engineers included a non-structural steel layer that will work in concert with tank pressure to help shield the liquid methane tank from the fire of the upper stage engines.
As it did with Flight 10 and Flight 11 last year, SpaceX also intends to deploy simulator Starlink satellites from the ship upper stage. This time around however, there will be 22 of them onboard – about double from previous flights – with two of them featuring new capabilities.
“The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions,” SpaceX said. “Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test.”
SpaceX will be testing a far more complete version of its heat shield with Flight 12. Unlike previous missions, during which multiple tiles were intentionally removed, this time only one is intended to be missing at liftoff.
“For Starship entry, a single heat shield tile has been intentionally removed to measure the aerodynamic load differences on adjacent tiles when there is a tile missing,” SpaceX said.
Starship’s twelfth flight test will debut the next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles, powered by the next evolution of the Raptor engine and launching from a newly designed pad at Starbase. The launch is targeted as early as Tuesday, May 19 → https://t.co/2gZQUxS6mm pic.twitter.com/JxmpL2WE4w
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 12, 2026
The Raptor engines also underwent notable upgrades since their last flight, offering greater promised performance.
“Raptor 3 engines deliver increased thrust, with sea-level variants now producing 250 tf (551,000 lbf) up from 230 tf (507,000 lbf), while vacuum engines produce 275 tf (606,000 lbf) up from 258 tf (568,000 lbf),” SpaceX said. “Sensors and controllers are now internally integrated and covered by engine thermal protection, eliminating the need for individual engine shrouds on both Starship and Super Heavy. All engine variants will also now feature a redesigned ignition system.
“Mass of the Raptor sea-level engines has been reduced to 1,525 kg from 1,630 kg. Overall vehicle-level mass savings reach approximately 1 ton per engine through simplification of the engine itself, vehicle-side commodities, and supporting hardware.”
The debut of Starship V3 is a long time coming and will be critical for NASA’s plans to return humans to the Moon. This iteration of the rocket will eventually demonstrate propellant transfer capabilities, which will be needed to support flights of the Human Landing System iteration of the rocket.
Both Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mk.2 designed mission architectures that require multiple launches and for fuel to shift from a tanker to their respective landers. A propellant transfer as such has never been done before in space.
“That first prop transfer flight is going to be really important to us for SpaceX and we expect to see that and get some real great data from it,” said Tom Percy, NASA’s HLS Systems Engineering and Integration Manager, based at the Marshall Space Flight Center. He spoke with Spaceflight Now prior to the launch of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission in April.
“I think more importantly for me, just as a long-term vision for space exploration, we know that multi-launch architectures for deep-space exploration are going to have to become a common thing. And so all the things that both providers (both SpaceX and Blue Origin) are doing to manage the development and the understanding of how to coordinate multiple launches to be able to build these bigger exploration systems is going to help us not only for the Moon, but also for Mars and beyond.”
