SpaceX finished the wet dress rehearsal. Today. May 20. The public beach next to Starbase was closed from early morning until afternoon so the team could pump the rocket full of cryogenic fluids. No ignition. Just the full countdown sequence, including fueling with liquid oxygen and liquid methane. If things go smoothly today, this is the last big check before the actual attempt tomorrow.
The target date is May 21. Thursday. 6:30 p.m. EDT.
It wasn’t supposed to be tomorrow. It was supposed to be Tuesday. Then it became Wednesday. Now it is Thursday. The window is ninety minutes wide, opening at that same 6:30 p.m. mark. Or 5:30 p.m. for people actually standing in Texas.
Starship Version 3 (V3) is the hardware for Flight 12. It is bigger. Stronger. Upgraded. This is the vehicle NASA needs for Artemis, the lunar lander that is supposed to bring astronauts down to the Moon by 2028. It is also the truck SpaceX plans to use for its own Starlink satellites and whatever comes next, like orbital data centers.
The rocket hasn’t flown since October 2022. Long gap. The upgrades caused it. But now Booster 19 (Super Heavy) and Ship 39 (the upper stage) are stacked on Pad 2. They rolled out yesterday. Now they wait.
“If all goes according to plan…”
We say that. SpaceX hopes for it.
Splashdown zones remain the same. The Super Heavy booster drops back into the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. It hits water. The upper stage goes further, on a suborbital hop that arcs halfway around the globe before landing in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia roughly sixty-five minutes out.
It won’t carry real payloads this time. Not really. Twenty dummy Starlink satellites. Two probe satellites that just snap pictures and beam them home.
The real story isn’t the dummies. It’s the hardware.
Is the V3 design finally robust enough for regular ops? For the heavy lifting required by commercial contracts? That’s what everyone is watching for. Not just the splash, but the structural integrity during ascent and reentry.
SpaceX livestream starts at 5:45 p.m. EDT tomorrow. Or does it. Launch windows slip. They have wiggle room, from thirty minutes to two hours in past flights. Road closures in Texas already signal a potential backup day of May 22 just in case. The town closed access to Starbase roads through the end of May 11… wait. The article says May 21.
Let’s check the calendar. May 19 closed. May 21 closed. The alert suggests May 22 might be the true fallback if Thursday falls apart.
Nobody catches anything today. Future flights will try to use Mechazilla ’s giant metal arms to grab both the booster and the ship right back on the pad. We have caught the Super Heavy on Pad 1 already. V3 needs to prove it can handle that stress repeatedly.
The stream link is live when it’s ready. Probably around 6 p.m. EDT to get set. Maybe later.
Watch the sky if you’re close. Otherwise, the video buffer waits for everyone else.
