---
title: 'SpaceX Is READY Launch Starship Flight 13 Now, But... Everything You Need To Know!'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=pIe_1dAv5qw'
video_id: 'pIe_1dAv5qw'
date: 2026-08-03
duration_sec: 743
---

# SpaceX Is READY Launch Starship Flight 13 Now, But... Everything You Need To Know!

> Source: [SpaceX Is READY Launch Starship Flight 13 Now, But... Everything You Need To Know!](https://youtube.com/watch?v=pIe_1dAv5qw)

## Summary

SpaceX is preparing for the launch of Starship Flight 13, following a week of intense preparation after a previous launch attempt was aborted due to four engine failures. The video details the rapid turnaround, including engine swaps, a cryogenic leak test, and the stacking of the full vehicle, while also discussing the weather concerns and the broader context of SpaceX's launch cadence and military contracts.

### Key Points

- **Launch Window Announced** [00:15] — SpaceX announced that additional preflight testing on Super Heavy is complete and they are preparing to launch as soon as July 23rd, just one week after the previous launch attempt was aborted.
- **Previous Launch Abort** [00:44] — Exactly one week prior, the same rocket ran the countdown to zero but refused to fly because four engines wouldn't light.
- **Preflight Test Conducted** [01:12] — On Wednesday, SpaceX performed a preflight test involving filling the liquid oxygen tank and a small load of liquid methane, causing frost to creep up the rocket's body. Observers initially suspected a spin prime test, but no ignition occurred.
- **Full System Leak Check** [01:55] — The test was actually a full system leak check and chill down, pumping liquid oxygen at minus 183°C through every line, valve, and connection on the newly installed engines to check for leaks, then draining it all.
- **Why No Static Fire** [02:25] — SpaceX did not perform a static fire because the previous 25-second static fire with all 33 engines had shown no issues, yet four engines failed days later. A new static fire wouldn't prove the fix; they needed to verify the new connections and cold handling.
- **Engine Swaps and Mystery** [03:22] — Musk said two Raptors would be replaced, but cameras spotted Raptor 3 serial number R152 in position E16, which was not one of the failed center engines. At least three engines left the booster, including a healthy one, leading to speculation about water hammer damage from the abort.
- **Ship 40 Rollout** [04:44] — Ship 40 was rolled out on highway 4, and the full stack was completed by late Wednesday night, with T-23 hours to launch. The entire process from booster leaving the factory to launch window opening took less than 48 hours.
- **Weather Concerns** [06:11] — SpaceX flagged weather as a 'significant watch item', despite local forecasts showing hot and sunny conditions. Possible concerns include upper-level winds and sea state at the splashdown zone, possibly affected by tropical storm Bertha in the Gulf.
- **White Heat Shield Tiles** [07:53] — Ship 40 has some heat shield tiles painted white as reference markers for cameras on six of the 20 Starlink V3 satellites it will deploy. These cameras will photograph the heat shield mid-flight to assess its condition for a safe return.
- **Flight 14 Hardware Ready** [08:45] — Booster 21 and Ship 41 have cleared structural qualification and are waiting on engines, indicating the next flight is already lined up behind Flight 13.
- **Launch Cadence Increase** [09:13] — SpaceX launched Starship twice in 2023, four times in 2024, five times in 2025, and aims for a flight every month, requiring about 20 Raptors per month (four per week) to support six flights a year.
- **Military Contract Expansion** [09:56] — The US Space Force raised the ceiling on a launch contract from $5.6 billion to $17 billion, bringing the military's total launch budget to over $30 billion. The program has two lanes: lane one for risk-tolerant payloads with multiple competitors, and lane two for expensive, sensitive hardware requiring certification.
- **Lane Two Expansion** [11:22] — The Space Force added 25 additional lane two missions on top of the 54 already under contract. Only Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and ULA's Vulcan have cleared certification, making it a two-horse race.

### Conclusion

SpaceX is pushing the boundaries of rapid reusability and launch cadence, with Flight 13 poised to launch after a week of intense preparation. The video highlights the company's aggressive schedule, innovative in-orbit inspection, and the financial backing from military contracts that fuel its ambitious production goals.

## Transcript

set to launch in just a few hours. This could be one of the most spectacular moments in SpaceX history, and you won't want to miss a second of it. But, will everything go according to plan, or is there something happening behind the
scenes that almost no one is talking about ahead of this afternoon's launch? Let's dig in. Yesterday, SpaceX posted a short update. Additional preflight testing on Super Heavy complete. That's right. Testing is done and they're
preparing to launch as soon as tomorrow, July 23rd. And that is genuinely surprising because exactly 1 week ago, this very same rocket stood on the pad, ran the countdown all the way to zero, and refused to fly. Four engines
wouldn't light. And now, after 7 days of surgery, it's back on a schedule so aggressive it's hard to believe. Tuesday evening, July 21st, booster 20 quietly
rolled back to pad two. Wednesday morning, around 11:44 a.m. Texas time, highway four closed, the pad cleared, and the test began. The very preflight test SpaceX mentioned in their announcement. As white vapor billowed
from the engine bay, a layer of frost started creeping up the rocket's body. Yep, they were filling the liquid oxygen tank, plus a small load of liquid methane. And a lot of people watching called it right away. Spin prime. That's
the test where propellant flows through and spins up the turbo pumps without ignition. The closest thing to a real firing and exactly what you'd want after swapping engines. But, sharper eyes spotted a problem. No sound suppression
system running. No sign of ignition. No ignition at all. And definitely no spin prime. So, what did SpaceX actually do? At its core, a full system leak check and chill down. Pump liquid oxygen at minus 183°C
through every line, every valve, every connection on those freshly installed engines, and watch for anything loose, anything off, then drain it all. Test passed. But, doesn't that seem strange? SpaceX just swapped engines on a booster
that refused to fly, and they chose not to fire it again. No static fire, not even a spin prime. So, why would they do that? Pause the video and drop your theory in the comments before I explain it. The answer is simpler than you'd
think. Sounds reckless until you learn this. Before July 16th, this same booster 20 completed a 25-second static fire with all 33 engines and zero reported issues. Same machine. Days later, four of them went silent. That
flawless test fire never caught the problem. So, firing it again wouldn't prove what SpaceX needed to prove. What they needed was new connections that sealed tight and a system that handles the cold. And that's exactly what
Wednesday's test confirmed. SpaceX is stripping away everything that isn't strictly necessary just to get Starship into the sky faster and hit milestones this industry has never seen. If you want to give them credit for that, drop
a great SpaceX in the comments right now. And of course, getting flight 13 back on the pad after that first delay was anything but simple. What we saw was a short, calm announcement from SpaceX. What actually happened behind it was
something else. Musk said two Raptors would be replaced, but community cameras caught something else. During booster 20's rollback, cameras spotted Raptor 3 20's rollback, cameras spotted Raptor 3 serial number R152 sitting in position
E16. Days later, that exact engine showed up at McGregor. Here's the problem. E16 is on the outer ring. It was not one of the four center engines that failed. Serial number matching shows at least three engines left
booster 20. The two that actually failed, plus one with no connection to the visible problem at all. Why pull a healthy engine? SpaceX isn't saying. But there's a theory worth thinking about. Imagine slamming a faucet shut while
water is blasting through. The pipes jolt with a loud thunk. Plumbers call it water hammer. Now replace the water with liquid oxygen, replace the pipes with a turbo pump spinning tens of thousands of RPM,
and slam a valve shut. The emergency abort itself may have injured perfectly healthy engines. The same thing was suspected after booster 19's aborted static fire before flight 12. To be clear, this is analyst speculation, not
confirmed by SpaceX. But it neatly explains why just two engine swaps pushed the launch from Monday to Thursday. Back to Wednesday afternoon. Just about an hour and a half after SpaceX's announcement at 3:42 p.m., ship
40 appeared on highway 4. A silver and black object as tall as a 15-story building crawling along to the hum of the self-propelled transporters beneath Observers on site noted it was quite windy that day. Remember that detail.
We'll come back to it. The clock at that moment, 26 hours until the launch window moment, 26 hours until the launch window opens. Let that number sink in. 26 hours before launch, and the spacecraft was still on a public highway. Around 7:00
p.m., the chopsticks lifted ship 40 into the air. The mating process took nearly 2 hours, aligning, lowering millimeter by millimeter, locking in. By late Wednesday night, the full stack stood complete. T-23 hours. Add it all up.
From the booster leaving the factory to the launch window opening, less than 48 hours. Rollout, propellant test, leak checks, reconfiguring the chopsticks for stacking, receiving the ship, the stack itself, all compressed into 2 days. This
is not the rhythm of a team that's worried. This is the rhythm of a team that treats launching the biggest rocket in history like just another thing you grandmother is a little sad that this channel has so few viewers. So, if you'd
like to cheer her up, hit subscribe. That way you'll also get notified whenever we drop a new video. Now, the question you've been waiting for. Will it actually fly on Thursday? Read SpaceX's words carefully. They didn't
write launching tomorrow. They wrote as soon as tomorrow. And they called the weather a significant watch item. In SpaceX's vocabulary, that's a high-level flag, not a polite weather permitting. Significant. Here's the strange part.
the Gulf of Mexico expected to strengthen into tropical storm Bertha. Sounds scary. But every forecast model keeps it hugging the northern Gulf Coast toward Florida, Louisiana, far to the northeast of Starbase. The local
forecast for Thursday, hot and sunny, 36 to 38° C. Rain chances under 20%. to 38° C. Rain chances under 20%. Southeast winds at 10 to 18 mph. On paper, that's a beautiful launch day. So, why is SpaceX still calling weather
a significant concern? A few possibilities. Wind, the very thing observers felt firsthand as Ship 40 rolled out. Ground level wind is one thing. Upper level winds along the flight path are another, and ground
the sea state at the booster's splashdown zone out in the Gulf. A storm, even a distant one, can churn up waves across a huge stretch of ocean. Which one is the real reason? SpaceX isn't saying, but when a company that
just compressed its entire launch flow into 48 hours goes out of its way to flag the weather, trust that they're seeing something on the meteorological map that we're not. So, will it fly Thursday? Probably, and the odds are
decent. But slipping to Friday on wind alone is entirely realistic. If you want it to launch on Thursday, drop a go 13 in the comments to show your support for the SpaceX team. There's one more detail on ship 40 that I'd bet almost no
channel is going to tell you about. Look closely at the heat shield and you'll spot a few tiles painted white. That's not a paint defect. SpaceX painted them white on purpose to fake the look of tiles that have fallen off. Because
among the 20 real Starlink V3 satellites flight 13 will deploy for the first time, six of them carry cameras. And their job is to turn around and photograph the heat shield of the very ship that just released them. Those
white tiles are the reference markers the cameras will lock on to. If this check themselves in the mirror mid-flight, assess their own heat shield, decide whether it's safe to come
home to the tower, or whether they need to ditch in the ocean instead. A spacecraft giving itself a physical in orbit. And that kind of detail only happening at Starbase right now. While flight 13 was sitting in the shop
getting new engines, the hardware for flight 14 was quietly finishing its own testing. Booster 21 and ship 41 have both cleared their structural qualification. Both are waiting on engines. That's it. The next flight is
already lined up behind this one and flight 13 hasn't even left the ground yet. Those two frantic looking days, that's not a team scrambling, that's the new normal. Pull the lens back and the numbers tell the real story. SpaceX
launched Starship twice in all of 2023, four times in 2024, five times in 2025, and now they're aiming for a flight every single month despite not launching
this year while the version 3 infrastructure was being rebuilt from the ground up. To feed a pace like that, you need engines. Each full stack burns through 39 Raptors, 33 on the booster, six on the ship. Six flights a year with
roughly 20 Raptors rolling out of the factory every month. Four a week, every week. So, where does all that money come from? How do you fund that kind of production and that kind of testing over and over again? This week's news might
explain part of it. Last Friday, the US Space Force raised the ceiling on one of its launch contracts from $5.6 billion to $17 billion. Add the rest of the program and the military's total launch budget now sits north of 30 billion.
But, the 30 billion isn't the interesting part. The split is. The program runs in two lanes. Lane one is the easy door. Risk-tolerant payloads, no lengthy certification, and it's crowded. SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin,
Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Relativity, Impulse. Seven companies, all invited, all bidding. So far, SpaceX has taken the lion's share of those task orders.
Blue Origin, selected back in 2024, won its first one earlier this year. Two years to get on the board. Then there's lane two. This is where the Pentagon puts its most expensive spy satellites and communications hardware designed to
keep working after a nuclear exchange. Money doesn't buy you a seat in this through the military certification process. They review every major subsystem. They want evidence from real flights, and they run it on their
schedule, not yours. Right now, exactly three rockets have cleared that door. Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and ULA's Vulcan. That's it. That's the whole list. And here's the detail worth sitting with. Back in April, the Space
Force went through its manifest and found 25 additional lane two missions on top of the 54 already under contract in a contract that had been finalized just 1 year earlier. 25 new missions in the one lane where almost nobody is allowed
to fly. Seven companies elbowing each other in the wide lane. And the narrow one, the one carrying the most expensive and most sensitive hardware, is still a two-horse race. One that keeps getting longer. And credit where it's due,
because this channel doesn't look with one eye closed. ULA got Vulcan through that certification gauntlet. That is a genuinely hard thing to do, and they are the only company besides SpaceX that has done it. New Glenn still hasn't. Back to
Starbase. Every Falcon 9 hauling Pentagon payloads is paying for those 20 Raptors rolling out of the factory every month. The military pays for today. The thing standing on pad two tonight is being built for tomorrow.