[00:02] McGregor and at that exact same moment 460 mi away at Massey, a completely different Raptor 3 on Ship 40 fired up perfectly for the first time. Same perfectly for the first time. Same engine, same day, opposite outcomes. So,
[00:17] what the hell is going on and does any of this put Flight 13's launch date at risk? Let's start at Massey. Overnight on June 23rd, Ship 40 rolled out of Mega Bay 2 to Massey Outpost with every single engine already installed. Three
[00:32] Raptor 3 sea level engines on the bottom, three Raptor 3 vacuum engines tucked inside, all six in place. On the 24th, SpaceX loaded propellant, no fire. Most likely an igniter test, just spinning up the spark plugs or a quiet
[00:47] abort that SpaceX never confirmed either way. The community sighed and kept watching. Then, the 25th arrived. This time, the propellant load looked different. The LOX tank only filled to about half. The LCH4 stayed at roughly
[01:02] the same level as the day before. Anyone who's been following long enough knew immediately what that meant. This wasn't setting up for a full six engine fire. This was a single engine test. One of Ship 40's sea level Raptor 3 engines
[01:16] ignited for the very first time. The burn lasted around 15 seconds. SpaceX posted the footage directly on X the next day, captioning it full duration single engine static fire test of Starship. The kind of thing that reminds
[01:31] this company. They didn't have to share that. They did anyway. Through the camera, it looked almost underwhelming. One engine, a cloud of dust, and it was over. But, the camera doesn't tell the whole story. So, why does a single
[01:45] engine matter this much? Ship 39, the Starship that flew on Flight 12 back in May, never did this test before launch. And on that flight, the in-space engine relight failed, most likely because a
[01:58] Raptor vacuum shut down earlier than it should have. Read that again. SpaceX skipped the single engine test on Ship 39, the most important relight of that entire flight never happened. That's not a coincidence. This burn is believed to
[02:12] simulate the reignition sequence Starship needs in space, the ability to relight during reentry to control descent speed, and to execute the landing burn. And there's one detail almost nobody mentioned. After finishing
[02:25] propellant loading, SpaceX held those levels for nearly 20 minutes before igniting, watching boil-off, checking pressure stability, measuring thermal behavior. All of it is data they need for keeping propellant stable in orbit,
[02:39] where Starship has to hold cryogenic fuel for extended periods before relighting. But Ship 40 didn't stay at Massy to run the six-engine fire everyone expected next. That same day, it rolled back to Mega Bay 2, quickly.
[02:52] No official explanation. SpaceX said nothing. The six-engine static fire will still happen, just not yet. Ship 40 will go back for inspection, and chances are it rolls back out for that six-engine test within the next week or so. But
[03:07] something arguably more significant just happened 460 mi north of Starbase, McGregor, Texas. If Starbase is where Starship is born and flies, McGregor is where engines earn the right to be there. Every single Raptor that comes
[03:22] least one test here before it gets certified and shipped down to Starbase for installation. No McGregor clearance, no Starship. And on the afternoon of June 25th, the same afternoon Ship 40's engine lit up successfully at Massy, the
[03:39] camera there caught something wrong, a bright flash, nothing like a normal test, no sustained flame, no typical exhaust plume. Local witnesses said it didn't look like a successful engine firing at all. SpaceX said
[03:53] No photos, no video from inside the facility. Just the external camera feed and a handful of observer descriptions. So, what actually happened? Two main So, what actually happened? Two main possibilities. One, a hard start.
[04:06] Propellant accumulating inside the combustion chamber before ignition, causing an uncontrolled combustion spike in a fraction of a second. Two, a leak that ignited unexpectedly. Both sound alarming, but both happen at McGregor
[04:20] more often than most people realize. Because McGregor is not where SpaceX tests things they already know will work. Engines get pushed well past their normal operating limits here. That's the whole point. Anomalies, including
[04:33] outright explosions, are an expected part of the development process. SpaceX part of the development process. SpaceX calls the philosophy test to failure. Find where the engine breaks before the engine finds that limit on its own in
[04:46] orbit, where nobody can do anything about it. The track record is long. In May 2024, a Raptor 2 suffered an anomaly at McGregor. A vapor leak triggered a secondary explosion that engulfed the entire test stand in fire and smoke.
[05:01] Cameras caught everything. The program didn't stop. In April 2026, just a couple of months ago, another large explosion during a Raptor 3 qualification test, visible from outside the facility. Starship V3 still launched
[05:15] in May. In that April incident, the engine that failed had reportedly been pulled from a previous static fire and sent back specifically so engineers could push it past its limits, mapping its failure modes before redesigning
[05:28] around them. And every single time, they learned something. After flight 8 lost Starship to a hardware failure on a center Raptor, SpaceX ran more than 100 long-duration firings at McGregor to recreate the exact conditions that
[05:43] caused it, then redesigned the system from what they found. That's not panic. That's what a serious engineering organization actually looks like. Did the June 25th anomaly directly affect ship 40? Almost certainly not. But, if
[05:58] SpaceX wants to double-check a batch of engines before lighting all six at once, rolling ship back to the factory is exactly the right call. That's not a sign of crisis. That's a sign of people who don't want surprises. Two milestones
[06:11] who don't want surprises. Two milestones remain before flight 13. Ship 40 back at Massey for the six engine static fire, and booster 20 out to the pad for its 33 engine test. If everything moves on schedule, flight 13 could launch by late
[06:24] July, though August is a completely realistic outcome, too. And if flight 13 pulls off the single engine relight in space, the one flight 12 missed, that's the last piece SpaceX needs before pushing into orbital refueling. And
[06:39] prerequisite for the entire moon program. NASA just confirmed the official number. At least 15 Starship launches just to fuel up for a single lunar landing. And all of that, the moon, the refueling architecture, the
[06:53] entire Mars plan, traces back to one Raptor 3 burning for 15 seconds at Massey. And to whatever SpaceX learns from the anomaly that happened the same afternoon, 460 miles away. But, here's a question
[07:08] most people never ask. Why is SpaceX's most critical engine testing facility located so far from Starbase? The answer isn't about logistics. It's about McGregor had an aerospace legacy long before SpaceX existed. It started as a
[07:23] World War II bomb manufacturing plant, then became a rocket engine test site for the US Air Force, and later Rocketdyne operated here for decades before SpaceX took over. When SpaceX leased the facility in 2003,
[07:38] they weren't starting from scratch. They They a site that already had test stands, existing infrastructure, and enough open land to fire rocket engines without bothering anyone. Today, McGregor spans 4,300 acres with 16
[07:52] specialized test stands. But, here's the honest truth about that 700-km gap. It's actually a legacy constraint, not a strategic advantage. The distance made sense when McGregor was chosen. The infrastructure was already there. The
[08:06] land was available, and Central Texas was far enough from population centers to test things that explode. It wasn't chosen because being far from Starbase it was the best option that already existed. And that distance creates a
[08:21] real cost. Every engine that passes qualification at McGregor has to be trucked down to Starbase for installation. If a static fire at Massy reveals a damaged engine that needs immediate replacement, the closest
[08:33] immediate replacement, the closest certified spare is sitting 700 km away. That's not a crisis when you're flying once every few months. But, when SpaceX wants to fly every week, that gap becomes friction. Slow, expensive
[08:46] friction that compounds at scale. Which brings us to the question that actually matters. Can McGregor keep up with what SpaceX is trying to do? Do the math. Each Starship launch requires 39 Raptor engines, 33 for the
[09:01] Super Heavy Booster, and six for the ship. If SpaceX hits 45 launches per year from Kennedy Space Center alone, and each engine gets reused an average of 10 times before needing replacement, you still need hundreds of new Raptors
[09:15] annually just to maintain operations before even thinking about expansion. Back in 2021, Musk announced a second Raptor production facility at McGregor, Raptor production facility at McGregor, targeting 800 to 1,000 engines per year,
[09:28] roughly two to four engines per day. As of April 2026, SpaceX said they had produced more than 600 Raptors total and accumulated over 40,000 seconds of run time on Raptor 3. That sounds impressive, but 600 engines across
[09:43] multiple years of development, mostly Raptor 2, doesn't mean Raptor 3 is rolling out at 1,000 units per year. By late 2025, observers were tracking truck convoys carrying three to four Raptor 3 engines leaving McGregor daily with
[09:58] serial numbers already past 68. Production was clearly accelerating, but not yet at designed capacity. And this is the real bottleneck. No engine, no Starship. No Starship, nothing else. No moon, no Mars, no Starlink V3, no Star
[10:15] mind. So, how does SpaceX solve this? The answer is being built right now, and it's not in McGregor. SpaceX is constructing a full-scale Starship production facility at Roberts Road in Florida targeted for completion by end
[10:28] of 2026. With three launch pads coming online there, shipping every Starship from Texas by barge becomes its own bottleneck. The answer is to manufacture on site. But, the Florida Star factory
[10:41] only solves vehicle assembly. Raptor engines still have to pass through McGregor for qualification testing. Unless SpaceX builds additional engine test infrastructure elsewhere or expands McGregor's output dramatically, every
[10:55] engine will still travel a long road before it ever gets installed on a vehicle. This is the problem SpaceX hasn't spoken about publicly, but is clearly working through. And if you want one signal of just how seriously they
[11:08] take it, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's COO, keeps her primary office in McGregor, not Hawthorne, not Starbase, McGregor. The number two person at SpaceX sits
[11:20] here. That's not an accident. McGregor isn't a support facility. It's the else. The most logical location for expansion still isn't Florida. Raptor engine blasts and dense population don't mix. Central Texas remains the strongest
[11:36] candidate. Cheap land, low population density, and eight decades of precedent for detonating large things here without anyone losing too much sleep over it. The real variable is timing. SpaceX wants to fly dozens of Starships per
[11:50] year within the next few years. To do that, Raptors need to come off the line faster than they are right now. And every time a Raptor suffers an anomaly at McGregor, whether June 25th or any other day, that's not a signal that the
[12:04] engine is unsafe. That's data. Falcon 9 didn't get to weekly launches overnight, either, but it got there. And right now, every anomaly at McGregor is one step every anomaly at McGregor is one step closer to Raptor doing the same.