---
title: 'SpaceX''s Raptor 3 faced an "Anomaly" during Test. Starship Flight 13 in Major Problem?'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=tA0PHl_lQss'
video_id: 'tA0PHl_lQss'
date: 2026-08-03
duration_sec: 745
---

# SpaceX's Raptor 3 faced an "Anomaly" during Test. Starship Flight 13 in Major Problem?

> Source: [SpaceX's Raptor 3 faced an "Anomaly" during Test. Starship Flight 13 in Major Problem?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tA0PHl_lQss)

## Summary

The video analyzes two simultaneous Raptor 3 engine events on June 25th: a successful single-engine static fire on Ship 40 at Massey, and an anomaly at McGregor. It explores the implications for Starship Flight 13, the critical role of McGregor in engine testing, and the production bottleneck SpaceX faces.

### Key Points

- **Two Raptor 3 events on the same day** [00:02] — At McGregor, a Raptor 3 anomaly occurred, while 460 miles away at Massey, Ship 40's Raptor 3 fired successfully for the first time. Same engine, same day, opposite outcomes.
- **Ship 40's single-engine static fire** [00:17] — Ship 40 rolled out with all six Raptor 3 engines installed. On June 25th, a single sea-level Raptor 3 ignited for about 15 seconds in a full-duration static fire, simulating the in-space relight sequence.
- **Why the single-engine test matters** [01:45] — Ship 39 skipped this test before Flight 12, and its in-space relight failed. The test is crucial for validating the reignition sequence needed for reentry and landing burns.
- **Propellant stability data** [02:25] — SpaceX held propellant levels for nearly 20 minutes before ignition to study boil-off, pressure stability, and thermal behavior—data needed for keeping cryogenic fuel stable in orbit.
- **Ship 40 rolls back to Mega Bay 2** [02:52] — After the test, Ship 40 returned to the factory for inspection. The six-engine static fire is still expected but delayed.
- **McGregor anomaly** [03:07] — At McGregor, a bright flash occurred during an engine test, with no sustained flame. Possible causes: hard start or unexpected leak. SpaceX did not officially comment.
- **Test-to-failure philosophy** [04:20] — McGregor pushes engines past limits to find failure modes. Anomalies are expected and part of development. Past incidents include Raptor 2 and Raptor 3 explosions.
- **Learning from failures** [05:28] — After Flight 8's failure, SpaceX ran over 100 long-duration firings to recreate conditions and redesigned the system. This is serious engineering, not panic.
- **Impact on Flight 13** [05:58] — The anomaly likely doesn't affect Ship 40 directly, but rolling back for inspection is prudent. Two milestones remain: six-engine static fire and booster 33-engine test. Flight 13 could launch late July or August.
- **Path to lunar refueling** [06:39] — NASA confirmed at least 15 Starship launches are needed to fuel one lunar landing. The single-engine relight is the last piece before orbital refueling.
- **Why McGregor is far from Starbase** [07:08] — McGregor's location is a legacy constraint, not strategic. It was chosen for existing infrastructure and open land. The 700-km gap creates logistical friction.
- **Raptor production bottleneck** [08:46] — Each Starship needs 39 Raptors. At 45 launches/year with 10 reuses, hundreds of new engines are needed annually. Production is accelerating but not yet at designed capacity.
- **Future solutions** [10:15] — SpaceX is building a Starship factory in Florida, but engines still need McGregor qualification. Gwynne Shotwell keeps her office in McGregor, signaling its importance.
- **McGregor expansion likely** [11:36] — Central Texas remains the best location for expansion due to cheap land and low population density. Timing is the key variable.

### Conclusion

The June 25th events highlight SpaceX's iterative testing approach. The anomaly is data, not a setback. Flight 13's success hinges on the single-engine relight, which is critical for lunar refueling and Mars plans.

## Transcript

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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.