New Starship Flight 13 Launch Date is Even Later Than We Thought...

[00:02] that get you excited about the future that make you glad to wake up in the because you can't wait to see what happens next. And [music] that's the future that SpaceX wants to bring to you.

[00:16] >> Elon Musk's words may be proving true for flight 13, the launch the entire world has been waiting so long for. But, a problem delayed the launch right as Starship was about to lift off. And worse, the promised return launch date

[00:30] right after that also got pushed back. So, what's really going on at Starbase? And what's the actual launch date? Let's dive in. All of us were probably hoping Starship could launch as soon as possible, at the very least on the

[00:43] original target date, today. But, things seem to be more serious with booster 20, forcing SpaceX to push back the official launch date. According to the latest post on X, SpaceX said, "Now targeting to launch Starship's 13th

[00:57] flight test as early as Thursday, July 23rd." Elon Musk confirmed that date, too. Though, he first threw out a little troll posting Friday instead before correcting it back to Thursday shortly after. Well, 3 days doesn't sound like

[01:11] much under normal circumstances, but 3 days waiting for a historic moment in the space industry, for rocket nerds like us, is a kind of restlessness that's honestly hard to put into words, right? Drop a yes in the comments if

[01:25] you're feeling exactly the same way. So, here's the real question. SpaceX is clearly itching to launch flight 13. So, why the extra 3-day delay? Did Elon give the Starbase ground crew an extra day off to watch the World Cup final? Jokes

[01:40] aside, the real reason for the 3-day slip is a lot more serious. First, Elon confirmed two Raptor engines are being pulled and swapped out to guarantee a clean flight. But, swapping out just two engines was never going to be enough on

[01:54] its own. The engineering team also has to reinspect all 33 engines because an abort mid-startup sequence is never harmless. Remember the booster 19 static fire? It cut out barely a second after ignition and 10 engines came away

[02:08] damaged. The culprit was something called a hard shutdown when the propellant valve slammed shut while fuel is still screaming through the lines at enormous velocity. Think of it like cranking your kitchen faucet shut super

[02:20] fast and hearing that clunk echo through the pipes in your house. That's water hammer. Except inside a raptor, that same pressure shock is violent enough to wreck a turbo pump. The good news is that this time the abort command came

[02:33] straight from the rocket's own flight computer. So the engines likely shut down in a much gentler sequence. But SpaceX is still swapping out two of them anyway. Now here's the detail I think is the juiciest part. Booster 20 currently

[02:47] has exactly 10 engines that were damaged in that same static fire, repaired and in that same static fire, repaired and bolted right back on. 10 repeat patients riding on the same rocket. Sounds suspicious as hell. But the data says

[02:59] otherwise. Out of the four engines that refused to start last Thursday, only one belongs to that group. Raptor number 78. The other three are completely healthy units with no prior history at all. And that leads to a much more uncomfortable

[03:14] question. If it's not the refurbished hardware acting up, then what exactly is going wrong? The most honest answer right now is that nobody knows for sure. The prevailing theory among observers points somewhere inside the startup

[03:27] sequence itself. Those few seconds when the turbo pumps have to spin up to tens of thousands of RPM and everything has to line up down to the millisecond. That's eerily reminiscent of flight 12 when the booster's engines also

[03:40] misbehaved during relight and sent it drifting off target by more than 100 km. Raptor 3 is the most powerful engine on Earth, but reliability is still a giant question mark hanging over it. Sure, it's frustrating to wait, but look at it

[03:54] this way. A scrub costs you 3 days, an explosion costs you a whole year, and drags Artemis and the entire Mars dream down with it. So, yeah, better safe than If you're with me on that philosophy, drop a yes in the comments. There's also

[04:10] a detail almost nobody talks about. Transport logistics. To swap out two engines, they have to separate ship 40 from the booster, lower each stage onto its transporter, crawl the whole stack down highway 4 back to Megabay, do the

[04:25] swap, then reverse that entire process to get everything back to the pad. Every single trip for a steel stack taller than a 20-story building eats up an entire day on its own. 3 days when you add it all up is almost absurdly fast.

[04:40] Meanwhile, the FAA issued three no-fly zones for the evenings of July the 20th, 21, and 22, which at first glance looks like a launch is imminent. But on the ground, the picture is completely different. Both the ship and the booster

[04:54] are still sitting inside the bay. No road closures, no beach closures. Those three no-fly windows are almost certainly just placeholder reservations, booked just in case. The real signal is showing up somewhere else. This

[05:07] afternoon, the chopstick arms at pad 2 flexed through a few motions, testing the catch rails and the stabilizer arms before settling into exactly the position for catching a booster. The arms are open. All that's missing now is

[05:21] the vehicle to grab. Back at the production site, cameras from Avid Space spotted an ARVAC cart the specialized rig engineers climb inside of to work directly inside the engine bay. Showing up near the launch site, though it's not

[05:34] yet clear what for. Booster 20 will likely roll out to the pad around the likely roll out to the pad around the 22nd. Ship 40, meanwhile, doesn't seem to need any repairs at all. But it still has to move out after booster 20 per

[05:47] standard procedure. The clock is ticking again. Flight 13 is back on track, so stay locked onto the channel for the latest updates. But, if you think Starbase spent the last 3 days just sitting around waiting on engine

[06:00] repairs, you don't understand this company's culture at all. Right after the scrub, before booster 20 had even made it back home, booster 21, the star of flight 14, rolled out to the Massey's test site and ran its first cryo test.

[06:15] This test is simple, but brutal. Fill the tanks with liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen at nearly 200° below zero, while hydraulic rams push against the base of the booster to simulate the thrust load of all 33 engines. In plain

[06:30] terms, this is testing how much punishment the skeleton can take before the muscle even gets bolted on. That particular test looked unusually short. It might have just been a fill and drain check, or it could have been a minor

[06:43] abort. Either way, they've already moved on to a second cryo test, and there will almost certainly be a third and fourth to fully confirm this vehicle for an to fully confirm this vehicle for an extremely special flight, flight 14.

[06:55] It's special because flight 14 opens the door to a much bigger dream. Here's the scenario the community has been buzzing about. If flight 13 flies clean and booster 20 splashes down softly in the Gulf, booster 21 could become the first

[07:10] block 3 booster ever caught by Mechazilla out of midair. Once it's caught, SpaceX has two options. Keep it in Texas or load it onto the Marmac 31 barge and ship it straight to Florida using a flight proven booster for the

[07:24] very first East Coast lift-off. Why does Florida matter so much? Because launch complex 39A is nearly complete. The chopsticks have been tested, the deluge system has been tested, the hold-down clamps have been tested. The only thing

[07:38] missing is an actual rocket. SpaceX still insists it wants Starship flying out of Florida before this year is over. And that moment changes the entire game. Two states, multiple pads, a much faster

[07:52] launch cadence, and cadence is the key to everything. Orbital refueling alone needs a dozen tanker launches firing off back-to-back within just a few weeks. The HLS lunar lander needs orbital refueling to get astronauts down to the

[08:05] moon, and Mars needs every single one of these pieces to come together. In other words, it turns out the road to Mars runs straight through Florida. While SpaceX is wrestling with four stubborn engines on the other side of the

[08:17] Pacific, China just pulled off something that made the entire space industry stop After completing its mission, the Long March 10B booster flipped around, decelerated, and lowered itself into a steel cable net stretched across a barge

[08:32] steel cable net stretched across a barge sitting offshore, 430 km from the launch pad. Four hooks on the rocket's body caught onto the net, and a hydraulic damping system absorbed the rest of the kinetic energy. That barge weighs 25,000

[08:45] tons, the equivalent of more than 10,000 cars, carrying a 67-m catch tower on its back. Essentially building a 20-story tower out on the open ocean. To be fair,

[08:57] this is a genuine feat. It took them nearly a decade to get to this catch, and they've earned the tip of the hat. But hold on, SpaceX fans, don't panic just yet. Let's put both systems side by side. China's net is like a goalkeeper

[09:10] allowed to catch the ball with the entire goal frame, a catch zone spanning dozens of meters, cables that stretch and give, forgiving a wide margin of error. MechaZilla is the opposite. It's like catching a falling knife with two

[09:24] fingers, exponentially harder, but the payoff is exponentially bigger, too. The booster comes right back to the exact spot it just launched from. Inspect it on site, refuel it, fly it again. And the offshore catch, once it's caught,

[09:39] of the ocean. You need a tugboat to bring it back, calm seas, resistance against corrosive salt air, and an entire multi-day logistics chain before it ever touches dry land. One system was designed from the ground up around the

[09:54] question, "How do we fly this again as fast as possible?" The other has only just answered the question, "How do we get the rocket home?" The gap between those two questions is an entire era. And there's still the overall scoreboard

[10:07] to consider. SpaceX has landed Falcon 9 hundreds of times, with some boosters flying more than 20 missions each, turning reusability from a miracle into a daily routine, and driving launch costs down to a level nobody else can

[10:20] touch. China just landed its first catch. One beautiful catch doesn't make a system, the same way baking one great loaf of bread is a world away from running an entire bakery chain every single day. What's actually worthwhile

[10:35] watching is their promise to re-fly this exact same booster before the end of the year. If they pull that off, that's the moment SpaceX should start checking the rearview mirror. As for right now, SpaceX has already moved on to a problem

[10:48] nobody else on the planet has dared to touch, catching the ship itself. A 100-plus ton hunk of steel screaming back from the edge of space, tearing through the fireball of re-entry, to land in the exact same arms that

[11:02] launched it. China caught a first stage, chasing something SpaceX has already chasing something SpaceX has already done more than 600 times. SpaceX is going after the second stage, a target China probably won't reach even 10 years

[11:14] from now. What do you think? Am I right? That's everything for today's video. If you enjoyed it, once again, please hit subscribe and smash that like button. this channel back to where it used to be. Truly, thank you, and have a great

[11:29] be. Truly, thank you, and have a great day.