Starship Flight 12 NEW DATE: No Earlier Than Wed, May 20th! [13:43]

YouTube ^ | May 17, 2026 | Ellie in Space

[SunkenCiv]

[excerpt] ...one of the big things that's different is that they have 20 dummy Starlinks and then two additional ones that have been outfitted with some of the reaction wheels for the V2 Starlinks. So some controllability and cameras. It'll give us a great chance to maybe see the ship going into orbital dawn, which will be really cool. And the other reason why they're doing it is people may have noticed that the starships have some tiles that are white and gray. They're painted that way because it gives them a marker to look for with those satellites to do like an inspection of the ship tiles, similar to what we saw with the space shuttle. The reason why they painted them gray and white is that the underneath the tiles is a black plated coating. So if the tiles are missing, it would just be black. So if they see the white or the gray, they know it's their markers and they can get some data from that. 

Starship Flight 12 NEW DATE: No Earlier Than Wed, May 20th! | 13:43
Ellie in Space | 224K subscribers | 1,612 views | May 17, 2026

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TOPICS: Business/Economy
KEYWORDS:

[SunkenCiv]

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

[SunkenCiv]

IIs Starship HLS really is a viable option for NASA and SpaceX to get humans back onto the surface of the moon for the Artemis Program? We'll go over why it's so tall, why it uses Methalox instead of hypergolic propellants, explain why it requires 15 or more launches for a single lunar landing and we'll even go over alternate options that could maybe simplify or speed up the process. 

Does Starship REALLY require 15+ launches to land one lunar Starship?! | 1:45:04 
Everyday Astronaut | 1.95M subscribers | 82,956 views | May 16, 2026

00:00:00 - Intro 
00:03:20 - Overview and Need-to-knows 
00:16:30 - is Starship Too Big and Tall? 
00:35:40 - is Methalox the Wrong Propellant? 
00:43:50 - Why Orbital Refueling? 
01:20:30 - Changing to Low Lunar Orbit 
01:35:40 - Propellant Supplies on Earth 
01:38:25 - Summary

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *will not* follow, too freakin' long. Don't have an hour and a quarter to listen to it? Aw, that's sad.

[citizen]

SpaceX page:

Starship’s Twelfth Flight Test
The twelfth flight test of Starship is preparing to launch as soon as Wednesday, May 20. The launch window will open at 5:30 p.m. CT.

A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 45 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. You can also watch the webcast on the X TV app. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to check in here and stay tuned to our X account for updates.

The upcoming flight will debut the next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles, powered by the next evolution of the Raptor engine and launching from a newly designed pad at Starbase.

The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time, with each element of the Starship architecture featuring significant redesigns to enable full and rapid reuse that incorporate learnings from years of development and test.

The booster’s primary test objective will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America. As this is the first flight test of a significantly redesigned vehicle, the booster will not attempt a return to the launch site for catch.

The Starship upper stage will target multiple in-space and reentry objectives, including a payload deployment of 20 Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, and two specially modified Starlink satellites. The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test. All of the deployed payloads will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship. A relight of a single Raptor engine while in space is also planned.

For Starship entry, a single heat shield tile has been intentionally removed to measure the aerodynamic load differences on adjacent tiles when there is a tile missing. Finally, the ship will perform experimental actions tested on previous flight tests, including a maneuver to intentionally stress the structural limits of the vehicle’s rear flaps and a dynamic banking maneuver to mimic the trajectory that future missions returning to Starbase will fly.