Did SpaceX Discover A Starship Problem? Ship 42 Is Being Fixed! [21:39]

YouTube ^ | October 20, 2026 | What about it!?

[SunkenCiv]

SpaceX's Ship 40 is home. 78 days after it left the pad, the first Starship ever recovered from the ocean rolled through the gates of Starbase and is standing upright again, next to three brand-new ships in Mega Bay 2. SpaceX is already going through it, and I'll show you what they're looking for. NASA just published its Starship roadmap for the Moon, and the next ten weeks on that chart are packed with things SpaceX has never done. The FAA opened the paperwork for 456 Starship launches a year from Boca Chica. Texas was quietly discussing selling an entire state park to SpaceX. And a Tesla did a barrel roll on SpaceX rocket thrusters. What does a flying car have to do with landing a Starship? More than you'd think. 

Did SpaceX Discover A Starship Problem? Ship 42 Is Being Fixed! | 21:39 
What about it!? | 673K subscribers | 212,681 views | October 20, 2026

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TOPICS: Business/Economy
KEYWORDS: artemis; elon; elonmusk; spacex; starship; sunkenciv; whataboutit

[SunkenCiv]

[Chapter 5 - snip] Now the Starship column. And look at what NASA put in the current quarter. Q4 2026 first orbital flight done. First version three booster catch, first ship catch, first Cape flight, first version three booster reuse. All of it in the box that ends on December 31st. That does sound good to me. NASA's own chart expects SpaceX to catch a booster, catch a ship, launch from Florida, and refly a booster in the next 10 weeks. Flight 15 would have to deliver the catches. Flight 16 from 39A, the Cape launch, and a reflown booster 22 or 23, the reuse. That is the entire 2026 wish list of this channel in one column with NASA's logo on it. 

And then the chart keeps on going. Q1 2027, the propellant transfer demo, the second Florida pad at LC37 complete, and operations testing of cabin one. Cabin one, that is a new one on that chart, is a flight-like crew compartment that SpaceX is building at Starbase right now where it's supposed to be complete this quarter and then operations testing starts with people working inside it on the ground with an airlock demonstration in the second quarter. [/snip]

[SunkenCiv]

00:00 The Return of Ship 40
05:15 Ship 42's Unexpected Return to Testing
08:00 The Goal for Flight 15
10:17 The Massive Expansion Plan
14:23 NASA's Artemis Roadmap Revealed
18:52 The Roadster's Rocket Thrusters

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The rest of the YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

[GenXPolymath]

They are debating a single or double catch on Sept 28. They have soft landed two of this new versions of Superheavy in the Gulf right next to the catch power they are ready to catch this version now. Since they had two soft spashdown of this Starship version and the last one Elon even said if there had been a tower there they would have caught it they nailed the landing xyz and more importantly the velocity vector box.

I would put money on at least a booster catch that’s the most expensive part of Starship system they could do catch the booster yeet Starships and still under cut every other launcher on the planet on mass to orbit costs.

For a double catch they have 18 hours for Texas to align on a ascending node of the orbit inclination so reentry happens from the south east to the north west with the dangerous part over the Gulf of America if they are not 100% sure they just use the flaps to S curve off speed and soft spashdown in the Gulf just off the coast and do a divert. They only have one mecazilla so once it catches Superheavy it needs to place it back on the launch cradle and then wait for Ship. Gonna be so 🔥

[GenXPolymath]

Meant Nov 28 but looks like FAA gave them the earlier window of Nov 8. Sweet

[GenXPolymath]

If they used 400 of those Starship launches for V3 Starlink they would at 60 per launch put 24,000 up that year. They filled for 15,000 and got it, so they could also put up a full 9000 for just Direct to Cell use which they are filing for Starlink Mobile thst bought more spectrum for like 8 billion last month.

[rlmorel]

I am having such SpaceX wood here...:)

There is so much going on there.

These are Salad Days, FRiend! (I see you are equally enthusiastic...exploration and pushing the human envelope...like Columbus and Magellan did!)

I can’t wait to see how SpaceX navigates all this. Very exciting!

[SunkenCiv]

Yeah! And as GXP said (with an emoticon), "Hot!" Lotta hardware going into the sky; a lot of older gen Starlink sats will remain in use, rather than being ditched before its time.

Given Elon's past pattern, my guess is, unless and until the actual spots in the sky are needed by the new gen Starlink sats, the older slower service will wind up being free.

And to think I was bent out of shape when CD players stopped being standard equipment in cars, and unavailable from the auto manufacturers.

Sirius XM continues to get installed in new vehicles I believe; if they had any sense, they'd partner with any or all of the streaming music services, and throw in maps and navigation, then drop the price to something much more reasonable.

They would of course have to find a second partner with sat bandwidth to spare...

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 1: The Return of Ship 40

Ship 40 is home. 78 days after it left the pad, the first Starship ever recovered from the ocean rolled through the gates of Starbase and is standing upright again next to three brand new ships in Mega Bay 2. SpaceX is already going through it, and I’ll show you what they are looking for. NASA just published its Starship road map for the moon, and the next 10 weeks on that chart are packed with things SpaceX has never done. The FAA opened the paperwork for 456 Starship launches a year from Bokh Chica. Texas was quietly discussing selling an entire state park to SpaceX. And a Tesla did a barrel roll on SpaceX rocket thrusters. What does a flying car have to do with landing a Starship? More than you’d think. My name is Helix. Welcome to What About It. Let’s dive right in. Starship updates. We were off for two weeks and the morning of Wednesday, October 7th, right on the day the tracker promised.

Quick recap for everyone who joined us late. Ship 40 launched on flight 13 on July 23rd, landed in the Indian Ocean, floated there for 24 days, got towed to Christmas Island, and then rode on the deck of a semi-submersible for 12,400 nautical miles around the Cape of Good Hope. On October 7th, it came into view in the port, lying on its side in the same cradle it had been strapped into since the Indian Ocean. And the first good look confirmed what we hoped. It still looks like a Starship, scorched and missing a few tiles, but in one piece.

Then came the part SpaceX had never done before: unloading a flown ship. On Friday, October 9th, the cradle was lifted off Fort’s deck and rolled onto the dock on self-propelled modular transporters. The cradle was designed exactly for that. A frame that a set of SPMTs can drive under, pick up, and carry away. Ship included. The crew got its first real practice at moving a Starship horizontally. Something that will be routine once ships travel to Florida by barge. Saturday night, the road closed at 10:55 p.m. and Ship 40 made the trip from the port past Masses to the production site. An overnight transit and a strange sight. Every ship before it went down that road standing up on the way to the pad. This one came back lying down.

At the Sanchez site, the ship got the hardware for the next step. The horizontal transport aft frame, the one that came over from Florida on the barge last month, was bolted to the engine section. That frame is the hinge for what SpaceX calls a breakover, tipping a horizontal ship back to vertical. On the forward end, the lift points were the ship’s own catch pins with a lift fixture attached to them. On Monday, October 12th, very slowly and very carefully, Ship 40 was tipped back to vertical and sat down on a transport ring inside Mega Bay 2.

5 days from arriving at the port to standing upright in a bay. In the last episode, I said I had no idea how long unloading a flown ship would take. It ended up needing five days. And SpaceX put it this way: the first Starship to return to its launch site after a journey across air, space, and sea is now vertical alongside three other Starships in a mega bay. Those three are Ships 42, 43, and 44, the next three ships to fly standing in a circle around the one that already flew. It’s kind of like a group of rookies trying to get some advice from a veteran.

So, what do they do next with it? SpaceX says Ship 40 will provide first-of-its-kind data on a flown heat shield, on Raptor engines, and on avionics and more. Engineers can pull tiles and check the entire assembly. They can check the felt behind them and see the steel underneath. The Raptors ran a full flight, a landing burn, and then sat in salt water. Pull them, cut them open, see what corroded and what didn’t. The avionics did the same. Every part of Ship 40 is now a s. And then the inside.

Nobody has ever seen the inside of a Starship that flew. The tanks and the plumbing after a full flight profile. That is what they’ll spend the coming weeks on. Ship 40 is not going to fly again, but everything SpaceX learns from it goes straight into Ships 42, 43, and 44, which are standing right next to it. And what happens with it after that? Scrapyard or a museum? The first Starship caught by the tower will probably get the museum spot. So, Ship 40 was the one that proved a ship survives the trip. Put your vote in the comments. Do you want to save it?

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 2: Ship 42’s Unexpected Return to Testing

Speaking of Ship 42, it’s had a strange two weeks. Last episode, we talked about all six Raptors being pulled off Ship 42. Now, we know what came next. On October 9th, the same day Ship 40 was being unloaded at the port, Ship 42 rolled back out to Masses and went back onto the cryo stand. A third round of cryoproof testing with no engines on the ship. You don’t do that for fun. A ship that already passed its cryo tests only goes back on a stand if something inside has changed. Engine plumbing most likely. Spaceflight runs on one hard rule: never bet everything on a single point of failure. When something goes wrong 400 kilometers up, you don’t want one person improvising. You want the entire ground network behind you. Thousands of people throwing every resource they’ve got at the problem.

[ad text redacted]

Remember the rafter vacuum that shut down early on Ship 41’s way up and the engine issue on flight 12? If SpaceX changed something in that area, they have to pressure test it again before putting engines back in. Masses, then back to Mega Bay 2 for engines, then static fire. Booster 22 is in Mega Bay 1 and could static fire any day now. Maybe by the time you’re watching this, it already has. And the dates moved as well. The FAA’s planning slides now list November 8th as the earliest date for flight 15 and December 10th for the first Starship launch from Florida.

The mission called Starlink 30-1. Both were October dates in the last version. So flight 15 slipped about 3 weeks, which makes sense given the engine work on Ship 42. Musk said it like this on October 10th: the flight 14 engine glitch doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue. The heat shield was robust. Flight 15 hopefully in 4 to 6 weeks. Uh, so we don’t know the exact launch date, but probably about 4 weeks or so. Four to 6 weeks. And we got a confirmation for what we are looking forward to most right now.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 3: The Goal for Flight 15

Skip the sea journey. The big milestone coming up hopefully on flight 15 is to catch the ship, making it the first full recovery of an orbital class rocket upper stage. First full recovery. Booster and ship both caught from one flight. That is the plan for the next launch. And then refly both stages on flight 16 if possible. Aggressive goals. Fingers crossed. Behind flight 15, the next pair is already moving. Booster 23 rolled out to Masses for cryo testing on October 13th, noticeably faster after stacking than Booster 22 did.

Ship 43 is the flight 16 ship, the one that may launch from pad 39A in Florida in December. Ships have to finish all their testing at Starbase because Florida has no ship test stand yet, though every day counts for Ship 43 before it goes on the barge. And its little sibling, Ship 43.1, the nose cone test article in the crusher at Masses, came out of last Thursday night’s test with a few dents. But that’s the point. You push the structure until it tells you where it bends. We’ve seen worse.

And two more pieces of Starbase moved while we were gone. The bridge crane went into the top of the gigab bay on October 15th, a lift that took almost 13 hours on strand jacks. And at pad one, a first section of the new flame bucket was lifted into the pit. The bathtub we talked about last episode is getting its diverter. Pad one is turning into pad 2’s sibling. Ya, you’ve reached the middle of the video. You made it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for watching and liking the video.

And if you’re among the 40% who haven’t subscribed yet, and there was at least one video you learned something new from, it would mean the world to me if you did. It’s free and it genuinely helps more people find my channel. Want to make my world even easier? There is only one place you’d rather be: the Y members club on Patreon and right here on YouTube. Click the card or the join button under the video. You are the reason we keep doing this. Thank you so much. You rock. And now to the number.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 4: The Massive Expansion Plan

That explains why the heck all this is happening at once. On October 13th, the FAA published a notice that it will prepare a full environmental impact statement for Starbase. Wait, why? The reason SpaceX wants up to 456 Starship launches and 912 landings per year from Bokh Chica, not Louisiana. The current approval is for 25 launches and 50 landings. So SpaceX asked for 18 times what it has today. And that comes in two steps. Phase one, up to 100 launches and 200 landings a year, any day, anytime. Phase two, within several years, 456 launches and 912 landings, but only Monday through Friday. Do the math. 456 launches over roughly 260 weekdays is almost two launches per working day. Weekends off for the rocket, not for us.

The landings count every booster and every ship coming back to the site, no matter where they launch from. So, a ship that launches from Florida and lands at Starbase counts here. That is the two pan network from last episode written into a federal document. And this is the moment where you, the viewer, can actually be part of it.

There are public scoping meetings on November 17th in Brownsville and November 19th in Port Isabel with a virtual one on November 18th, and written comments are open until November 30th. If you live in the valley, go; that is how this process works. Now more launches need more land. And last Friday, a report surfaced that Texas has been considering selling Bokeh Chica State Park to SpaceX, about 1300 acres of beachfront directly next to Starbase.

The sale was reportedly far enough along to be on the draft agenda for a closed-door session of the Parks and Wildlife Commission on November 5th, but after the story came out, the commission said that the sale is not on the November agenda. Not denied, just not in November. Some context. In 2024, the state agreed to swap 43 acres of that park for 477 acres of SpaceX land near the Lagona Atascosa Refuge. And SpaceX walked away from that deal. This summer, SpaceX got a much bigger one with the federal government instead: 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Refuge in exchange for 683 acres of private land.

If the state park follows, the entire area around the launch site changes hands. Ah, I don’t know how I feel about that one. That park is where our team has stood for every launch since Star Hopper. Louisiana is moving in the same direction. By the way, the preliminary plans for the marine logistics hub at Pan Island were filed this month. A 181-acre wharf site with a basin dredged to 16 feet. Bulkhead piles going down 80 feet. Construction from March 2027 to September 2032.

That’s the harbor for the swamp spaceport we talked about in episode 576. Now with a start date. And a few miles up the road from Starbase near the port, there is a third piece of land, 444 acres that Brownsville removed from its city limits at SpaceX’s request in late August in a rushed Saturday night vote that came with a $220 million offer for the city’s water system. SpaceX hasn’t said what it’s building there, but the job postings list data center engineers and gas turbine power plant engineers. Pretty obvious if you ask me.

An AI data center, Colossus 3. So SpaceX is expanding everywhere. Hundreds of launches per year are planned.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 5: NASA’s Artemis Roadmap Revealed

But what about all those interesting goals? What about the moon, for example? At the International Astronautical Congress in Antalya, NASA’s HLS program manager presented the Artemis roadmap, and the slides are now public. For the first time, there is a quarter-by-quarter chart of every Starship milestone NASA expects on the way to the moon. And it is basically starting right away. First, the missions. Artemis 3 in 2027. Orion tests docking with both landers in Earth orbit. We covered the concept back in July. Artemis 4 early 2028, the first crude Luna landing since 1972. And NASA still writes TBD. Which lander will be used? Artemis 5 late 2028, the second landing. And then the cargo versions of both landers carrying around 15 tons to the surface each with SpaceX penciled in to deliver Jax’s pressurized rover no earlier than 2032.

Now the Starship column. And look at what NASA put in the current quarter. Q4 2026 first orbital flight done. First version three booster catch, first ship catch, first Cape flight, first version three booster reuse. All of it in the box that ends on December 31st. That does sound good to me. NASA’s own chart expects SpaceX to catch a booster, catch a ship, launch from Florida, and refly a booster in the next 10 weeks. Flight 15 would have to deliver the catches. Flight 16 from 39A, the Cape launch, and a reflown booster 22 or 23, the reuse. That is the entire 2026 wish list of this channel in one column with NASA’s logo on it.

And then the chart keeps on going. Q1 2027, the propellant transfer demo, the second Florida pad at LC37 complete, and operations testing of cabin one. Cabin one, that is a new one on that chart, is a flight-like crew compartment that SpaceX is building at Starbase right now where it’s supposed to be complete this quarter and then operations testing starts with people working inside it on the ground with an airlock demonstration in the second quarter.

The first HLS cabin before the first HLS and the propellant transfer demo is an essential milestone. A lot of things depend on two ships in orbit, one pumping propellant into the other. Without that, there is no lander and no moon for Blue Origin as well, by the way. And the Artemis 3 test ship has its own row: a passive docking mechanical fit check this quarter, then docking system and aero cover integration in Q1.

Remember the question from July when NASA’s renders showed Orion docking at the very tip of a Starship nose, where are the header tanks live? The chart answers it. The ship has a docking system with an aero cover for ascent. Q2 2027, the test ship gets its cryo tests, engines, and static fire, goes on the barge to the Cape, and the landing legs get demonstrated. Oh boy.

Q3 2027, Artemis 3 itself with all three launches from the Cape, Orion, Blue Moon, and Starship, plus the first tanker flight for the uncrewed landing demo. Q4 2027, the uncrewed lander launches and lands on the moon. Thank months. Propellant transfer, a crew cabin, landing legs, a Florida launch site, and a tanker flight in between. Will it slip? Well, what do you think?

Of course, it will slip. Every chart like this slips, but that’s not what the chart is for. It’s NASA saying in public which order things happen in and what it needs from SpaceX by when. And the first box on it is due by New Year’s. Blue Origin’s column for the record: New Glenn back to flight this quarter. The first Blue Moon Mark 1 landing in Q1 2027 and the uncrewed Mark 2 demo at the end of 2027. Two very different landers. And now we can finally close a mystery.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 6: The Roadster’s Rocket Thrusters

Remember the tent at McGregor? Many thought for more than a year that this was where SpaceX was testing HLS-related hardware, right? Instead, SpaceX and Tesla used this tent to test the new Tesla Roadster RCS system. Yeah. Not a Luna lander, a car. Last Thursday, Tesla unveiled the Roadster at McGregor with no driver inside. 10 cold gas thrusters fed by 600 liters of compressed air in carbon fiber pressure vessels stuffed into every empty space in the car. It drove up a ramp and onto the ceiling held there by a fan-based suction system.

God. Then it launched itself off the ledge into a barrel roll and landed on its wheels. And if that wasn’t enough, it jumped over a line of six vehicles. Musk’s own words, “This is not necessarily a safety optimized car.” Great Scott. Production is supposed to start in 2028.

Let’s be clear, that RCS system will never be road approved. No regulator on Earth is going to certify a car that does barrel rolls over a parking lot. But that’s not the point. The point is what it shows about SpaceX’s control systems. Combine them with a silly fast electric car, use them to pull off some mind-blowing stunts, and you get a demonstration of how precise these systems can be today. Think about what the computer in that car did. It read the car’s attitude many times a second while it was tumbling, fired 10 thrusters in the right order, and set a sports car down on four wheels after exactly one rotation.

That is the same job Starship’s cold gas thrusters do in orbit and the job that will put a ship between the chopsticks. SpaceX took that control loop, put it in a car, and let it do a trick. The trick is silly. The capability isn’t. It shows how far along SpaceX is with these kinds of systems.

What might feel a bit silly during a car reveal is going to be essential stuff on the moon. Just saying. And that’s it for today. Smash that like button. Subscribe for more. This is what fuels the algorithm. And this is how you can help us for free. Check out our epic shirts in your favorite space nerd store. Our all-time favorite Raptor engine design and countless others are there for you to explore. Click the card or the US or worldwide link in the description.

History is being written in real time. If you want to catch the other historic stories from recent weeks, click the video on screen and continue the journey. Thank you very much for watching, and I’ll see you again in the next episode.

[SunkenCiv]

Elon Musk: SpaceX Will Attempt to Catch BOTH Starship & Booster on Flight 15!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di6_DcLjeWE
14:28
VideoFromSpace
2.17M subscribers
6,107 views
October 20, 2026

[telescope115]

I watched Felix this morning. What isn’t clear to me is, if they’re planning on catching both sections, will Tower One be used as well as Tower Two, or just Tower Two for both, at different times.

[SunkenCiv]

I’m not sure anyone knows outside SpaceX; since there’s a major time gap between the two events, could be just one tower will be needed. Good way to practice it.

[frank ballenger]

Give this man a little breathing room.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/57987e9e-24cb-4e81-afb1-e4c49f282862

[ebshumidors]

If I was a new A&P, I’d want to work there.

[SunkenCiv]

“Test it in combat.” [different episode, but works]