Starship 12 failure analysis

6/12/26:

Not claiming to be a steely-eyed rocket man here. However, I can always give my two-cents as to what happened that caused the failure of the booster to perform as intended on flight 12.

In my opinion, the whole problem boils down to timing. The rocket engines in the second stage have to light up just at the right time. These same rocket engines have to be gimbaled so that the engines are pointed at exactly the right angle at the same time. These same rocket engines have to hit the top of the booster at exactly the right place. All of this is a complicated maneuver that depends upon exactly correct timing. If anything happens at the wrong time or wrong place, the whole process will fail. I think that is exactly what happened.

It's not an engine problem, in other words.

It is probably easily corrected, in other words. We should see flight 13 within a few weeks.

Jun 10, 2026:

This video is from Alpha Tech. (Update: WTF??? How did WAI get in embedded in there?? Was that a mistake?! Something odd here...) It is probably a bit too long, or I'm too impatient. Take your pick!

In my opinion (which nobody asked for), I think it is obvious even to a non-steely-eyed rocket man that it couldn't have been SpaceX's intent to have its Starship's plume hit the grid fin of the booster! Therefore, the booster was out of its expected position.

If the booster is out of position, then obviously something went wrong with the hot staging. Everything else follows from this important fact.

You don't need a twenty plus minute video to explain that.

I don't want to be too critical ( even though I am anyway ), it is mostly an informative video.