JoeKangas

🚀 The time is now! 🚀 After countless hours of work, planning, and refining, Starship Tracking is excited to finally unveil the brand-new website! 🔗 Explore the new website here: Starship-Tracking.com Designed to bring the action covered by Starship Tracking all that much closer to you. From the launch sites to the vehicles themselves, the goal has always been the same: make it easier to follow the incredible things happening with Starship. Thank you to everyone who has followed along, supported our journey, and helped make this possible. There’s so much more to come. The future is being built with Starship. Welcome to the new Starship Tracking Website. Developed by © Starship Tracking | 2026 Not affiliated with or endorsed by SpaceX

Flight 12 (2026-05-22) | Written by @KangasSpaceroo Well we have finally had it. Ship 39 and Booster 19 have lifted off! 221 days since Flight 11. Welcome to Version 3. Attempt 1 Notices all indicated Flight 12 would launch on May 21st. Unfortunately, we would go through several holds and ultimately scrub for the day due to a pin not retracting on the Ship QD arm. Attempt 2 Starship would try again the next day on the 22nd and at 5:30 PM Central, with all 33 engines lit, the first V3 ship and booster would lift off from the brand new Pad 2. Nominal callouts through the ascent. Unfortunately one of the outer Raptor 3 engines would shut down during ascent but Booster 19 successfully reached MECO. Ship 39 would ignite all 6 raptor engines and would separate from Booster 19 nominally. During Booster 19’s boostback flip and burn, Booster 19 would attempt to relight all 33 engines for the boostback burn but would fail to keep its engines lit. Shortly after it would shut down all engines and would gear up for entry. Booster 19 would however be in a roll but would recover before its landing burn. On landing burn, only one Raptor 3 would ignite and Booster 19 would be lost just before impact with the Gulf. As for Ship 39, one Raptor Vacuum would be shut down shortly after T+3:00. However, Ship 39 would push to “orbit”, becoming the first V3 ship to reach its suborbital trajectory. Ship 39 would skip the raptor relight, potentially due to an issue with the engine but we’ll wait for a SpaceX post after the flight. Payload deploy would begin shortly after T+19:30. After an 11 minute deploy sequence, Ship 39’s payload bay door would shut. In total, 20 simlinks and 2 dodger dogs, modified V2 mini starlinks, would be deployed. These dodger dogs were aboard as tech demos of V3 Starlinks and to provide external views of S39’s heatshield. While in the coast phase we would receive the first camera view of Starship from an external camera during flight! At T+45:00, Ship 39 would cross the Karman line officially beginning reentry. As is routine with Starships, we would get views down through the plasma. In addition, we would also catch the simlinks and dodger dogs burning up. It appears as the catch pins survived nicely through reentry. After peak heating, Ship 39 would perform a “Flap Load Test” where the flaps would be tested to the extreme. Following that test, an RTLS banking manuever would be performed where the ship would be tested. Like on Flight 11, Ship 39 would turn sideways as part of the RTLS test and would be “On Target” for its landing position. Shortly before T+1:05:00, Ship 39 would be in its belly flop. Before ignition, Ship 39 would do a slight turn. At T+1:06:07, Ship 39 would light 2 of 3 engines for its landing burn and would SUCCESSFULLY touchdown in the Indian Ocean. Shortly after, Ship 39 would tip over and would explode. This closes out Flight 12. Some minor teething issues with Raptor 3 but otherwise that was a beautiful flight. Bring on Flight 13.

As the year comes to an end at Starbase, the writing team has given me (Ring) the responsibility to write a post regarding Starbase Tracking... I'm not sure where to really start this because this team has amazed me all year long and words are truly hard to find. At the start of 2025, Starbase Tracking had been a thing for only four months... yes, four. The team was pretty strong at the time but we were only tracking Starbase. As far as we were aware and concerned we would never open up to track the Cape or Falcon boosters or anything OTHER than Starbase. As the team continued to grow we started to gain chances to work alongside people, so we did. In April we started to use more and more of @RGVaerialphotos to update the Starbase board. Followed a month later when @FelixSchlang stepped in and provided us flyovers for a good couple of months. To this day we still use RGV in every way we can, and we cannot thank them enough. Moving swiftly along, I decided to really put the foot down and push for a release of the Cape Tracking board. Walking into this we knew it was going to be hard because of the size and limited photos, but we put it together strong. With a release of the Cape board in October we now had two boards under our belt and our team was stronger than ever before. Following this by just days after the release and telling NASASpaceflight they could use our stuff, we joined forces. Now to the current day we have four of our own team members working alongside NSF and couldn't be happier. @NASASpaceflight from the bottom of not just us four, but our entire teams hearts, we thank you. This year has been an absolute blessing for Starbase Tracking and we never imagined we would be where we are today. As of posting this we have: - 4,563 X Followers - 830 Discord Members - 15 Starbase Updaters - 9 Cape Updaters - 9 Discord Updaters - 4 Socials People - 4 Writers To all of you who have supported us, had faith in us, interacted with us, and more... we thank you. We have big plans in 2026 and we can't wait for you to see them. Happy New Years. - Starbase Tracking