SpaceX Detected Massive Problem with Booster V3 after Starship 12 launch...and "Exploded"

SpaceX Detected Massive Problem with Booster V3 after Starship 12 launch...and "Exploded"
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#techalpha
#spacex
#elonmusk
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SpaceX Detected Massive Problem with Booster V3 after Starship 12 launch...and "Exploded"
SpaceX has just completed the full suborbital flight of the latest version of the Starship-Super Heavy launch system.
The achievements from this mission are undeniable, but there were also moments that had everyone holding their breath right from the very first seconds.
Yo chat! Where did the Booster go?!
What exactly happened to the first stage of the newly upgraded Super Heavy booster?
And could this incident affect the launch timeline of the next Starship flight?
Let’s find out in today’s episode of Alpha Tech.
SpaceX Detected Massive Problem with Booster V3 after Starship 12 launch...and "Exploded"
The 408-foot-tall (122-meter) rocket lifted off at 6:30 p.m. EDT on May 22 from Pad 2, a newly designed launch complex at SpaceX’s Boca Chica Beach facility in Texas, less than a day after a technical issue forced the cancellation of the original Flight 12 launch attempt.
SpaceX had high expectations for the upgraded Super Heavy booster during this test flight, including a successful liftoff, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, landing burn, and ultimately a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
All 33 Raptor engines ignited to lift the massive rocket off the pad. The upgraded hot-staging separation system performed as expected, and Super Heavy successfully separated from Starship.
However, the booster did not actually perform as smoothly as many of us initially thought.
Right from the first moments of flight, SpaceX’s engine telemetry showed that one Raptor Version 3 engine failed to ignite. There could be several reasons behind this, but the loss of a single engine still remained within the booster’s fault-tolerance limits during ascent. As we have seen in previous Starship test flights, even with one or several engines failing, the booster was still capable of continuing the mission normally.
At that point, while watching the launch myself, I was still hoping that nothing unusual would happen to this giant machine.
But things started becoming far more concerning when SpaceX suddenly stopped showing live footage of the booster during the next phase of flight — something we would normally expect to see, along with real-time telemetry, during previous launches.
SpaceX Detected Massive Problem with Booster V3 after Starship 12 launch...and "Exploded"
Maybe they temporarily lost connection with the booster, or perhaps they were trying to stabilize the feed again. Of course, that is only speculation for now, and we will need to wait for an official explanation from SpaceX. What do you think happened? Let me know down in the comments.
And by the time we finally saw the booster again, Super Heavy was already falling freely while attempting its landing burn sequence.
This is the most critical propulsion phase of the booster’s return trajectory. The vehicle must slow itself down along its flight path while redirecting back toward the landing zone, requiring a very precise number of engines to reignite and maintain thrust for an exact calculated duration.
And at that moment, the real problem became undeniable.
Several of the booster’s Raptor 3 engines failed to relight, something SpaceX officially confirmed on its website shortly after the launch.
Some engines did reignite, but then shut down earlier than planned, making the required delta-V corrections impossible to achieve. As a result, the booster entered an uncontrolled ballistic trajectory.
Super Heavy failed to complete its return burn and rapidly fell back toward Earth, ultimately crashing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico.

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