LC 30: Starship Flight 13's T-0 Abort and Artemis IV

MaxHey, everyone, welcome to Landing the Moon. I'm Max.

BlakeAnd I'm Blake. Max, this was a loud week for Starbase.

MaxLoud is one word for it. So Flight 13, counting down, everybody's staring at the pad, and then nothing.

BlakeZero. Literally at T-0.

MaxFour Raptor 3 engines just didn't light out of 33.

BlakeAnd SpaceX says two of those four are getting swapped before they try again.

MaxTeslarati broke that down Friday, and Techtimes had their own read on the- Read on the ignition gap; we'll get into what actually happened on the pad.

BlakeI want to know if this is routine hardware churn, or something worth watching at that engine count.

MaxOoh, plot twist; you and I already disagree on that one!

BlakeWe do; and it matters beyond the pad. This ties straight into the human landing system timeline for Artemis IV.

MaxPlus the stock side; SpaceX just went public and this scrub apparently didn't sit well with the market. Under one hundred and thirty five dollars as of the scrub.

BlakeWe'll look at what that number is actually telling us.

MaxAnd by the end of the show, we're both putting a real prediction on record for the July twenty third re launch.

BlakeDroned out, written down, no wiggle room later.

MaxNone. So let's get into what actually broke on that pad. Okay, so picture this: the clock hits T-Zero, eleven and a half million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen already loaded into Booster 20, and then... Nothing. No liftoff.

BlakeNothing at all.

MaxNothing at all. Silence, dude. Full abort. Four of the thirty three Raptor three engines just refused to light.

BlakeThat's interesting. First T-zero abort in program's history, right?

MaxNASASpaceflight dot com times confirmed at Friday. Thursday evening at Starbase this thing was seconds from the fastest stack to launch turnaround SpaceX had ever attempted.

BlakeSo walk me through the actual threshold. How many engines can fail before the computer pulls the plug?

MaxTelemetry reportedly showed only twenty nine of thirty three lit clean, and the posted flight parameters allow at most three failed engines on startup.

BlakeThey had four.

MaxThey had four. Yeah, one engine over the line and the whole stack shuts itself down.

BlakeNo explosion, no damage?

MaxNone. Booster Twenty, Ship Forty. Forty both intact, both rolled back to the hangar for inspection.

BlakeSo what actually broke?

MaxMusk went on X within hours and named it directly: two flagged Raptor engines physically pulled and replaced, not a software patch.

BlakeThat's a hardware call, not a sequencing bug.

MaxExactly, and that's the part that should worry people more than a normal scrub.

BlakeBecause a software fix is a Tuesday, a hardware swap on a

Speaker 3Thursday.

BlakeBut when a cluster of Thirty-three engines is a different conversation.

MaxLook at you, already pressure testing the timeline.

BlakeSomeone has to. NASASpaceflight has SpaceX now targeting July 23rd for the second attempt

MaxA weak turnaround, which honestly, if it holds, is kind of insane for a rocket this size.

Blakeif it holds.

MaxThere it is.

BlakeSo if four engines out of 33 sounds small, 12%, but if two of those need a physical replacement basement, the question is whether this cluster can actually run at scale without this happening again.

MaxOkay, building on that abort, let's get into why four engines actually went dark. Raptor 3 runs full flow staged combustion, and Techtimes clocked its chamber pressure at 350 bar, highest of any operational engine flying.

BlakeWalk me through what that pressure number actually buys you.

MaxMore thrust, tighter tolerances, less margin for error, and here's the catch, Raptor 3 has no chamber spark plug. The preburner exhaust itself ignites the main chamber.

BlakeSo if a pre-burner doesn't hit its thermal threshold fast enough.

MaxThe engine just doesn't light. Exactly. On all 33, Techtimes says ignition runs in a staggered sequence through ground equipment, computer checking chamber pressure and turbopump spin up before it releases the clamps.

BlakeSo Four missed the window, fine. But Musk isn't patching software. He's pulling two engines off the booster physically.

MaxRight, that's the tell. Sequencing bug you fix it in the flight computer overnight. Swapping hardware means someone traced it to an actual part.

BlakeWhich lines up with what Techtimes is describing too—pointing at hardware not logic.

MaxI mean, would you trust thirty three engines coming off a production line that's moving this fast?

BlakeThat's actually where I want to push. Flight Twelve lost an upper stage engine during ascent back in

Speaker 3November.

BlakeAnd back in May; now Flight Thirteen loses four before it clears the pad.

MaxTwo different failure points on two different sections of the vehicle, though.

BlakeSure, different hardware, but it's the same open question: is a thirty three engine cluster reliable at this rate, or is SpaceX still figuring that out in public?

MaxYou're just itching for a delay.

BlakeI'm itching for a number nobody's published: how many static fires does one engine get? Get before it's cleared to fly,"

MaxFair-that's not out

Blakethere.

Maxthere.

Blakewhich is kind of the point.

MaxSpeaking of what this flight was actually supposed to prove-

BlakeThe in-space relight-the one Flight Twelve never got to attempt after it lost that engine.

MaxAnd that thing ties straight into Artemis IV. Stepping back from the pad, the real prize on Flight 13's manifest is an in-space "Raptor Relight." Flight 12 skipped that test after losing an engine on ascent.

BlakeRight. And that relight is basically the whole ball game for Artemis 4.

MaxWalk me through why for anyone who doesn't know what HLS even stands for.

BlakeHuman Landing System, the Starship variant NASA's paying SpaceX to build for the crewed lunar touchdown.

MaxAnd that variant can't launch with full tanks; it needs orbital refueling, other Starships docking and transferring propellant before it's got enough fuel to land and get back off the moon.

BlakeMultiple refueling flights stacked one after another, and every single one of those transfer missions depends on proving an engine can relight reliably once it's already in space, away from ground support equipment, not on a pad with no tower, no ground crew standing by.

MaxWhich is exactly the box Flight 13 was supposed to check, and it didn't even get off the ground.

BlakeTechtimes was direct with this: they wrote the abort carries consequences for whether Artemis can hold its 2028 timeline.

Max2028—that's the date everyone's been circling.

BlakeAnd Space.com is now reporting SpaceX is targeting July 23rd for the second Flight 13 attempt. That's a web report, so I'd hold it loosely given the program's track record.

MaxThere! But even if they hit that window- Still, the relight test is still sitting there, unproven. That's my whole worry. NASA doesn't just need one successful relight. It needs proven, repeatable relights across a chain of refueling flights before anyone signs off on a crewed landing. You're doing the thing again-stacking risk on risk before the rocket's even flown twice. I'm doing math on a contract with a fixed date. If the relight slips past July twenty third, every downstream refueling flight slips with it. Wait, so this one relight is basically a bottleneck for the entire HLS schedule? That's the read-one relight holding up a chain of missions holding up twenty twenty eight. Okay, that's a much bigger deal than four engines not lighting on a Thursday night. And it gets messier once you follow the money because SpaceX isn't a private company anyone can shrug off at anymore. Shifting to the money side, this is where it gets real for shareholders. SPCX priced its IPO at one hundred thirty five dollars back in June.

BlakeRight, the big public debut everyone was buzzing about.

MaxWell, Beincrypto reported the stock closed at one hundred thirty one dollars and eleven cents after the scrub, first close under the IPO price ever. Wait, below one hundred thirty five dollars? On a scrub not even a failed launch? On a scrub, and Beincrypto noted it kept sliding in aftermarket trading afterwards. Afterwards." "OK, that's a gut check for anyone who bought in on hype.

BlakeWalk me through what changes here: a year ago this was NASA's problem and SpaceX's problem; now it's retail investors' problem too.

MaxEvery anomaly is basically a live earnings event now.

BlakeExactly, and Starlink V3 sats sat on that booster. Every week Flight Thirteen slips, that's deployment revenue

MaxMm

Blakepushed right, sitting on a balance sheet Congress can point to.

MaxSo now a lawmaker doesn't need engineering talking points, they just They just pull up a stock chart. That's the shift.

BlakeHLS Contract Performance Reviews used to be an internal NASA conversation.

MaxAnd now it's a Capitol Hill hearing with a ticker symbol attached.

BlakeElon Musk actually posted on X warning short sellers their survival odds are quote very low holding positions against SpaceX over time.

MaxBold thing to say the same week you close under IPO.

BlakeIt reads like confidence. Or it reads like a CEO managing a nervous market in real time.

Speaker 4I mean probably both. He's not wrong that SpaceX usually fixes pad issues fast. Sure, but does a scrub and swap this close to a public debut invite more scrutiny of the Artemis promises or less? More. Every skeptical senator just got a market data point to wave around.

BlakeWhich is a very different pressure calculus than SpaceX operated under a year ago. Building on that stock hit, let's argue the actual engineering, because I don't think this scrub is the disaster you're framing it as.

Speaker 4Okay, make the case.

BlakeThe flight computer saw four engines out of sync and aborted at T-zero. That's the system working—nothing left the pad, nothing burned up, nobody's stacking a new booster from scratch.

Speaker 4Sure, the abort logic worked. I'm not arguing that.

BlakeAnd engine swaps? That's Tuesday at Starbase. Musk said two Raptors get pulled and replaced. That's routine hardware turnover, not a redesign.

MaxHere's my problem: this is Flight Twelve's boost back engines and Flight Thirteen's ignition engines; two flights, two different failure points, same engine line.

BlakeDifferent phases of flight, though.

MaxDoesn't matter if the common thread is Raptor Three at thirty three engine scale. Techtimes flag this directly: The engine's thermal behavior under full thirty three engine pad loading has fewer flight hours logged than Raptor Two had at the same point in its life.

BlakeWait, less flight data than Raptor Two had?

MaxThat's what Techtimes reported: lighter, more powerful, less proven under load. That's not noise; that's a company still learning its own engine while NASA's counting on a 2028 Artemis IV target that was shaky before Thursday.

BlakeOkay, but SpaceX diagnosed this one in hours, not weeks. Musk had the root cause and a fix path out before the sun set on the scrub.

MaxDiagnosing fast doesn't mean the underlying issue is small. Fast diagnosis is a process win, it's not a reliability finding.

BlakeSo what would actually spook you? Because right now- Right now you're treating a nominal abort like it's evidence of something systemic.

MaxFair question. A disqualifying signal looks like this: the same engine failure mode recurring on Flight Fourteen after they say they fixed it, or the in-space relight failing outright.

BlakeOkay, I can work with that line. If they swap engines and it happens again...

MaxThen it's not turbulence anymore, it's a pattern with a name.

BlakeBut until then I'm calling this normal test campaign chaos. Big rocket, thirty-three engines, stuff breaks, they fix

MaxRight;

Blakeit.

Maxand I'm calling it two data points that both point at the same subsystem right before the hardest test in the whole campaign. We're not converging on this one.

BlakeNope, not even a little.

MaxWhich is honestly perfect, because there's a very specific date about to put both our arguments on the clock.

BlakeOh, don't tease that yet.

MaxI'm teasing exactly that. Building on that friction, let's put a date on it. Space.com has liftoff Thursday, July twenty third, window open six forty five p m Eastern at Starbase.

BlakeCountdown's reportedly GO right now as we're recording this, no slip announced yet.

MaxSo here's my marker on record. Relight fails or we get engine trouble again. Either one, I'm done trusting the HLS timeline.

BlakeAnd I'm calling it clean. Thirty-three ignite, stage separation smooth, and the in-space Raptor. The Raptor relight actually fires.

MaxThat relight is the real test. Propellant transfer depends on restart reliability, not just getting off the pad.

BlakeDuly noted, Mr. Consensus Trap, but a clean relight tees up the propellant transfer demo next.

MaxIf it flies at all. Two aboard dates already.

BlakeWait for it Thursday, six forty five Eastern. We check this in seven days, no excuses.

MaxAgreed. Booster Twenty, Ship Forty, on the record.

BlakeLet's see if thirty three engines finally behave. Okay, so quick recap: Four Raptors refused to light, SpaceX swapped two engines, and that alone tells you it was hardware, not software.

MaxThat's interesting, though I'd still argue the pattern across Flight 12 and 13 matters more than the fix itself.

BlakeYou and your consensus traps.

MaxBut if the in-space re-light fails on the 23rd, that's a real HLS problem, not a footnote.

BlakeFair. Either way, July 23rd's the date. To the date, mark it!

MaxWe'll hold ourselves to whatever we predicted today.

BlakeAs we should. Accountability, baby.

MaxIf this helped you actually follow what's happening with Artemis, send it to someone still confused about why we're going back.

BlakeAnd subscribe. We'll be right back on this the moment Flight 13 flies again.

MaxThanks for sticking with us.

BlakeSee you next time!

MaxThe