SpaceX scrubs Starship Flight 12 attempt

SpaceX called off its planned Starship Flight 12 launch on May 21, 2026, after the countdown sequence encountered repeated holds and the team ran out of time to continue troubleshooting. The scrubbed attempt took place at the company’s Starship launch complex, with live coverage documenting the shifting status through the late afternoon and early evening local time.

According to verified reports, the countdown was ultimately aborted at about 6:40 p.m. CDT (7:40 p.m. EDT). By that stage, controllers had already dipped in and out of multiple holds, and the remaining hold time available under the day’s launch constraints had been exhausted, leaving no option but to stand down.

The critical point came when the countdown was paused at T-minus 40 seconds. Live updates from the attempt indicated that, at that moment, there were less than three minutes remaining in which SpaceX could legally or operationally remain in a hold before they would be required to scrub for the day.

After attempts to restart the automated sequence within that narrow window were unsuccessful, SpaceX scrubbed the launch. The combination of the late-stage hold and the limited remaining hold time meant the team could not fully resolve the issue while still meeting the day’s launch rules.

Following the scrub, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on X that the immediate technical cause involved ground support equipment on the launch tower. He said that “the hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract,” preventing the system from proceeding to liftoff.

Musk added that, if the hydraulic component could be fixed in time, there could be another launch attempt on May 22 at 5:30 p.m. CT (6:30 p.m. ET). That prospective timing framed the work SpaceX teams would need to complete on the tower arm mechanism before resuming the countdown sequence.

Flight 12 was slated to be the debut mission of Starship Version 3, a new configuration of SpaceX’s fully reusable launch system. The vehicle for this attempt was a 407-foot, two-stage stack composed of Super Heavy Booster 19 and Ship 39.

The mission profile for Flight 12 called for a suborbital test. Under the plan, Booster 19 was to perform a controlled descent and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, while Ship 39 would follow a trajectory ending in a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Both splashdowns were intended as part of the test regime, rather than recoveries to land.

SpaceX’s live coverage and local reporting highlighted the significance of Flight 12 as the first outing for the Version 3 hardware, even though the vehicle did not launch on May 21. The scrubbed attempt shifts attention to resolving the tower arm hydraulic issue and determining readiness for the next available launch window.