SpaceX has a Major Problem to Launch Starship Thirteenth…Elon reacts

Starship Flight 13 suddenly had to be halted. Not the outcome any of us were hoping for. But this wasn't without reason. The cause is a major problem with the new generation Raptor engine, one that's holding up this historic launch. So, what have SpaceX and Elon Musk explained about it? What's the fix? Let's analyze with AlphaTech in today's episode. Let's go back to July 16th at Starbase, Texas. Ship 40 sits stacked on top of booster 20, carrying 20 Starlink V3 satellites. And everything runs almost suspiciously smooth. The launch window opens at 6.45 p.m. The team is go. And over 5,000 tons of liquid methane and oxygen, roughly the weight of a dozen fully loaded Boeing 747s, flow into the rocket. Weather looks good. Systems look good. The crowd holds its breath. Then the countdown hits its final five seconds. In the final second, the ignition sequence begins. From the drone camera high above the pad, you see smoke and steam billowing beneath the booster. A few engines flare to life. But not all of them. And instantly, everything stops. All of it. The giant rocket just stands there on the pad, as if someone had pulled the plug. On the livestream, the voice of SpaceX's Dan Hewitt comes through, calm but unable to hide the disappointment. No Starship launch today. We'll dig in with the teams, figure out what happened, and figure out when our next attempt is going to be. Minutes later, SpaceX's official account posts exactly one line. Standing down from today's flight test attempt. Short, cold, classic SpaceX. But Elon Musk isn't so cold. About 10 minutes later, he posts on X. Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort. Now, offloading propellant. Next launch attempt, hopefully in a few days. Presumably after the first report landed from the engineering team, he's back on X with the follow-up. To be confident of a good flight, two Raptors will be removed and replaced. Just a few days? Can you believe it? If you're feeling as hyped about this as I am, drop a comment, Go 13 to cheer SpaceX on. Now, this is where the puzzle begins. Two engines to be replaced. But sharp-eyed viewers rewinding the stream's telemetry counted four engines that never lit. The analysis community on X went even further. According to a widely shared diagram, the four positions that failed to ignite were E5, E6, E12, and E13. And they failed in pairs, sitting right next to each other, all in the middle ring of the engine cluster. Not scattered randomly around the outer ring. That detail changes how you look at the whole problem. Think of it this way. You come home, flip the light switch, and four bulbs in the same corner of your living room all stay dark at once. What do you think? Certainly not. What a coincidence. All four bulbs burned out at the same time. You suspect the fuse, the wiring, the thing all four bulbs share. Four engines clustered in one zone, refusing to start together, points very strongly at a systemic issue. Maybe the propellant feed to the inner ring, pressure not hitting its threshold at the right moment, or the thermal conditions in the central section. But wait, if it's a systemic problem, why did Booster 20 sail through its static fire flawlessly? Before we dive deeper, could you take two seconds and hit the subscribe button? Just to check if it still works. Because nobody's touched it all week, and I'm starting to think it's broken. Now, back to the mystery. This is the piece that makes the story so much better. On July 10th, just six days before the launch attempt, Booster 20 test-fired all 33 engines right on the pad. Every one of them lit. Every one of them roared. If those four engines were truly broken, they should have shown their faces that day. So, look at what actually changed in those six days. Not the engines. Not the booster. The sequence. After Flight 12, the flight where the booster flipped a full 90 degrees off course and five engines refused to relight, SpaceX rewrote the ignition sequence from the ground up. New timing. New startup conditions. New alarm thresholds tuned for the multi-engine environment. And here's the thing about a static fire. It is never a perfect copy of launch day. Different propellant load. Different tank pressures. Different software configuration. July 16th was the first time the new sequence ever ran with a fully fueled stack under real launch conditions. The old rules gave those four engines a pass. The new rules did not. The software didn't create the fault. It exposed it. And there's a reason those new rules are so ruthless. The Raptor is a full-flow stage combustion engine. The most complex engine cycle ever flown. During startup, methane and oxygen must meet at exactly the right ratio. At exactly the right millisecond. If an engine drifts outside that window and you light it anyway, the flame doesn't just sputter. An oxygen-rich fire at those temperatures cuts through turbine blades like a torch through wax. This is why the computer would rather kill the entire launch than ignite one engine on bad terms. It's not being cautious. It's refusing to gamble. Which finally explains the two-versus-four mystery. Four engines went dark, but the data tells two different stories. Two of them show genuine hardware anomalies. The kind of readings that mean an igniter, a valve, or a turbopump can no longer be trusted. The other two never got the chance to fail. The computer shut down the whole group before their turn came. And once a Raptor has missed its startup window, you don't repair it on the pad. You can't fully trust it again without tearing it apart. So SpaceX did the SpaceX thing. Pull both out, drop new ones in, fly. On the ground, a heart transplant is far cheaper than open-heart surgery in the sky. Which brings us to the best question of this entire event. Why is losing an engine in flight survivable, but losing an engine at ignition potentially catastrophic? Sounds backwards, right? But think back to October 2012. A Falcon 9 on the CRS-1 mission lost an entire Merlin engine mid-ascent and still completed its mission, delivering cargo to the ISS. In the sky, the rocket already has speed. It's already lighter from burning propellant. And the remaining engines just burn a little longer to compensate. It's like your car losing a bit of power while cruising on the highway. Annoying, but you still make it home. But at T-0, a 5,000 ton rocket needs all 33 engines straining at full power just to lift itself off the ground. Losing four engines at that moment is like an overloaded truck stalling halfway up a steep hill. And it gets worse. Those four dead engines sat on one side of the cluster. The thrust would be lopsided. If the computer had forced the lift off anyway, the rocket could have tilted, slid, and turned the entire launch pad— hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure—into a fireball. History has seen moments just like this. NASA's space shuttle aborted on the pad multiple times after its main engines had already ignited. The first in 1984 on STS-41-D, when the computers caught an anomaly and shut everything down just seconds before the solid rocket boosters were due to light. And once those things ignite, nothing on Earth can turn them off. The astronauts that day sat on top of a bomb that a computer had just diffused. So, the abort on July 16th was not a starship failure. It was the moment the safety system proved exactly how much it can be trusted. The only question left is, how long until it flies again? Can you guess? Drop your prediction in the comments. Let's see who gets it right. I'll go first. Wednesday afternoon, July 22nd. Your turn. One hint before you answer. Maritime authorities have just updated the Indian Ocean Navigational Warning for Flight 13. July 20th as the primary date, with alternates through the 25th. And the forecast at Starbase looks good for those days, so don't expect a weather delay. If anything pushes this launch again, it won't be the sky, and it won't be transport logistics either. Ship 40 and Booster 20 were both rolled back to the production site on the morning of July 17th, one after the other, which means rolling back out on the night of the 19th, or the morning of the 20th, is entirely on the table, just in time for the earliest launch date. The pieces are moving fast. Still, there's a little sting of regret in all this, isn't there? Whether by design or by chance, SpaceX picked July 16th, the day when, 57 years earlier, the whole world held its breath as a Saturn V carried Apollo 11 away from Earth. If Flight 13 had flown that day, it would have been one of the most beautiful mirror images in spaceflight history. The generation of rockets that first took humans to the moon, and the generation of rockets that will take us back. History didn't give us that gift, but maybe it's just saving it for another day. And while Starbase swaps engines, the space race is heating up on a very different front. Not on the launchpad, but inside employment contracts. On that same July 16th, news broke that Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is rolling out a far more generous equity package for its employees. Why? Because ever since SpaceX went public on June 12th, in the largest IPO in history, roughly 4,400 of its current and former employees have become paper millionaires, from executives all the way down to welders. About 400 of them are now worth over $100 million. Blue Origin had to respond or watch its talent walk out the door. But the new package comes with a controversial catch. Leave for a competitor within 18 months, and you forfeit every share. Financial advisors have a name for it—golden handcuffs. The war for talent between these two giants is now every bit as brutal as the race to orbit. And in a bitter twist, the very abort on the afternoon of July 16th sent SpaceX stock down more than 3% in after-hours trading. A reminder that from now on, every second on the Starbase launchpad is being watched by Wall Street. Back to the rocket lying in the megabay. Two new engines will go in. Data from thousands of sensors will be dissected down to the millisecond. And somewhere in that mountain of data lies the final answer to why four musicians in a 33-piece orchestra went silent at the exact moment the conductor raised the baton. On July 16th, 1969, humanity left Earth to touch the moon. On July 16th, 20,000's 26, a computer decided that humanity should wait a few more days. And maybe that's the most astonishing part of all. We've gone from betting the lives of three astronauts to building machines wise enough to say, on their own. Not today. Once again, a huge thank you to everyone still here at the end of the video. You're the best part of this channel. Have a great day. And don't forget to subscribe, because Flight 13 is about to fly. And you'll want to be here when it does. With Starship coming to 39A, the launch complex will soon have two operational pads for two very different rockets with Starship and Falcon Heavy. It has been awesome to see the 39A Starship program come to life over several years, and it's going to be exciting to soon see a Starship launch from this historic pad. Yeah, we're super excited. But 39A isn't SpaceX's only pad in Florida. Just a few miles down the coast at Space Launch Complex 37, the first of two Starship launch pads at that site is quickly taking shape. Pad 37A is targeted to be ready for flight operations early next year, which is very fast considering we only started construction on the pad in November.