SpaceX has delayed Starship Flight 12 once more. Elon Musk announced the test flight of the new Starship Version 3 — featuring Raptor 3 engines and a redesigned booster — is now targeting early to mid-May, pushed back from an already-slipped April window. [1]

The delay is the latest in a pattern. Musk said in March that Flight 12 was "4 to 6 weeks away," pointing to a late April target. That moved to May after Reuters reported on April 3 that the next test would slip by a month. [2] Now even that timeline has softened to "early to mid-May," according to Florida Today. [3]

The V3 configuration is the most ambitious upgrade yet: new engines, a larger payload fairing, and structural changes aimed at making Starship genuinely reusable for orbital operations. An explosion at Starbase during testing added to the schedule uncertainty. [4]

The delays matter beyond SpaceX. NASA's Artemis program depends on Starship as its lunar lander. Every month Flight 12 slips, the Artemis III crewed moon landing — already years behind its original timeline — slides further into abstraction. Musk's ambitions for Mars colonization require a flight rate that V3's debugging cycle is nowhere close to achieving.

For now, the world's biggest rocket waits on a Texas launchpad. The Gulf Coast sky is patient. Musk's timeline is not.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo.