SpaceX's Starship V3 megarocket will do something completely new on Flight 12 — take a good look at itself

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about Tuesday's (May 19) planned test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket. For starters, it will be the first launch of Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — in nearly seven months. And, while the mission will be Starship's 12th overall, it will mark the debut of the advanced new V3 vehicle, which features a number of important modifications and upgrades compared to its predecessors. (That helps explain the long launch lacuna.) Finally, while Starship will fly a familiar suborbital trajectory on Flight 12, it will do something completely new while it's up there — take a good, long look at itself. The Flight 12 plan calls for Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, to deploy 22 dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband spacecraft. These will be "similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 12 mission description . That's an important detail: SpaceX has said that one of Starship's main tasks when it comes online will be to finish building out the Starlink megaconstellation. (Other key jobs will be ferrying astronauts to the lunar surface for NASA's Artemis program and helping set up a colony on Mars .) That number marks a considerable increase over previous Starlink flights, during which Ship has carried eight or 10 such mass simulators. And there's another important difference as well — the Flight 12 dummy-Starlink batch includes two inspector spacecraft. …