I think these videos and the fact that this rockets actually works is one of the inspirational things in my life (and I am almost 40). I grew up loving everything about space (sci fi books and movies, astronomy in school, etc), and it was very bewildering not to see any progress basically for the first half of my life. Now it seems that humanity is back in the game, and it is amazing!
Perhaps kids of my kids would be able to travel to the moon.
This launch got a massive amount of ad time for starlink. But as advertising goes, I'm not complaining about that one - just that saying that the PR was pretty thick there.
The original Starship payload was supposed to be 300 tons. The latest flight was 16. They’ve had to scale everything back because it’s been such a shitshow.
Yet they successfully operate the world's best satellite ISP and reuse their smaller rockets repeatedly. SpaceX is capable of landing a 400 foot corn silo right on top of the chicken coop.
Yeah, I don't think the public understands how far behind they are. SpaceX was supposed to have moon missions in 2023-2024 time frame. NASA has said that Starship's timeline is "significantly challenged" and expects the vehicle will be years late. Apollo for comparison took about 8 years from announcement to moon landing. Space shuttle took about 9 years from approval to first flight. Starship has been in development now about 9 years.
Despite it's iterative approach (and benefit of decades of space technology and learnings) it has been slower than both Apollo and Shuttle.
Keep in mind Starship hasn't even achieved orbit yet.
It's making the 2027 Artimis III moon landing increasingly unrealistic.
> don't think the public understands how far behind they are
The public watches cropped launch videos and then scrolls on to the next issue. Most Americans probably couldn’t say what Starship is.
> it has been slower than both Apollo and Shuttle
For a fraction of the cost.
> It's making the 2027 Artimis III moon landing increasingly unrealistic
The entire Artemis programme has been a boondoggle. But while SpaceX is building a new launch vehicle and tackling propellant transfer, Lockheed can’t stop fucking up a legacy heat shield.
(I’m still like 4:1 on Orion, not HLS, being the reason Artemis 3 is delayed [1].)
> Keep in mind Starship hasn't even achieved orbit yet
It’s in development for reuse at a scale of rocketry we’ve never done before. It’s weird to hold a literal moonshot R&D project to consumer timelines like this.
After this (11) test, if Block 3 and Pad 2 validate (12), we could see an orbital attempt in Q1 ‘26 (13). I’d be shocked if orbital insertion is not succeeded in 2026; the big question is how much refurbishment will be required. (Given SpaceX is basically the only group in the world to have solved this problem, I wouldn’t hold my breath.)
Beyond Artemis, it looks more likely than not that Starship will be delivering cargo to LEO by the end of 2027. This not only represents a major leap in capacity and cost advantage, it obsoletes several rockets on the books in Europe and Asia through the late 2030s.
If anything, I would still count this one in the "refreshing" column.
SpaceX has been having difficulties with several launches and with permitting - and yet, construction continues; Launches continue at as high a pace as they can get away with; make do with their earlier rockets in the meantime (cranking out starlinks launches at an insane pace). They have been more cautious but there is still visible progress. As opposed to others which might have disappeared for a few years, or folded altogether.
I'm pretty NASA signed the deal knowing full well that they were taking a big risk. The chances of Starship HLS being a Long Poll item for Artemis III were high. They chose Starship HLS knowing that it had a long and risky critical path.
And In fairness to NASA....and I may not have all of these details correct, but they didnt have many choices. the NASA Reauthorization Act required them to select two different landers for HLS, but the budget only funded one and under funded them at that. Starship was all that they could afford. Congress has since gone back and funded a second one.
> Apollo for comparison took about 8 years from announcement to moon landing. Space shuttle took about 9 years from approval to first flight. Starship has been in development now about 9 years.
This comparison is very unfair. Nine years ago the big rocket was a dream, not even Starship at the time.
> During his presentation, Musk joked that his strategy for raising money might be to “steal underpants,” do a Kickstarter campaign … and profit.
Contra Saturn V, which had strong funding out the gate.
> Apollo for comparison took about 8 years from announcement to moon landing.
Apollo is not reusable.
It seems to me you compare apples to oranges. SpaceX solves a problem no one have ever solved before. Obviously they going to have set backs and missed deadlines.
SLS took 11 years to first flight and cost $29 billion. First flight was perfect and went around the moon. Starship is estimated to have cost about $10B so far and has had 11 test flights and still hasn't achieved orbit.
SLS can reach the moon from the earth, Starship can't reach the moon on a signel flight and requires 10-40+ tanker flights to fuel one lunar mission. That's a lot of chances for failure.
Even after Starship finally achieve orbit, it's still years away from being able to attempt what SLS did on day one.
The claim is that Starship will eventually be cheaper because of it's re-usability because they target $10M per flight you are talking about $400M for a lunar mission. But $10M per flight is insanely unrealistic. Consider that the Falcon Heavy, which is much, much simpler than Starship, costs around $90-$150M per launch. If we generously assume $50M per launch and 15-20 tanker flights that's around $750M - $1B which is suddenly comparable or could be more expensive than SLS.
Considering that SpaceX does not currently have a fully reusable rocker and if they manage to make Starship fully re-usable each one would need to be spread out a huge amount of flights to start becoming economical.
What's obvious to me, and maybe not everyone here, is the design of Starship is optimized for LEO, not deep space missions. The re-usability features are earth-specific (heat shield tiles, flaps for atmospheric control, landing legs designed for earth gravity). All of this mass is dead weight for a deep space mission.
Notice the HLS variant of Starship depot ships don't re-enter the earth and don't have all this re-usability stuff.
The refueling requirement is a consequence of the design. Starship is too heavy to reach the moon on one launch. It's massive dry mass prevents it from leaving LEO without refueling.
It's design is also not optimized for Mars either. It's optimized for earth operations. Mars has only 1% of the earth's atmosphere requiring completely different aerodynamics. You still need orbital refueling to get there and also back. It needs in-situ propellant production on Mars just to return to earth.
All of this is enormous complexity that hasn't been even close to being demonstrated (remember, Starship still hasn't achieved orbit).
What they are doing is building a ship to deploy Starlink, and wasting NASA funding to do it.
Very clean flight, almost all the way through, despite the intentional missing tiles and new flight pattern. No flap burn through, no issues with simulated Starlink deploy, I don't think they even lost any engines.
They're clearly almost ready to scale this thing, if the next block version doesn't add a ton of problems back on. I'm not sure they're quite at the point of rapid reuse looking feasible, since tiles did come loose near the end of flight; not a problem for stage return, but definitely bad enough to warrant a meaningful correction before a (counterfactual) reflight.
The boostback burn of the booster was short 1 engine (12 of 13 were running), though the one middle-ring engine that didn't light during the boostback burn did light during the first phase of the landing burn.
The hard part of reuse is getting the thing back in flying shape. The booster part is actually just demonstrated, and this flight got us a fully-intact upper stage back, sans a few tiles lost to the wind and the landing being simulated.
I can see room for skepticism on their rapid reuse plans, but skepticism on practicable reuse alone just seems discordant with the demonstrated success.
my favorite part of these has gone from liftoff to the purple plasma glow on re-entry. The glow is so perfect and beautiful it looks like an "artist's rendition" of what re-entry plasma would look like. I think the chopsticks catch still takes the cake just for the absurdity of it. It is a little depressing to realize some people pull things like this off yet i can't get my team to load a csv of records into a database correctly...
What AI do you use to do this? I can definitely get direction on what to do if it doesn't work but haven't found an agent that I can give this task to and it'll actually get it done.
Usually just hand something a header and a few rows and ask it to give me a command/code/whatever to import it. Usually it can give you decent enough code to do a streaming import. Haven’t had any model since like 2023 stumble on import glue code.
The thing Elon does well I feel, is he takes real experts with know-how and talent, and puts them on the cool project they want to work on and just lets them cook.
It sounds like a no-brainer management strategy, but it's surprisingly rare in practice. People will lend on random teams and projects, projects won't try to push any envelope but just be the next thing marketing or product came up with to boost some metrics or acquire some new customer, etc.
Now I might be entirely wrong as I never worked at one of his companies, but it's the impression I get and most of his success, Tesla and SpaceX, I think he really managed to snatch the experts away from where they worked because of that.
At least I think this holds for bootstrapping. And then that top talent left, and now since the major innovations have already landed, probably you can just churn out grunt out-of-schoolers to iterate and keep the lights on.
What I think he does well, perhaps his true genius—-is that he is willing to put the capital into transformative ideas that have an exceptionally long payback and has the patience to wait for those returns.
This isn't really the case. For Falcon 1 he hired a bunch experts but a pretty small handful. Then he hired a lot of really young hungry engineers.
And its also hard to say that 'top talent left'. Because arguable some of the achievements after some of those people left is bigger then before. Tom Mueller for example build the Merlin engine, but claims to be more proud of the team he build that then went on to build Raptor. So clearly even while some talented people left, many others joined.
SpaceX is not 'iterating and keeping the lights on' they are always going for something harder in the next iteration.
Well, I don't mean it's not talented people that join, I'd assume it's all top grade students. But the initial best-in-class experts in the field I mean.
I agree with a small handful, I think that's also necessary. A select few best in class experts is ideal, because too many and they don't have room to lead and start stepping on each other and entering debates and so on.
You take best in class experts in the field, give them a team of top tier workers under them that can follow and deliver. In turn they learn from the best.
I think for Starship and Starlink he followed the same playbook though. He brought in best in class specialists to bootstrap them.
That and the other thing I think he does that's just as important is go get things unstuck. When there is bureaucracy and managers getting in the way he gets it through. Very under appreciated IMO.
the people that hate musk are going to find something wrong with it "The Ship blew up on landing" and the musk lovers will do the opposite when things actually go wrong.
Counterpoint: I dislike Musk because he's narcissist (subtypes: strongly communal, somewhat grandiose) but I don't wanna see spaceX fail. I just don't want abusive individuals in positions of power to have so much influence and to be given credit for the technical achievements of others.
He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. Books documenting SpaceX's early days make it pretty clear that Musk had a pretty significant role in putting in place the kind of thinking that has allowed SpaceX to blow open the commercial space market.
Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.
By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and likely at least flight 16 before anything orbital, likely into the upper 20s before reliable refueling and non-Starlink payloads. Most other rich people haven't done much besides minimally funding small startups or dead end joyrides.
Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).
Yeah, I agree with what you said about Elon's tolerance for risk and continuously betting the company on ever larger projects. I just dislike the common characterization of "billionaire space race", when one of the billionaires is a billionaire because of that "race", while for the other it's just a small side project (relatively to his wealth). But I root for Blue Origin too. Thanks to Bezos' commitment and the real work they have done, they will be flying frequently at some point, and that's good. Everything that keeps up the space boom that SpaceX started is good, from my space nerd perspective. And it wouldn't be good if SpaceX became a monopoly (if we don't consider it a monopoly already).
> he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire
There's a survivorship bias occurring too.
You see the same selection going on with huge commercial real estate winners: they keep doubling down and the majority eventually fail out. You see only the winner, not the failures. “Keep rolling till you crit-fail.”
I don't know much about Tesla's history, but with SpaceX, that definitely plays a role. While their success can be attributed to their engineering practices, their existence can be attributed to managing to get Falcon 1 to orbit on the last launch that the company could afford at the time, while many other companies, both before and after, have failed due to missing that "keyhole".
At that point Tesla was 3 guys with an idea and no money. They got $7.5M of investment, of which $6.5M was Musk's money (and he became chairman). I count that as "starting Tesla", as without his money nothing would happen (first big money from other investors came 2 years later).
They surely had some cash, but I think it was a small contribution compared to Musk's. Given that Musk was $6.5M out of $7.5M series A, and something like $9-10M out of $13M series B, I think it's not possible they contributed more than Musk, unless they put big money into it right at the start (unlikely). I count find any concrete information about how much money the two actual founders contributed (which I consider as evidence that it wasn't much). Do you have some sources on how much they invested?
This is a super tired, wrong talking point. Tesla was basically nothing when Elon bought it. He effectively just bought the name. It's also a tired talking point because even if there was some meaningfully well-developed product he was buying at the time, he still grew the company from basically non-existent to one of the best car manufacturers in the world, which is 99.9% of what matters.
If we're going to criticize people I wish we'd stick to real things to criticize, because there are plenty with Elon. Making stuff up like this just makes anti-Elon people look ridiculous.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
> Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
>considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Sometimes I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space.
The whole nazi thing is just gross to me. Everything surrounding his is repulsive and disappointing to me now. Whether you consider that "hating", I can't be sure.
He's not a nazi though. It's literally only those on the opposite political spectrum saying that. He waved and literally described the motion in words as he was doing it.
That's a completely unfair thing to say. It's a meme at this point even that if you elevate your arm upwards at any angle between 90 and 180 you're automatically treated as having made a nazi salute.
What matters is the context around it, as has always been the case. And the context is not that of a nazi salute.
The people who insist on it being a nazi salute are just disingenuous people pushing an angle for their own virtue signalling. It's tiresome.
As one of the aforementioned, yes I don't mind seeing his projects blow up.
I'm sure Starship will make it to orbit, but I'm betting that the claim of 100 tons to orbit is where it will miss the mark. And that is the crux of the issue IMO -- because getting the new rocket engines to be reliable enough can always be accomplished by dialing back on its efficiency and overall thrust capabilities. I'm waiting to see if they will be able to deliver on its claims.
I find it amazing how sentiment extrapolates. Or maybe different people dominate on different threads.
For ages people took it for granted Starship will succeed - even quoted cost per kg to orbit! Any comment saying it might still fail would be usually ridiculed and downvoted.
Then Starship hit a few failures and the sentiment flipped completely - megalomaniac Musk had his hubris catch up with him.
Now two successful launches later it's all gung ho again and great success.
What I would like to say is that each success increases the overall chance of final success but there's still non trivial hurdles to overcome:
- how well can they reuse the Starship
- how much is the turnaround cost
- how reliable they end up being after N launches
- is the marginal return on building a new Starship positive
A380 for example is a marvel of engineering and a technical success, but overall a commercial failure. I love flying on it, but they're not building them anymore. Similar case for the Concorde.
I wish SpaceX well, I'd wish them even better if Musk wasn't a part of it, and let's see if they can cover the last 20% on this project. It's not a given to me that they will.
Another smashing success. It is cool that they've started adding more explanations and nice footage leading up to the launch. Explaining some of the improvements they are testing out like the crunchwrap heat tiles, I enjoyed the "Live Mas" joke he snuck in there.
Just incredible overall to watch and very inspiring. Few things give me hope for the future like these videos do.
I think they're holding off on going fully orbital until the Ship engines are relatively stable (they try out different things with them almost every flight, and V3 has a significantly improved engine design too), tile losses are relatively under control and they're either ready to start testing Ship catches, or have tested them.
Right now they're in a comfortable testing regime, getting up to near-orbital speed to be able to verify reentry in realistic conditions, while having the freedom to test dummy payload deployments and freedom to risk losing tiles since they will all definitely burn up or splash down within minutes of the ship reentry rather than floating around in orbit for some time.
If they go orbital, they had better be sure they won't leave a ton of tiles behind, and that they will be able to perform a controlled deorbit.
> they're holding off on going fully orbital until the Ship engines are relatively stable
They’re still re-flying Block 2 boosters. Hence intentionally leaving off heat tiles (and re-flying engines). Burning for orbit wouldn’t make sense on an, essentially, already-obsolete vehicle.
Block 3 launches on Flight 12. (It also validates a new pad.) Once that is debugged, SpaceX would be ready for an orbital attempt.
The crazy thing is right after orbital they go for propellant transfer. This is something our species has never done, and it’s ridiculously capability enabling if we can get it even within an order of magnitude of cost expectations.
I think they'll start launching starlink v3 satellites pretty soon, before perfecting reentry let alone rapid reuse. They've demonstrated a zero-gravity engine re-light several times and deployed dummy sats twice, that's all they need to put real satellites in orbit. We could see it on the second or third launch of the block 3 rockets.
I think the tile loss rate will still be important to them before that. Even in such low orbits, any tiles lost would take some time to come down (and might even survive all the way down).
If they can make it so they only lose tiles when in a suborbital trajectory, they may be safe to begin deploying real Starlinks as soon as V3 has proven engine relight.
Oh, do you think so? I thought they're looking very good outside the atmosphere at least, although it's difficult to really tell. I'd be surprised if that holds things up but you could be right.
As you say, it's just difficult to tell, the tile loss seems less dramatic than many used to expect back when the heat shield was relatively early in design, but ultimately only SpaceX knows how much they're passively losing during the coast phase.
All I'm saying is that that's one more factor besides relight that I think will need to be sorted (it might already be sorted, I wouldn't know) before orbit.
Yes, as after it leaves the atmosphere and achieves that 98% of orbital speed, its trajectory wouldn't change much even if it exploded - its engines are turned off after ascent that takes ~9 minutes, then it free-falls for an hour to the other side of the Earth. They target a spot in the Indian Ocean near the west coast of Australia (it's coming from the west). In case of explosion debris would fall to the ocean sooner, farther to the west from Australia. More dangerous part of the flight is ascent (when it gains that speed), as its ground path is near some Caribbean islands, and it can cause problems like on flight 7:
> Around three minutes later, Ship 33 exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands, causing debris to litter the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. While no injuries were reported, the debris caused minimal damage to infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, and prompted airspace closures in the region for over an hour. The FAA ordered SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the breakup, grounding Starship until the inquiry was complete.
Technically, the trajectory of the last couple of flights is a transatmospheric orbit, meaning that if the Earth didn't have atmosphere, it would be an actual orbit.
I think it depends on which specific step fails. The farther into flight it happens, the narrower the area over which the debris is spread. But, I think being over the entire ocean is unlikely, since the trajectory intersects with the planet, and that intersection point would also have to be in the ocean.
Correction: the trajectory only intersects with the planet prior to engine relight testing. After that it's at ~50km [1] (though to be fair, if they make it safely through the relight, all testing so far shows they're likely to make it through most of reentry)
There’s a very short period of time where if it exploded debris would fall on the African continent which is an unavoidable risk of orbital flight out of the US. Other than that it’ll either fall in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean.
They're testing specific things with no need for full orbit, although I think they reach verrrry close to orbital velocity. They want the payload dummies to 'de-orbit' quickly (from a suborbital trajectory). They could easily have gone orbital if they wanted to. I guess we'll see orbital demonstrations after a few splashdowns of v3 stack early next year.
I'm a bit sad that this question is downvoted, because it's a valid question, even if a bit pointed.
First, we don't really know what's there. Because the entirety of the rest of the world is there, and that's a lot!
Second, it's also a bit of a cold war-like thing. A kind of power can be asserted from space. This power can be used for military purposes (just like any other power), and the possibility of this power is real, so, existing, capable powers must ensure that they don't lose their power to the power coming from this new territory. So basically, defense is another purpose.
Third, research doesn't often have an immediate commercial or welfare goal attached to it. Simply because we don't know what we'll find, and how that'll be useful. In this way, one could argue that research is pointless, but I think that would lead to the pointlessness of life itself, philosophically.
Fourth, successful space missions elevate morale, by providing inspiration. It's also a tool for diplomacy, a way to connect nations via a joint effort.
Except for point 2 these are cliches. Thanks to science we pretty much know what's in space and it's not very interesting. So sure, we'll put weapons up there as "defence". But that's not very interesting is it?
So you can have the technology that allows you to comment here (Starlink), or drive home from work (GPS), or cure cancer (various ISS research), or survive as a species, or mine space rocks so we don't fight nor pollute land for some scarce resource, or inspire children to dream big, materials science, water purification/generation, satellite communication, faster travel, physics, and a few more.
I don't think being able to comment here is that valuable, GPS is fine but so were maps, curing cancer won't save anyone from dying anyway, surviving as a species is useless for an individual, mining space rocks won't stop fighting or polluting, I don't see how any of this would inspire children, etc etc. The answer should be obvious and easy to muster, instead we have to dig hard to come up with vague possibilities. That should tell you something.
> So you can have the technology that allows you to comment here (Starlink),
People have been posting on chat / message boards for a few decades now. This is not novel. Not sure the quality of discussion has improved since the modem days (14.4k was my first).
> or drive home from work (GPS)
Tens of millions of us learned how to read maps and road signs once upon a time. You can actually fit several states' worth of maps into most car glove compartments, it is quite wild.
> or cure cancer (various ISS research)
There has been lots of cheering of all the cuts that DOGE made, including cancer and other disease related research and prevention, so this seems a rather moot point.
> survive as a species
Oh yes! First crewed mission to mars according to Musk is just what, 3 years away now?
I think these videos and the fact that this rockets actually works is one of the inspirational things in my life (and I am almost 40). I grew up loving everything about space (sci fi books and movies, astronomy in school, etc), and it was very bewildering not to see any progress basically for the first half of my life. Now it seems that humanity is back in the game, and it is amazing!
Perhaps kids of my kids would be able to travel to the moon.
I'll never forget watching SpaceX launches during the COVID lockdowns. A beacon of hope in troubled times.
Honestly the most surprising thing isn’t that they’re doing all this stuff - they’re live-streaming it; failures and all.
It’s so refreshing in a glossy PR-coated world.
This launch got a massive amount of ad time for starlink. But as advertising goes, I'm not complaining about that one - just that saying that the PR was pretty thick there.
The original Starship payload was supposed to be 300 tons. The latest flight was 16. They’ve had to scale everything back because it’s been such a shitshow.
Yet they successfully operate the world's best satellite ISP and reuse their smaller rockets repeatedly. SpaceX is capable of landing a 400 foot corn silo right on top of the chicken coop.
The fully reusable thing is hard.
Yeah, I don't think the public understands how far behind they are. SpaceX was supposed to have moon missions in 2023-2024 time frame. NASA has said that Starship's timeline is "significantly challenged" and expects the vehicle will be years late. Apollo for comparison took about 8 years from announcement to moon landing. Space shuttle took about 9 years from approval to first flight. Starship has been in development now about 9 years.
Despite it's iterative approach (and benefit of decades of space technology and learnings) it has been slower than both Apollo and Shuttle.
Keep in mind Starship hasn't even achieved orbit yet.
It's making the 2027 Artimis III moon landing increasingly unrealistic.
> don't think the public understands how far behind they are
The public watches cropped launch videos and then scrolls on to the next issue. Most Americans probably couldn’t say what Starship is.
> it has been slower than both Apollo and Shuttle
For a fraction of the cost.
> It's making the 2027 Artimis III moon landing increasingly unrealistic
The entire Artemis programme has been a boondoggle. But while SpaceX is building a new launch vehicle and tackling propellant transfer, Lockheed can’t stop fucking up a legacy heat shield.
(I’m still like 4:1 on Orion, not HLS, being the reason Artemis 3 is delayed [1].)
> Keep in mind Starship hasn't even achieved orbit yet
It’s in development for reuse at a scale of rocketry we’ve never done before. It’s weird to hold a literal moonshot R&D project to consumer timelines like this.
After this (11) test, if Block 3 and Pad 2 validate (12), we could see an orbital attempt in Q1 ‘26 (13). I’d be shocked if orbital insertion is not succeeded in 2026; the big question is how much refurbishment will be required. (Given SpaceX is basically the only group in the world to have solved this problem, I wouldn’t hold my breath.)
Beyond Artemis, it looks more likely than not that Starship will be delivering cargo to LEO by the end of 2027. This not only represents a major leap in capacity and cost advantage, it obsoletes several rockets on the books in Europe and Asia through the late 2030s.
[1] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-...
> how far behind they are.
If anything, I would still count this one in the "refreshing" column.
SpaceX has been having difficulties with several launches and with permitting - and yet, construction continues; Launches continue at as high a pace as they can get away with; make do with their earlier rockets in the meantime (cranking out starlinks launches at an insane pace). They have been more cautious but there is still visible progress. As opposed to others which might have disappeared for a few years, or folded altogether.
I'm pretty NASA signed the deal knowing full well that they were taking a big risk. The chances of Starship HLS being a Long Poll item for Artemis III were high. They chose Starship HLS knowing that it had a long and risky critical path.
And In fairness to NASA....and I may not have all of these details correct, but they didnt have many choices. the NASA Reauthorization Act required them to select two different landers for HLS, but the budget only funded one and under funded them at that. Starship was all that they could afford. Congress has since gone back and funded a second one.
> Apollo for comparison took about 8 years from announcement to moon landing. Space shuttle took about 9 years from approval to first flight. Starship has been in development now about 9 years.
This comparison is very unfair. Nine years ago the big rocket was a dream, not even Starship at the time.
> During his presentation, Musk joked that his strategy for raising money might be to “steal underpants,” do a Kickstarter campaign … and profit.
Contra Saturn V, which had strong funding out the gate.
> Apollo for comparison took about 8 years from announcement to moon landing.
Apollo is not reusable.
It seems to me you compare apples to oranges. SpaceX solves a problem no one have ever solved before. Obviously they going to have set backs and missed deadlines.
Where's SLS?
How much was spent on development of SLS, Shuttle and Apollo?
Why do you think the other competitors thought it would cost $10 billion for a HLS?
Did NASA have $10 billion for HLS?
Where are the suits?
Where did you get this nonsense about orbit? Is the vehicle incapable?
SLS took 11 years to first flight and cost $29 billion. First flight was perfect and went around the moon. Starship is estimated to have cost about $10B so far and has had 11 test flights and still hasn't achieved orbit.
SLS can reach the moon from the earth, Starship can't reach the moon on a signel flight and requires 10-40+ tanker flights to fuel one lunar mission. That's a lot of chances for failure.
Even after Starship finally achieve orbit, it's still years away from being able to attempt what SLS did on day one.
The claim is that Starship will eventually be cheaper because of it's re-usability because they target $10M per flight you are talking about $400M for a lunar mission. But $10M per flight is insanely unrealistic. Consider that the Falcon Heavy, which is much, much simpler than Starship, costs around $90-$150M per launch. If we generously assume $50M per launch and 15-20 tanker flights that's around $750M - $1B which is suddenly comparable or could be more expensive than SLS.
Considering that SpaceX does not currently have a fully reusable rocker and if they manage to make Starship fully re-usable each one would need to be spread out a huge amount of flights to start becoming economical.
What's obvious to me, and maybe not everyone here, is the design of Starship is optimized for LEO, not deep space missions. The re-usability features are earth-specific (heat shield tiles, flaps for atmospheric control, landing legs designed for earth gravity). All of this mass is dead weight for a deep space mission.
Notice the HLS variant of Starship depot ships don't re-enter the earth and don't have all this re-usability stuff.
The refueling requirement is a consequence of the design. Starship is too heavy to reach the moon on one launch. It's massive dry mass prevents it from leaving LEO without refueling.
It's design is also not optimized for Mars either. It's optimized for earth operations. Mars has only 1% of the earth's atmosphere requiring completely different aerodynamics. You still need orbital refueling to get there and also back. It needs in-situ propellant production on Mars just to return to earth.
All of this is enormous complexity that hasn't been even close to being demonstrated (remember, Starship still hasn't achieved orbit).
What they are doing is building a ship to deploy Starlink, and wasting NASA funding to do it.
>wasting NASA funding to do it.
You'll note SpaceX has spent more than NASA on this vehicle.
I'm sure they can have their money back if they want. (Oh no they can't. SpaceX has hit all the milestones and got milestone payments)
>The refueling requirement is a consequence of the design
Seems you don't know this is true for Blue Origins Blue Moon too. The other moon lander
>SLS can reach the moon from the earth
Wrong wrong wrong. TLI
>Starship can't reach the moon on a signel flight
Starship can reach anywhere SLS can if you treat it like SLS
>$29 billion
SpaceX got about $2 billion or so. When do they get the remaining $27 billion?
>still hasn't achieved orbit
This is nonsense. SpaceX has hit orbital velocity.
>What's obvious to me, and maybe not everyone here, is the design of Starship is optimized for LEO, not deep space missions.
If you look well, you'll see the vehicle can be configured for different missions.
I don't know how many times I'll have to tell people the NASA contract is for HLS, not Starship. i.e you haven't seen the lunar vehicle launch once.
>more expensive than SLS
Can't happen either operationally or lifetimewise
Very clean flight, almost all the way through, despite the intentional missing tiles and new flight pattern. No flap burn through, no issues with simulated Starlink deploy, I don't think they even lost any engines.
They're clearly almost ready to scale this thing, if the next block version doesn't add a ton of problems back on. I'm not sure they're quite at the point of rapid reuse looking feasible, since tiles did come loose near the end of flight; not a problem for stage return, but definitely bad enough to warrant a meaningful correction before a (counterfactual) reflight.
Overall they've clearly proven the recipe works.
The boostback burn of the booster was short 1 engine (12 of 13 were running), though the one middle-ring engine that didn't light during the boostback burn did light during the first phase of the landing burn.
Starship re-use is what this entire thing hinges on and we are still few years away from validating this.
The hard part of reuse is getting the thing back in flying shape. The booster part is actually just demonstrated, and this flight got us a fully-intact upper stage back, sans a few tiles lost to the wind and the landing being simulated.
I can see room for skepticism on their rapid reuse plans, but skepticism on practicable reuse alone just seems discordant with the demonstrated success.
They demonstrated tiles withstand single landing - thats far from rapid re-use.
Somehow steel, high temps and ceramics reminds me apple crumble, not re-useable spaceship, but I wouldn’t bet against Elon here.
> The booster part is actually just demonstrated
For the second time.
The booster and most engines were reused in this test flight.
Yep but ship is where this is very difficult and far from validated.
my favorite part of these has gone from liftoff to the purple plasma glow on re-entry. The glow is so perfect and beautiful it looks like an "artist's rendition" of what re-entry plasma would look like. I think the chopsticks catch still takes the cake just for the absurdity of it. It is a little depressing to realize some people pull things like this off yet i can't get my team to load a csv of records into a database correctly...
Loading a CSV into a database is one of the tasks I offload to AI every time now.
What AI do you use to do this? I can definitely get direction on what to do if it doesn't work but haven't found an agent that I can give this task to and it'll actually get it done.
Usually just hand something a header and a few rows and ask it to give me a command/code/whatever to import it. Usually it can give you decent enough code to do a streaming import. Haven’t had any model since like 2023 stumble on import glue code.
I don’t trust “agents” to do things on their own.
SpaceX got so good that even test flights that go well aren't news anymore.
because people that hate elon love to see spacex failure so they can shove it to elon face
The thing Elon does well I feel, is he takes real experts with know-how and talent, and puts them on the cool project they want to work on and just lets them cook.
It sounds like a no-brainer management strategy, but it's surprisingly rare in practice. People will lend on random teams and projects, projects won't try to push any envelope but just be the next thing marketing or product came up with to boost some metrics or acquire some new customer, etc.
Now I might be entirely wrong as I never worked at one of his companies, but it's the impression I get and most of his success, Tesla and SpaceX, I think he really managed to snatch the experts away from where they worked because of that.
At least I think this holds for bootstrapping. And then that top talent left, and now since the major innovations have already landed, probably you can just churn out grunt out-of-schoolers to iterate and keep the lights on.
What I think he does well, perhaps his true genius—-is that he is willing to put the capital into transformative ideas that have an exceptionally long payback and has the patience to wait for those returns.
This isn't really the case. For Falcon 1 he hired a bunch experts but a pretty small handful. Then he hired a lot of really young hungry engineers.
And its also hard to say that 'top talent left'. Because arguable some of the achievements after some of those people left is bigger then before. Tom Mueller for example build the Merlin engine, but claims to be more proud of the team he build that then went on to build Raptor. So clearly even while some talented people left, many others joined.
SpaceX is not 'iterating and keeping the lights on' they are always going for something harder in the next iteration.
Well, I don't mean it's not talented people that join, I'd assume it's all top grade students. But the initial best-in-class experts in the field I mean.
I agree with a small handful, I think that's also necessary. A select few best in class experts is ideal, because too many and they don't have room to lead and start stepping on each other and entering debates and so on.
You take best in class experts in the field, give them a team of top tier workers under them that can follow and deliver. In turn they learn from the best.
I think for Starship and Starlink he followed the same playbook though. He brought in best in class specialists to bootstrap them.
That and the other thing I think he does that's just as important is go get things unstuck. When there is bureaucracy and managers getting in the way he gets it through. Very under appreciated IMO.
the people that hate musk are going to find something wrong with it "The Ship blew up on landing" and the musk lovers will do the opposite when things actually go wrong.
And the many more people he fired through DOGE? What will they do and how justified is that?
Counterpoint: I dislike Musk because he's narcissist (subtypes: strongly communal, somewhat grandiose) but I don't wanna see spaceX fail. I just don't want abusive individuals in positions of power to have so much influence and to be given credit for the technical achievements of others.
He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. Books documenting SpaceX's early days make it pretty clear that Musk had a pretty significant role in putting in place the kind of thinking that has allowed SpaceX to blow open the commercial space market.
Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.
By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and likely at least flight 16 before anything orbital, likely into the upper 20s before reliable refueling and non-Starlink payloads. Most other rich people haven't done much besides minimally funding small startups or dead end joyrides.
Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).
Yeah, I agree with what you said about Elon's tolerance for risk and continuously betting the company on ever larger projects. I just dislike the common characterization of "billionaire space race", when one of the billionaires is a billionaire because of that "race", while for the other it's just a small side project (relatively to his wealth). But I root for Blue Origin too. Thanks to Bezos' commitment and the real work they have done, they will be flying frequently at some point, and that's good. Everything that keeps up the space boom that SpaceX started is good, from my space nerd perspective. And it wouldn't be good if SpaceX became a monopoly (if we don't consider it a monopoly already).
> he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire
There's a survivorship bias occurring too.
You see the same selection going on with huge commercial real estate winners: they keep doubling down and the majority eventually fail out. You see only the winner, not the failures. “Keep rolling till you crit-fail.”
Lots of successful businesses like Nvidia or Standard Oil have a similar story too: https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/how-rockefeller-and-his-...
I don't know much about Tesla's history, but with SpaceX, that definitely plays a role. While their success can be attributed to their engineering practices, their existence can be attributed to managing to get Falcon 1 to orbit on the last launch that the company could afford at the time, while many other companies, both before and after, have failed due to missing that "keyhole".
He didn't start Tesla, he was their lead Series A investor and gradually took over.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/12/29/how-much-equit...
At that point Tesla was 3 guys with an idea and no money. They got $7.5M of investment, of which $6.5M was Musk's money (and he became chairman). I count that as "starting Tesla", as without his money nothing would happen (first big money from other investors came 2 years later).
Those people also had the cash to invest.
They had more cash than Musk put in.
They didn't even have the right to the name. Had to buy it from some Euro company
They surely had some cash, but I think it was a small contribution compared to Musk's. Given that Musk was $6.5M out of $7.5M series A, and something like $9-10M out of $13M series B, I think it's not possible they contributed more than Musk, unless they put big money into it right at the start (unlikely). I count find any concrete information about how much money the two actual founders contributed (which I consider as evidence that it wasn't much). Do you have some sources on how much they invested?
I'm not saying they put in more cash. I'm saying they had more cash but left it in the bank rather than investing
Ah, okay. So it was 3 guys that didn't want to put much of their money into Tesla, and Musk who did.
This is a super tired, wrong talking point. Tesla was basically nothing when Elon bought it. He effectively just bought the name. It's also a tired talking point because even if there was some meaningfully well-developed product he was buying at the time, he still grew the company from basically non-existent to one of the best car manufacturers in the world, which is 99.9% of what matters.
If we're going to criticize people I wish we'd stick to real things to criticize, because there are plenty with Elon. Making stuff up like this just makes anti-Elon people look ridiculous.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
> Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
>considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Sometimes I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space.
> I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space
You’re seriously arguing the descendants of those peasants aren’t better off for it?
The whole nazi thing is just gross to me. Everything surrounding his is repulsive and disappointing to me now. Whether you consider that "hating", I can't be sure.
He's not a nazi though. It's literally only those on the opposite political spectrum saying that. He waved and literally described the motion in words as he was doing it.
I believe the woman who gave him his Auschwitz tour leans politically conservative and yet...
Ok. If it's no big deal, please video yourself doing the same motion. I'll wait.
If you can't do this one simple task, then just stop defending him. If you can't do a simple wave, then what are you afraid of?
That's a completely unfair thing to say. It's a meme at this point even that if you elevate your arm upwards at any angle between 90 and 180 you're automatically treated as having made a nazi salute.
What matters is the context around it, as has always been the case. And the context is not that of a nazi salute.
The people who insist on it being a nazi salute are just disingenuous people pushing an angle for their own virtue signalling. It's tiresome.
Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55MtlRBXwU0
Bet you won't accuse him of the same thing as you do Musk, just like the media and everyone else. Hypocrisy at its finest.
What a crummy edit - doesn't even fully clip out the parts where he is putting both of his hands on his checks! This is your equivalence?
As one of the aforementioned, yes I don't mind seeing his projects blow up.
I'm sure Starship will make it to orbit, but I'm betting that the claim of 100 tons to orbit is where it will miss the mark. And that is the crux of the issue IMO -- because getting the new rocket engines to be reliable enough can always be accomplished by dialing back on its efficiency and overall thrust capabilities. I'm waiting to see if they will be able to deliver on its claims.
Mission success, apparently. Next flight (in 2026) will launch next generation of Starship.
Relevant primary source: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-11
The video and info: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-11
(Liftoff is around 33 mins in)
I find it amazing how sentiment extrapolates. Or maybe different people dominate on different threads.
For ages people took it for granted Starship will succeed - even quoted cost per kg to orbit! Any comment saying it might still fail would be usually ridiculed and downvoted.
Then Starship hit a few failures and the sentiment flipped completely - megalomaniac Musk had his hubris catch up with him.
Now two successful launches later it's all gung ho again and great success.
What I would like to say is that each success increases the overall chance of final success but there's still non trivial hurdles to overcome:
- how well can they reuse the Starship
- how much is the turnaround cost
- how reliable they end up being after N launches
- is the marginal return on building a new Starship positive
A380 for example is a marvel of engineering and a technical success, but overall a commercial failure. I love flying on it, but they're not building them anymore. Similar case for the Concorde.
I wish SpaceX well, I'd wish them even better if Musk wasn't a part of it, and let's see if they can cover the last 20% on this project. It's not a given to me that they will.
Another smashing success. It is cool that they've started adding more explanations and nice footage leading up to the launch. Explaining some of the improvements they are testing out like the crunchwrap heat tiles, I enjoyed the "Live Mas" joke he snuck in there.
Just incredible overall to watch and very inspiring. Few things give me hope for the future like these videos do.
Taco bell, taco bell, product placement for taco bell
Nacho, burrito, and enchirito, taco bell...
Still not orbital?
Well done, of course, props and snaps. But I'm looking forward to it getting up to full speed, and being able to get down from that.
I think they're holding off on going fully orbital until the Ship engines are relatively stable (they try out different things with them almost every flight, and V3 has a significantly improved engine design too), tile losses are relatively under control and they're either ready to start testing Ship catches, or have tested them.
Right now they're in a comfortable testing regime, getting up to near-orbital speed to be able to verify reentry in realistic conditions, while having the freedom to test dummy payload deployments and freedom to risk losing tiles since they will all definitely burn up or splash down within minutes of the ship reentry rather than floating around in orbit for some time.
If they go orbital, they had better be sure they won't leave a ton of tiles behind, and that they will be able to perform a controlled deorbit.
> they're holding off on going fully orbital until the Ship engines are relatively stable
They’re still re-flying Block 2 boosters. Hence intentionally leaving off heat tiles (and re-flying engines). Burning for orbit wouldn’t make sense on an, essentially, already-obsolete vehicle.
Block 3 launches on Flight 12. (It also validates a new pad.) Once that is debugged, SpaceX would be ready for an orbital attempt.
The crazy thing is right after orbital they go for propellant transfer. This is something our species has never done, and it’s ridiculously capability enabling if we can get it even within an order of magnitude of cost expectations.
I think they'll start launching starlink v3 satellites pretty soon, before perfecting reentry let alone rapid reuse. They've demonstrated a zero-gravity engine re-light several times and deployed dummy sats twice, that's all they need to put real satellites in orbit. We could see it on the second or third launch of the block 3 rockets.
I think the tile loss rate will still be important to them before that. Even in such low orbits, any tiles lost would take some time to come down (and might even survive all the way down).
If they can make it so they only lose tiles when in a suborbital trajectory, they may be safe to begin deploying real Starlinks as soon as V3 has proven engine relight.
Oh, do you think so? I thought they're looking very good outside the atmosphere at least, although it's difficult to really tell. I'd be surprised if that holds things up but you could be right.
As you say, it's just difficult to tell, the tile loss seems less dramatic than many used to expect back when the heat shield was relatively early in design, but ultimately only SpaceX knows how much they're passively losing during the coast phase.
All I'm saying is that that's one more factor besides relight that I think will need to be sorted (it might already be sorted, I wouldn't know) before orbit.
They go up to 98% of orbital velocity on purpose to ensure they don’t create space junk if something goes wrong.
If it gets up to that speed and something goes wrong, is the entire possible crash trajectory over the ocean?
Yes, as after it leaves the atmosphere and achieves that 98% of orbital speed, its trajectory wouldn't change much even if it exploded - its engines are turned off after ascent that takes ~9 minutes, then it free-falls for an hour to the other side of the Earth. They target a spot in the Indian Ocean near the west coast of Australia (it's coming from the west). In case of explosion debris would fall to the ocean sooner, farther to the west from Australia. More dangerous part of the flight is ascent (when it gains that speed), as its ground path is near some Caribbean islands, and it can cause problems like on flight 7:
> Around three minutes later, Ship 33 exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands, causing debris to litter the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. While no injuries were reported, the debris caused minimal damage to infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, and prompted airspace closures in the region for over an hour. The FAA ordered SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the breakup, grounding Starship until the inquiry was complete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7#Mission...
It's fully orbital speed but the trajectory is steep enough such that it'll come back down in the Indian ocean whether they maintain control or not.
Technically, the trajectory of the last couple of flights is a transatmospheric orbit, meaning that if the Earth didn't have atmosphere, it would be an actual orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatmospheric_orbit
I think it depends on which specific step fails. The farther into flight it happens, the narrower the area over which the debris is spread. But, I think being over the entire ocean is unlikely, since the trajectory intersects with the planet, and that intersection point would also have to be in the ocean.
Correction: the trajectory only intersects with the planet prior to engine relight testing. After that it's at ~50km [1] (though to be fair, if they make it safely through the relight, all testing so far shows they're likely to make it through most of reentry)
[1] https://x.com/planet4589/status/1977917833825730792
There’s a very short period of time where if it exploded debris would fall on the African continent which is an unavoidable risk of orbital flight out of the US. Other than that it’ll either fall in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean.
They go above orbital velocity, they are avoiding an orbital trajectory.
A rapid unscheduled decomposition at that height will accelerate at least some junk into orbit.
Are you going to say the same thing about their 500th suborbital test?
They're testing specific things with no need for full orbit, although I think they reach verrrry close to orbital velocity. They want the payload dummies to 'de-orbit' quickly (from a suborbital trajectory). They could easily have gone orbital if they wanted to. I guess we'll see orbital demonstrations after a few splashdowns of v3 stack early next year.
Why are we going into space? Don't we already know what's there?
I'm a bit sad that this question is downvoted, because it's a valid question, even if a bit pointed.
First, we don't really know what's there. Because the entirety of the rest of the world is there, and that's a lot!
Second, it's also a bit of a cold war-like thing. A kind of power can be asserted from space. This power can be used for military purposes (just like any other power), and the possibility of this power is real, so, existing, capable powers must ensure that they don't lose their power to the power coming from this new territory. So basically, defense is another purpose.
Third, research doesn't often have an immediate commercial or welfare goal attached to it. Simply because we don't know what we'll find, and how that'll be useful. In this way, one could argue that research is pointless, but I think that would lead to the pointlessness of life itself, philosophically.
Fourth, successful space missions elevate morale, by providing inspiration. It's also a tool for diplomacy, a way to connect nations via a joint effort.
Except for point 2 these are cliches. Thanks to science we pretty much know what's in space and it's not very interesting. So sure, we'll put weapons up there as "defence". But that's not very interesting is it?
I think it's pretty interesting.
So you can have the technology that allows you to comment here (Starlink), or drive home from work (GPS), or cure cancer (various ISS research), or survive as a species, or mine space rocks so we don't fight nor pollute land for some scarce resource, or inspire children to dream big, materials science, water purification/generation, satellite communication, faster travel, physics, and a few more.
I don't think being able to comment here is that valuable, GPS is fine but so were maps, curing cancer won't save anyone from dying anyway, surviving as a species is useless for an individual, mining space rocks won't stop fighting or polluting, I don't see how any of this would inspire children, etc etc. The answer should be obvious and easy to muster, instead we have to dig hard to come up with vague possibilities. That should tell you something.
> So you can have the technology that allows you to comment here (Starlink),
People have been posting on chat / message boards for a few decades now. This is not novel. Not sure the quality of discussion has improved since the modem days (14.4k was my first).
> or drive home from work (GPS)
Tens of millions of us learned how to read maps and road signs once upon a time. You can actually fit several states' worth of maps into most car glove compartments, it is quite wild.
> or cure cancer (various ISS research)
There has been lots of cheering of all the cuts that DOGE made, including cancer and other disease related research and prevention, so this seems a rather moot point.
> survive as a species
Oh yes! First crewed mission to mars according to Musk is just what, 3 years away now?
Or just more people being exposed to the blue marble effect the better.
We also know what isn't there, and thus we plan to put it there.
Nuclear weapons right?
Starship can't do that.
Think more along the lines of communications satellites and humans on other planetary bodies.
Teapots.