Indeed SpaceX is boiling multiple oceans at the same time and betting the timing will align.

-- SpaceX is building a starship factory, not just starship. The market won't deliver enough demand, they need to create their own

-- V3 Starlink constellation targets 100k sats. With 50 sats per flight (100t to orbit) you need 2000 flights to build constellation and then 400 flights per year to replace sats after 5y lifespan.

-- There was that idea of ballistic human travel but this is unlikely to materialize

-- There also was solarsat/powersat where solar power is beamed from space and if you massaged your math the right way the numbers were ~promising

-- AI saves the day. We "need" 1mln AI sats. That solves the demand and justifies the spending. for now

the demand for bandwidth is infinite… this used to mean copper -> fibre, but it’s that squared for orbital bandwidth, as they lower and close up the sat formation, the antenna gets smaller and the data rate gets faster … I think Musk killing all terrestrial telcos is quite likely

> Telecommunications.. Can scale only so much. Starlink is cool. Compared to Iridium it's way way cheaper. But demand is .. modest? It seems to only beats fiber on the ground in special situations

It is not designed to compete with finer. Go somewhere truly remote and see how it’s changing the world very quickly. I’ve seen it first hand in Arctic Canada, Australia and North Africa. Before starlink the best they had was dialup. Now they video chat family and doctors, do school online and so much more. Easily a few billion people will use it.

You also forgot about AI data centres in orbit, on which SpaceX have pegged virtually all their valuation in.

Could you elaborate on your counterpoint?

Genuinely interested. How does or doesn't an existing satellite constrain other operators from desirable orbits? Is it irrelevant because many satellites can share the same orbit at different phase angles (i.e. satellite train), and there are more than enough similar orbits to go around? How many spacecraft would it take to actually be a concern (accounting for attrition from end-of-life ones going out of service, and the point of crowding where diminishing spatial/temporal buffers available for the collision avoidance adjustments needed to practically maintain your desired orbit become too risky).

Today's launch was the 3rd largest payload ever put in orbit (52 tons). Only Skylab (77 tons) and Buran (80 tons) exceed it.

The Starlink V3 sats launched today are much bigger and heavier than the Starlink satellites they've been launching on Falcon. Even if they fit within the Falcon fairing, they'd be too heavy to launch on F9.

> skeptic would claim their engines can’t take a real launch payload weight.

full duration full throttle burns of Raptor3 are common and I'm pretty sure a part of qc for each new engine anyway. Payload weight doesn't strain the engines, once they're throttled at 100% then they're throttled at 100% no matter how much or how little payload there is.

> a real launch payload weight

Their engineers understand mass, and how to distinguish it.

Falcon 9 used to do that when being tested.

They push them to the limits in testing/development to make them reliable in production.

Starship still in testing/development.

The exploding rockets were all test launches. SpaceX is pretty good at launching rockets successfully:

> Rockets from the Falcon 9 family have a success rate of 99.57% and have been launched 703 times over 16 years, resulting in 700 full successes, two in-flight failures [...], one pre-flight failure [...], and one partial failure [...]. The active version of the rocket, the Falcon 9 Block 5, has flown 633 times successfully and failed once [...], resulting in a 99.84% success rate.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

When I made this comment I was unaware that this most recent launch had in fact also ended in an explosion.

I guess the next defense will be it only exploded after safely delivering payload

Probably, but I assume it would depend on price differentials and payload. Something like constellations of multiple identical satellites could plan to tolerate losses. One-offs like space telescopes not so much.

No, and if you are you’re not familiar with how SpaceX operates.

Those were parts taken from this video: https://www.spacex.com/content/starship/holy-grail-of-rocket...

Article must be wrong.

  > During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both Super Heavy and Ship back to the launch pad, where they'll be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but has not yet attempted it with Ship.

>>Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.

>F9 fits how many?

Zero. Starlink v3 is too big for the F9 payload fairing. It's not just a matter of mass, the diameter and overall volume is important as well. In terms of performance, last I read they're supposed to add 1 Tbps of capacity each, so assuming they all work the first time all 26 would be around 10x the network addition of a full F9 v2 Mini launch. But the larger antennas would have other advantages beyond sheer bandwidth, and they'll be able to start getting more serious about direct to cell.

29 v2 satellites (around 4 times lighter than v3)

I think somebody on the livestream said 60x capacity over Falcon.

"A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible."

I don't think a week is enough to gather data and fix subsequent launch

One can only hope

They could probably generate one with an AI model and he would believe it. No on e in his inner circle contradicts him anyway.

It's incredible to witness what humanity is capable of when pushed to our limits and appropriately motivated. The space race was in many ways a civilizational and existential fight for the U.S. The innovations this spurred in a relatively short span of time (and the risks the astronauts took) are numerous and impressive. I sometimes wonder that if in the absence of adversity, humans tend towards comfort and security and stability. Maybe that's obvious. Maybe most people with full bellies, warm homes, and physical security just aren't motivated to work 16 hour days for years on end and risk lives.

I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.

The reusability is what made the rest of these investments possible. Musk is annoying, but you have to give him credit for it.

"nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9"

well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space

Yes. The Starship program is pushing the limits of engineering, if it fails today it doesn't make it unimpressive

I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy

Blowing something up so hard it almost gets into space is a feat of engineering, even if all it does is rain debris from ahigh.

What was interesting is how short the single engine burn was to bring it from suborbital to orbital. It was just a few seconds. I'm not even sure I saw the altitude change.

ooops - not giving up yet.