u/perilun

Its back! More data ....

WTF?

Our submission to the #FutureVisionXPRIZE (https://www.xprize.org/news/lights-camera-moonshot-announcing-future-vision-xprize). The submission is centered on the development of this space based laser constellation powered jet plane. This is an adaption of our first place winner for NASA's Brilliant Minds for Pure Blue Skies Challenge. NASA submission PDF here: https://widgetblender.com/SLEP_Final.pdf

XAI will become the revenue leader soon ... our workers will train the LLM ...

Looks like a higher ROI mission than sample return ... both science and possibly crewed mission value.

I guess in the IPO they put I "Elon can promise whatever he wants and you can't sue him". While a Lunar railgun might be cost effective at creating a large object at NHRO, you need to apply a lot of DV to get that material to say MEO for those datacenters ... say 3 km/s off the moon in the rail gun (100s of g's) and then 3 km/s to put it into a useful low MEO orbit (requires some sort of substantial kick-stage engine or thruster) ... so you need to take the fuel from LEO to the Moon ~6.5 km/s + 3 km/s to get it back to Low MEO. Not much of a savings over just going from the ground to low MEO ~ 10 km/s.

Direct Varda competitor? ... that was fast. Just shows that the ISS is now pointless when it comes to made-in-space.

Can one imagine 6 Starship launch/catch facilities ... there is no commercial use for such capacity that I can envision ... only some Mars fleet that will never happen.

Some more details on Starboat ... and a nice segment on robotic servicing of GEO sats.

This could kill off a bunch of environmental whining (often just a front for another company trying to hold up another).

Looking pretty good ... some leaks from the crunch wrap but tiles looks all there. Eric suggests this is not good enough .... but I think you could do a 48 hour turn with maybe $100,000 robotic inspection and fix of maybe 1000 tiles ...that is enough Rapid Reuse for me.

Yep, tiles are a pain. Even if tiles can't be perfected ... if they are willing to have a week between Ship launches (they will probably have a dozen on standby) this is not a problem. 1) You need to catch and bring ship back to the bay anyway for any mission other than a refuel mission ... to load the next payload. 2) You can have an scanner bot quickly (in 24 h) completely scan all the tiles at high res, then in the next 24 hours have it replace tiles if needed.

What a "better-than-shuttle" but less than perfectly "no-maintenance-heat-shield" can do ... crewed missions! These will be premium priced missions, and after mission auto-looks are no big deal.

Another data point on this. My guess this is not Ms. Shotwell's preferred plan. Post IPO SpaceX may start to squeeze more out of their customer base ... maybe forcing them only a still-to-be-proven Starship. This of course will greatly slow Amazon LEO that is waiting on both New Glenn's return and Vulcan's return (still dealing with SRB review and probably a BE-4 review since we still don't know what happened in the NG engine bay). The end of F9 Transporter missions will really hurt some small companies, especially Varda (where Starfall is now a possibility). So, it looks like Ariane might have an opportunity to become the new Transporter provider before New Glenn returns?

So B+ or A-? It was a great IFT-13 ... everything accomplished to plan except for a softer landing from Super Heavy. 100% Raptor up, maybe an issue with SH down. Good relight = orbital next time with a bunch of Starlink V3s ready for operations. Great upper stage water recovery. My only nit-pic is that the flight video seemed lame compared to earlier test runs.

Can Starlink really scale up that big?

Great for them! Now time to scale up and get some LEO constellation biz.

The DoD is where the real money is. I expect that one day SX will be the #1 gov't contractor.

And now Starlink V3 with IFT-13 (hopefully next week).

Reliability issues with Raptor V3 ... not good news. Onto Raptor V4?