"That was absolutely incredible," SpaceX Build Reliability Engineer Amanda Lee said during live launch commentary. "A huge congrats to all the teams here."
"Great work by the SpaceX team!!!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the flight.
Amazing accomplishment. Always a thrill to watch live.
SpaceX conducted 134 launches in 2024 and is targeting a record-breaking 160-170 orbital launches in 2025.
It was a significant progress, but I won't call it "nailed it". As there was an damage or explosion on re-entry where the skirt of the starship got damaged. And we could see pretty significant damage on one of the fins.
Fin damage isn't ideal, but even if they had to replace the fins every flight, the cost would be quite low in comparison to replacing the entire second stage, which is necessary on the Falcon 9.
SpaceX has two big things going for it: Starship/Raptor factories churning them out cheap, and themselves as a paying customer in Starlink who can dogfood a risky new launch platform.
Now that they're demoed pez-dispensing v3 dummy Starlinks, I'd assume they'll start launching real ones within ~1-3 months. At that point as long as they can deliver payload to orbit and catch the booster the program is operational and they'll start switching their own Falcon 9 launches over.
The HLS timeline is definitely dicey, but whether Starship winds up being the blocker remains to be seen. Otherwise they've now succeeded enough to "lean launch" Starship with equal/better capabilities to any other existing orbital rocket, and Starlink can fund indefinite further tests/iterations on the rest of their roadmap features (which no one else has).
The fins were intentional… they said on the live stream they were testing different types of tiles and missing tiles to see how the substructure would behave.
Given the results of test 10 (successful splash down of Starship), any ideas what test 11 will entail? Could we be looking at a chopstick catch of the Starship itself?
Incredible achievement, but what is more incredible is how many people (including almost all of my friends circle) have started rooting for SpaceX to fail due to the shenanigans of its founder.
I think as a culture we've lost the ability to compartmentalize. We should be able to criticize and even despise the head of a company, and at the same time celebrate when the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart and hard-working people at that company push the boundaries of what is possible for humanity.
I mostly hope that Blue Origin will be a worthy competitor.
For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.
I am rooting for them all. I don't need to like the founder, or his politics. I understand that Gwynne Shotwell and so many others are behind much of the progress.
Shenanigans of its founder being falsely accused of doing a Nazi salute when he was just waiving and not agreeing with certain peoples politics. When someone tries to compare someone to the most evil person that has ever existed then odds are that person is lying through their teeth. On one had we have a 'wave,' literally, and on the other hand we have genocide. It's incredible to me how many people choose not to see through the lies about Elon Musk, even though they have the capability, and to this day think he is a nazi.
You can't really compare them because SLS was a jobs program intended to spread out contracts across many states by reusing suppliers from shuttle programs. Cheap? No. Wasteful? also no. Most of that money went back into those economies.
Too many things don't add up, for example: SpaceX, and friendly commentators, have framed this as a highly experimental test flight. The most visible aspect of that are the heatshield test tiles on various parts of the upper stage.
That kind of testing is understandable to a certain extent. But it doesn't make sense to ditch the rocket in the Indian Ocean once you've run those experiments, instead of catching it, and having all the parts available to study.
It's a very cool rocket and this success is a nice change of pace from the past several failures. However, I just have to say:
> Mars rocket
Very dubious. If you disregard all the SpaceX marketting talk and just go by what they're building, then it's a rocket meant for launching very large satellite constellations as cheap as possible.
Starship is like AI/LLMs in that success would revolutionize the world, but technological failure is very possible. And despite the confident predictions on the internets, we don't know which it's going to be.
After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governments.
Today it costs ~$3,000 per kilogram to put something in orbit (on a SpaceX Falcon 9). Starship aims to lower that to $10 per kg. That's totally crazy, but even if it could get it down to $300 per kg, that would revolutionize access to space.
Data centers in space, biotech manufacturing, and maybe even asteroid mining and energy generation become practical at those prices. To say nothing of telecommunications, remote sensing, and global navigation--all become much cheaper.
And, of course, that drops the price on all the cool science/exploration goals that we always talk about: massive space telescopes, regular probes to all the planets, and crewed exploration.
We're literally at an inflexion point between two possible futures and we don't know which it's going to be. If I were younger I would absolutely try to work at SpaceX to help tilt the chances.
I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?
The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 57.6 ms ] thread"Great work by the SpaceX team!!!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the flight.
Amazing accomplishment. Always a thrill to watch live.
SpaceX conducted 134 launches in 2024 and is targeting a record-breaking 160-170 orbital launches in 2025.
https://www.spacex.com/launches
Nailing it would be without the things above.
I was very surprised that that flap still held up during the stress testing on atmospheric re-entry.
Now that they're demoed pez-dispensing v3 dummy Starlinks, I'd assume they'll start launching real ones within ~1-3 months. At that point as long as they can deliver payload to orbit and catch the booster the program is operational and they'll start switching their own Falcon 9 launches over.
The HLS timeline is definitely dicey, but whether Starship winds up being the blocker remains to be seen. Otherwise they've now succeeded enough to "lean launch" Starship with equal/better capabilities to any other existing orbital rocket, and Starlink can fund indefinite further tests/iterations on the rest of their roadmap features (which no one else has).
I think as a culture we've lost the ability to compartmentalize. We should be able to criticize and even despise the head of a company, and at the same time celebrate when the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart and hard-working people at that company push the boundaries of what is possible for humanity.
For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.
This is not to condemn or argue with anyone who feels differently. But I think we need to be more visible.
That kind of testing is understandable to a certain extent. But it doesn't make sense to ditch the rocket in the Indian Ocean once you've run those experiments, instead of catching it, and having all the parts available to study.
> Mars rocket
Very dubious. If you disregard all the SpaceX marketting talk and just go by what they're building, then it's a rocket meant for launching very large satellite constellations as cheap as possible.
After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governments.
Today it costs ~$3,000 per kilogram to put something in orbit (on a SpaceX Falcon 9). Starship aims to lower that to $10 per kg. That's totally crazy, but even if it could get it down to $300 per kg, that would revolutionize access to space.
Data centers in space, biotech manufacturing, and maybe even asteroid mining and energy generation become practical at those prices. To say nothing of telecommunications, remote sensing, and global navigation--all become much cheaper.
And, of course, that drops the price on all the cool science/exploration goals that we always talk about: massive space telescopes, regular probes to all the planets, and crewed exploration.
We're literally at an inflexion point between two possible futures and we don't know which it's going to be. If I were younger I would absolutely try to work at SpaceX to help tilt the chances.
But as it is, all I can do is root for them.
“ended in failure” sounds harsh in this context. Or is that just me whistling past the sunk cost fallacies?
I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?
The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!