Does someone know where to watch the official livestream? The internet is so swarmed with all the recasters I cannot find the official stream anymore...
I use to watch the nasaspaceflight and everyday astronaut streams but the official one is best for the actual launch. The other two are good for the commentary because if you ask a question in the chat they’ll sometimes answer it.
It certainly is, but my mind is more boggled by the Saturn V that did it 60 years ago. Space launch technology feels like it had a 30 year gap, as in, nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. And now, we are just catching up. Not just SpaceX, there is also Blue Origin, Rocketlab,... and everything that's happening in China.
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
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.
One thing that made me realize the scale of the Apollo project was the "rubber room". This is a bunker connected by a slide to the launch pad. It was designed as an emergency escape in case of an imminent explosion.
At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.
At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.
I think the '90s was a missed opportunity. The U.S. was (mostly) at peace, had a lot of tax revenue flowing in, and should have built a safer replacement for the Space Shuttle.
Instead, we continued to rely on a flawed, expensive, and dangerous system to build and supply the ISS. Then, we tragically lost another Shuttle and crew in early 2000s.
If you get the chance to see it in person, it's an experience. The best way I can describe it is that looking from Isla Blanca beach, it looks like a skyscraper sitting on the pad, and then, the impossible happens -- the skyscraper lifts off into the sky.
The live channel has some video of recovery of the last starship which is pretty cool - it remained floating so they crawled up and removed some of the tiles to see how they performed, and actually reinstalled a few of them for the upcoming flight. So this mission will actually see some of the tiles flying for a second time.
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.
IDK how much they oversell it but also single sat probably is maxxed out for that location only, so all constellation is held back by single sat (tho there are usually few you can connect to).
Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
There is (2 minutes before Flight 14, maybe it changes in 10 minutes) low chance, but not no chance.
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible.
The last few missions have been successful at the primary objectives so there's not necessarily a pressing need to fix anything before the next launch.
planned 6 orbits, 10hr's in space
the load of satelites will deploy 10x the banwidth of a single falcon launch making the economics of this venture rather startling for any 'competition'.
if they nail the deploy, relights, and soft landings, it will time for everybody to rethink everything *
* keep in mind they are already tinkering with on orbit fuel tranfer technology, which will lead to routine bunkering *
other things, like doing visual condition inspections of every ship in orbit means there experience base grows at a rate that other companys litteraly cant imagine.
simple, the first iteration of the new starlinks put 10x a falcon load on orbit, they are stating that they expect to double the banwidth, which wouldbe equivilant to 20 falcon launches,looks like margin to me, hey!, just the ground handling, inventory, staff availible, etc is deal changing, cost per bit goes into freefall, market expands verticaly.
these things weigh in at more than 2 tons each, and they just lifted 12, zero problem, the lift capacity is surreal, they are iterating, they have litteral stacks of everything built now, and are aimed at exactly one thing, launches so boring and routine that they get ZERO press, just glummerand glummer looks from EVERYBODY
else doing launch.
dont get me wrong, I dont like elon, but even when playing pool with nasty evil freeks, a good shot, is a good shot, and there is no way to beat someone good, unless you state that they ARE a good shot, and you step up YOUR own game
Same with data centres in space, "Noooooo it cant work, heating in space, blah blah" same people, will never achieve anything in life as they only see limits.
Limits are security. Dont have to do this, don't have to risk that, no need for uncertainty, anxiety won't kill the weak confused mind...you can't fail if you never try (big brain!). That's the type. It is called cowards ;)
"It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work."
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
To be fair, radiators in space doesn't require any new technology. It's a very well understood problem. The best method is infrared radiators. Cooling is just a function of how large the surface area of the radiators, their heat, and the cooling required.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
Great comment and I agree with all of it except you're describing an expanded starlink rather than "datacenters in space". There are definitely workloads that benefit from being in space but that's different from being an economical place to put a rack of H200s doing training or inference.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
I agree on all points. That said, we're seeing a lot of preparatory activity from many places. SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, Orbital Compute, Odyssey, and China’s ADA Space/Zhejiang Lab. SpaceX and Blue Origin have filed plans for huge orbital compute constellations. Google is developing TPU-equipped satellites under Project Suncatcher. Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 in orbit. China’s ADA Space has also launched a small network of AI-compute satellites. A lot of very smart and very rich people are making big bets in this space.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
A better comparison would be Starlink, which had a bunch of unresolved problems and had to be more economical than existing satellite internet providers.
Starlink is "networking in space". The compute, power, and heat stories are minor compared to the networking benefits. Different story than making compute cheaper in space.
You’re right, I’m just back from the city, took no time and was so cheap thanks to the hyperloop. Next week I go to Asia, I think I will use the rocket transport system Musk announced a few years ago. It’s so nice how my Tesla is making me so much money while I’m traveling, offering taxi service to everybody around. Next will I will get the add-on to have it join the Tesla compute fleet - it’s free compute if you think about it, given the solar roof is generating the energy! Might even get one of those humanoid robot to replace me at work. Just hope it’s not raining too much, my cybertruck steel plates are rusting a bit. Also, my kids are really enjoying their summer camp at the Mars colony!
It’s funny how the people calling Musk’s skeptics “cowards” for doubting him have nothing to say to any of this, they just angrily downvote. They know it’s true. You didn’t even list a third of his broken promises and bullshit.
They're being careful because they don't want to wreck their launch pad.
On the previous flight, they were going for the same ocean soft landing as this flight, but several engines on the booster failed to start during the landing burn (reportedly due to ice clogging propellant feed). Had this crash not happened they likely would have tried for a tower catch today.
They want to be sure the mitigation for this failure worked before they put the pad & tower at risk.
They seem to have reached near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing. Lets see if they decide to go all the way to orbit or if the failure causes an abort.
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.
I think the mission was deliberately designed to get to just-below-orbit, have a decision point, and then proceed to orbit. So thats why it was a short burn. Because just-below-orbit is safer if anything goes wrong, they had a little pause.
edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"
Altitude doesn't change (much) at the point where an orbit raising maneuver is performed. It increases the altitude of the rest of the orbit, with the greatest change ~180 degrees later.
If you'll excuse some poor ASCII art:
_______
______ / \
/ \ / \
burn here -> * O | result: | O |
in elliptical \______/ \ /
orbit \_______/
Not a fan of Elon Musk at all, but SpaceX is damn impressive. Watching these key launches always makes me emotional for our species and what we can accomplish together.
I tuned in at T+11 just in time to hear the announcer talking about splashdown in the Indian ocean and that they weren't going to orbit today, followed immediately by saying the team is still considering options and trying to find a way to get to orbit. We'll see what happens.
Having an impossible critical path will be the demise of the starship project. Too many things have to work that cannot be tested out of order. Too many of those things that needed to work years ago still don't. And those are the easy ones.
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
I'm saddened by this comment being upvoted a lot on this site. I'm a space nerd from EU and have been watching SpX since they were launching from an atol. This comment is the epitome of clueless negativity, wrapped in an umbrella of big words and a list of things that are neither important nor factually correct.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 22 F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 22x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
...keeping whatever project that should've been put to sleep months ago alive. Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up. That's often accompanied by isolated economic arguments that are fragments of what started out as a coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
> Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up.
And others work in the industry that is in the form it is today due to the work of one company alone. The one that puts more mass into orbit every year than any other entity in the world - nation states included.
As for "massively missed milestones" - it is easy to predict milestones when you are making CRUD apps in React. Not so when building the largest rocket that has ever existed, and making it fully reusable.
> coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
Lol. They operate the most successful and most profitable rocket in history, and they are confident enough that they have stopped taking bookings for it. And they just demonstrated a system that can bring the cost down another 1 or 2 orders of magnitude with nearly zero competition even close to them. No coherent business case indeed.
> Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 10+ F9 launches.
The mass being launched is roughly 50 metric tons, which is a bit over twice F9’s capacity. Yet it took something like 10x the propellant because of the fundamental rocket equation. I don’t think there’s a path to starship being economical
This post feels like written by a QA. This is their first semi operational flight . In its current state starship is a reason to be proud by any nation . It pushed science forward with cost and payload size never possible before . That’s only current state .
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
> they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
I wonder how this type of comment would apply to software development world where something innovative is being built, currently not ideal but the devs would just look at it: Meh, it doesn't do X, it doesn't do Y, it does Z worse and it doesn't send email!
Maybe AI applies here - from a few years of supercharged intellisense to builds stuff on its own. But even here I don't remember such a skepticism some folks are aiming at Starship.
It's like running into R&D department and just pointing out at the flaws/not implemented features while you iterate on your product. Annoying.
AI and the success of agentic coding is an excellent example. It works because validation is external to the AI coding process. If it had to validate itself it wouldn't work. Luckily, humans created a lot of tools to validate the work of humans. If your use case doesn't match the characteristics of agentic coding, don't expect the same success. That kind of serendipity is rare when conditions for it are good, and the conditions for serendipity around rockets is never that good.
As it stands today - Starship Flight 14 just deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, 52 tonnes total. At around $110M marginal per launch, that is about $2.1M per tonne. A Falcon 9 at $30M carrying 15 tonnes is about $2M per tonne. So even as a fully expendable rocket, Starship is already basically in Falcon 9 cost-per-ton territory.
> and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
Or increase performance in the engines and elsewhere. Falcon 9 Block 1 was 9000kg to LEO. The Block 5 that is flying now is 22000 kg to LEO. It's not magic. They already have a path forward with Raptor 4 and other improvements.
> needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers
They don't need to launch special tanker missions for a depot. Their goal is to start launching Starlinks and AI inference sats en-masse. Once they demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer, the easiest way is to fill the depot during normal missions. They can cut out some payload from specific flights to carry excess fuel and top off the depot. The sheer scale of their other flights is enough to keep it full. It is infrastructure that they need for higher energy missions. I doubt they are going to launch 15 dedicated flights just to fill up the tank.
> just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
They can hit massive cadence even fully expending every Starship, still work out kinks with reusability in the process and still make a profit off of Starlinks given their pace of production.
And given what they have shown so far, I think they are going to try to catch both in the next 2-3 flights barring unforeseen issues.
> Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal
Nope. Even a cadence of once a week means that by the time they have 10+ launch pads up (in LA+FL+TX), they can be launching once a day if not more frequently. Their rate of production can already sustain that. What's missing is fuel source which will get built out in Louisiana.
> really big blind spot for the project management implications
Lol. The guy got partially reusable rockets and human rated spacecraft working at a cadence unheard of in the aerospace industry. Quite the accomplishment with such a blind spot for the project management!
This mindset kills projects. Even worse it prevents capital allocation to productive projects by keeping dead projects as zombies walking around consuming resources. This happens in software development all the time on projects that are months to years late yet every status meeting shows incremental progress. Usually it takes some kind of specific crisis like a customer walking away from a product in development to get senior management involved enough to ask whether a project actually converges on completion. You can also see how that kind of clarity is not obtainable here.
Now that the most recent test flight is complete, we can see a glaring hole in the optimistic projections: everyone is celebrating that an orbital insertion was possible even with an engine out on the upper stage, and multiple engines failed to light on the booster when it ran a simulation of a return to launch. It's nice that the mission did not fail due to failed engines. But it also means that it will likely take years of further development to attain rapid reuse.
This person is living in the same days of future past when people didn't utterly dismiss the PowerPoint Mars colony. We now know better, and even the stans have limited themselves to touting an oversized rocket for orbital launches.
I’m a bit saddened this thread has so little activity, 55 comments as of posting, here even though there are half a million people watching the spacex stream. Just watching the launch, the amount of technology and people involved is incredible.
This is ballistics weapons technology, being progressed by a country that can't stop missile striking people, who has recently declared its intent to heavily weaponize space, whose leader has recently "claimed the moon", who is actively declaring its desire to annex its own allies, done by a corporation whose profits will be almost exclusively concentrated in a very small group of the already-wealthy in a country with horrific wealth disparity.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
Calm down. V-2 was a missile whose very design intent was to kill people.
If Starship ever kills people, it will be a disaster, but not intent.
This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor. Sailors are pretty happy too.
All rocket development is weapons development, which is why ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) classifies rocket and space tech as sensitive national security items and is why foreign nationals can't even work on Starship. The entire US space program was funded for military development in the first place.
The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload. More realistically given vehicle costs, its an ideal heavy lift platform for cheaply placing other weapon vehicles into orbit - a stated goal of the current administration.
> This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
Plenty of people are also using Starlink to wage war, and its already become political as access is provided and removed at whim.
I love space. I love space technology. I work on a game set in space. I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space.
Almost every technology can be used to wage war. But not all war activities are evil. I am happy that the Ukrainians can use Starlink to defend themselves against a brutal aggressor and preserve sovereignty of their country.
"The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload."
If you insist on this worldview, you will always be miserable around every technological development out there. Just imagine what can be done with mRNA or maybe 3D printing.
"I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space."
I am pretty sure that militarization of space will be a decision of governments, not Musk himself. He is not rich enough to be able to build an actual orbital army and not get arrested.
Unless by a "notorious individual" you mean Trump or Xi... in which case, there isn't much new under the sun, because governments have weaponized space since the very beginning.
What I feel is positive is the civilian use of the technology. The military use will always be there, but the civilian use needs better and cheaper tech, which is what Starship is. Some medications could be produced in the orbit for example, and with enough launch capacity, they could be produced for the entire planet at once.
> I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor.
It is going to be truly amazing for a lot of small communities around the world. I don't want to deny this game changing technology at all.
But given how much of us westerners are beginning to loathe screens and internet (or social media for no good reason), I wonder how this "lets connect everyone" movement changes?
I think we are bound to have a sinusoidal relationship with tech: "oh it is wonderful" - "actually it damages people" - "if we mitigate XYZ it is still wonderful" etc.
It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!
Not as crazy of an idea as it sounds. A bomber that could fly as fast as a missile and orbit the planet allowing it to deliver a payload and then return and land would be a useful technology. Might be a preferable way of delivering "Rods from God" style kinetic impactors since it wouldn't involve keeping an armed satellite in orbit where it could be targeted.
Though, for point of reference, the biggest Soviet ICBM, the SS-18, could lift about a 9 ton payload for a 20 megaton nuclear explosive warhead. The minutemen iii's have 1 ton payload. Starship has shown today that I can do, call it a 60 ton payload.
By itself no, but parking bunch of ballistic sats / hypersonic vehicles in orbit for 10th the price of enemy is attractive. A lot of strategy in war is not just capability but logistics and cost. And US has been particularly bad at keeping costs at bay.
I think there are so many more mission objectives for success, e.g., still in payload deploy. I think we've already reached a lot of milestones with this launch, but there's still a lot of satellites to go at the time of writing. I'm so used to these failing that I'm holding my breath until everything is done.
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
There is a cadre of left wing Elon haters on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their hatred of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably works within the pinnacle of tech.
There is a cadre of right wing Elon simps on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their love of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably uses other people to make himself look good.
If this were any other space company it’d be on the front page with glowing praise. But it’s Elon’s company and the launch was a success, so it’s buried down on the fourth page or so currently. I expect this out of general population social media but it’s sad to see hacker news become like this.
Instead, we have such important news like "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain" and "MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta" and a fridge magnet to greet us on the front page.
My favorite headline so far "SpaceX's Starship reaches orbit for the first time, then returns early and blows up in a fiery explosion" - livescience.com. So many people when faced with a SpaceX success just can't stand it. It's getting comical.
Hard to get sincerely engaged when the genuine achievement is surrounded by insanity like mars colonization or gigawatt datacenters in orbit, both in a decade. Oh and I even saw spacex touted as anti-DEI success story...
There's been so many mid tests, I think activity would pick up if one of the flight tests put everything together, launch, orbit, catch etc even with elon fatigue.
He is not polite, but he is not wrong either. Originally, the first orbital flight test should have happened years ago. There have been many delays, though Starship is still years ahead of the competition.
At their bleeding edge, yes. Further back - their Falcon launch system is delivering far more reliably, frequently, and economically than any other launch system on Earth.
And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 11.6 ms ] threadEdit: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmkHjDeECps
Also hosted directly on SpaceX website:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
Would HN describe a huge program that didn't do the thing it was designed to do a "feat of engineering"?
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.
At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.
well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space
Instead, we continued to rely on a flawed, expensive, and dangerous system to build and supply the ISS. Then, we tragically lost another Shuttle and crew in early 2000s.
Launch window is 8:15 AM to 9:30 AM eastern time.
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMPMQxB
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
SpaceX's flight profile says both are splashdowns?
F9 fits how many?
>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.
> 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.
Thanks, Claude
1000000 mbps / 50 mbps per Starlink customer * 80$ per month * 12 months * 26 satellites = $500M revenue per year added per launch.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...
His lordship announced this to the world at the UN.
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. 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
I am so looking forward to a successfully launch today.
For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
I don't doubt Starship, BTW. Great project.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
Tough problem, however it is notable that after SpaceX, there are now several other companies with similar plans, including Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...
One interpretation is they're all delusional. Another is that Musk showed the way and others now see it too.
works beautifully
Inspiring to watch, really.
On the previous flight, they were going for the same ocean soft landing as this flight, but several engines on the booster failed to start during the landing burn (reportedly due to ice clogging propellant feed). Had this crash not happened they likely would have tried for a tower catch today.
They want to be sure the mitigation for this failure worked before they put the pad & tower at risk.
Update: Or maybe not? They're reviewing the status now.
Update 2: Go for orbit!
edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"
If you'll excuse some poor ASCII art:
Hell yeah, that was the longest 10 minutes.
near-orbit was planned, they just had to burn longer. It's in the timeline: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
But yeah, they had a big decision to make in those few minutes between engine cutoff ang insertion burn.
T+22: Go for orbit!
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 22 F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 22x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
...keeping whatever project that should've been put to sleep months ago alive. Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up. That's often accompanied by isolated economic arguments that are fragments of what started out as a coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
The thing works and is launching satellites? And if they just continue as is it'll be the lowest cost per Kg to space?
Seems quite successful even if the moon landing doesn't happen.
And others work in the industry that is in the form it is today due to the work of one company alone. The one that puts more mass into orbit every year than any other entity in the world - nation states included.
As for "massively missed milestones" - it is easy to predict milestones when you are making CRUD apps in React. Not so when building the largest rocket that has ever existed, and making it fully reusable.
> coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
Lol. They operate the most successful and most profitable rocket in history, and they are confident enough that they have stopped taking bookings for it. And they just demonstrated a system that can bring the cost down another 1 or 2 orders of magnitude with nearly zero competition even close to them. No coherent business case indeed.
The mass being launched is roughly 50 metric tons, which is a bit over twice F9’s capacity. Yet it took something like 10x the propellant because of the fundamental rocket equation. I don’t think there’s a path to starship being economical
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
Maybe AI applies here - from a few years of supercharged intellisense to builds stuff on its own. But even here I don't remember such a skepticism some folks are aiming at Starship.
It's like running into R&D department and just pointing out at the flaws/not implemented features while you iterate on your product. Annoying.
As it stands today - Starship Flight 14 just deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, 52 tonnes total. At around $110M marginal per launch, that is about $2.1M per tonne. A Falcon 9 at $30M carrying 15 tonnes is about $2M per tonne. So even as a fully expendable rocket, Starship is already basically in Falcon 9 cost-per-ton territory.
> and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
Or increase performance in the engines and elsewhere. Falcon 9 Block 1 was 9000kg to LEO. The Block 5 that is flying now is 22000 kg to LEO. It's not magic. They already have a path forward with Raptor 4 and other improvements.
> needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers
They don't need to launch special tanker missions for a depot. Their goal is to start launching Starlinks and AI inference sats en-masse. Once they demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer, the easiest way is to fill the depot during normal missions. They can cut out some payload from specific flights to carry excess fuel and top off the depot. The sheer scale of their other flights is enough to keep it full. It is infrastructure that they need for higher energy missions. I doubt they are going to launch 15 dedicated flights just to fill up the tank.
> just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
They can hit massive cadence even fully expending every Starship, still work out kinks with reusability in the process and still make a profit off of Starlinks given their pace of production.
And given what they have shown so far, I think they are going to try to catch both in the next 2-3 flights barring unforeseen issues.
> Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal
Nope. Even a cadence of once a week means that by the time they have 10+ launch pads up (in LA+FL+TX), they can be launching once a day if not more frequently. Their rate of production can already sustain that. What's missing is fuel source which will get built out in Louisiana.
> really big blind spot for the project management implications
Lol. The guy got partially reusable rockets and human rated spacecraft working at a cadence unheard of in the aerospace industry. Quite the accomplishment with such a blind spot for the project management!
Now that the most recent test flight is complete, we can see a glaring hole in the optimistic projections: everyone is celebrating that an orbital insertion was possible even with an engine out on the upper stage, and multiple engines failed to light on the booster when it ran a simulation of a return to launch. It's nice that the mission did not fail due to failed engines. But it also means that it will likely take years of further development to attain rapid reuse.
This person is living in the same days of future past when people didn't utterly dismiss the PowerPoint Mars colony. We now know better, and even the stans have limited themselves to touting an oversized rocket for orbital launches.
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
If Starship ever kills people, it will be a disaster, but not intent.
This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor. Sailors are pretty happy too.
The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload. More realistically given vehicle costs, its an ideal heavy lift platform for cheaply placing other weapon vehicles into orbit - a stated goal of the current administration.
> This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
Plenty of people are also using Starlink to wage war, and its already become political as access is provided and removed at whim.
I love space. I love space technology. I work on a game set in space. I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space.
"The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload."
If you insist on this worldview, you will always be miserable around every technological development out there. Just imagine what can be done with mRNA or maybe 3D printing.
"I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space."
I am pretty sure that militarization of space will be a decision of governments, not Musk himself. He is not rich enough to be able to build an actual orbital army and not get arrested.
Unless by a "notorious individual" you mean Trump or Xi... in which case, there isn't much new under the sun, because governments have weaponized space since the very beginning.
What I feel is positive is the civilian use of the technology. The military use will always be there, but the civilian use needs better and cheaper tech, which is what Starship is. Some medications could be produced in the orbit for example, and with enough launch capacity, they could be produced for the entire planet at once.
It is going to be truly amazing for a lot of small communities around the world. I don't want to deny this game changing technology at all.
But given how much of us westerners are beginning to loathe screens and internet (or social media for no good reason), I wonder how this "lets connect everyone" movement changes?
It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!
/s because the Internet is crazy.
that's putting it mildly, a war where ICBMs are used would be over before they could get the road closed to roll Starship and a booster to the pad...
That's a whole lotta MIRV capacity.
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
Instead, we have such important news like "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain" and "MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta" and a fridge magnet to greet us on the front page.
???
And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.