There is a lot riding on V3. SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. If 2026 is another 2025 (3 V2 failures in a row followed by 2 V3 successes), then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030.
My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August.
If they can demonstrate in-space refueling by the end of 2026, then they have a shot at a lunar-landing demo in 2027 and a crewed-landing in 2028. But a lot has to go right for that to happen. Here's hoping it does.
> then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030.
A crewed Moon landing before 30 is really implausible. Everyone is late, but the latest NASA OIG report put the Axiom suits very late (somewhere ~2031 if everything holds, but it notes it might not hold).
All Starship test launches are suborbital so if anything goes wrong, the ship and debris fall back to Earth.
Even if it was put in orbit, debris are not an issue because orbital decay at Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is significant. A satellite orbiting below 250km will fall back to earth within a few hours, and at 400km within a year. LEO below 500-600km has enough atmospheric drag to be self-cleaning.
Debris issues are more significant at higher orbits 800km and above.
Keeping the orbits low enough, and/or intentionally going suborbital after docking/before starting the fuel transfer, will make the chances of that being possible very low.
It's also worth considering that they have demonstrated cryo propellant pumping between two tanks within a ship, so, AFAIK, transfer between two ships is more about testing the docking systems, than it is about the pumps. They could probably rig the system to first pump some inert gas to verify the quality of the docking, then try to pump propellants.
Liquid handling in microgravity has always been weird. Big gas bubbles in the fluid, surface tension effects causing liquid to float in balls in the ullage, stuff like that. Turbopumps break if they ingest a larger bubble.
There could be some odd failure modes I would think. Failure to pump the liquid, broken pumps, who really knows? My guess would be that a failure mode would be a big spill, a failure to pump, only partially refilling, or broken turbopumps before an explosion.
For something like a transfer between Starships you can resolve a lot of those problems by (very) gently spinning the 2 craft. It won't take much force for the liquids to settle at the bottom of their respective tanks where you would presumably put the intakes.
Because there’s a much, much simpler and easier way:
1. Connect the two ships
2. Connect the liquid valves from both cryo tanks together.
3. Spin the ships about the short axis
4. Open the vent valve for the cryo tank to receive liquid.
5. Lock closed the vent valve for the cryo tank to supple liquid.
Steps 2, 4 and 5 are how you normally transfer cryo fluids between dewars on earth. You just to create pseudo gravity / acceleration in the body frame of the ships to make it work in space.
> The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions
Hope we get to see those images. Would be awesome to see a 3rd person view of starship in space.
Dang, they aren't catching the booster this time, but I guess V3 is practically a new vehicle and validating the next Starship launch is probably too critical to risk damage to the launch site for now.
The booster catch is a useful trick but when the focus is just getting SS3 into orbit without incident, you can drop a few of the boosters in the ocean with the intent to fix at a later point.
Oh hey, you're right! Somehow I read "water landing" and interpreted it as landing on one of the barges (ocisly or jrti) any clue why that isn't the case? Is super heavy just too big for the barges maybe?
They won't use barges because the booster has no landing legs (to save weight), and because the booster is massive compared to Falcon 9. Also Starship is meant for rapid reusability, and it can take days to return a barge to port and unload the booster. Getting barge landings to work would be a distraction from the goal of Starship, and SpaceX already has Falcon 9 for current payloads.
And they won't attempt a catch with the first V3 booster because it's not worth the risk. They can build a new booster every couple of months. It takes much longer to build the launch/catch tower, and they don't have any spare towers yet. A catastrophe during a booster/ship catch would set them back a year, so they'll only attempt a catch if they're confident it will succeed.
So 200-280 tons. A standard barge can support 1500-3000 tons of cargo. Even with the added weight of a catch tower and a healthy factor of safety thrust isn't gonna sink the barge. Far more likely the major hurdle would be stability issues with how tall it is.
It's not 280 tons... it's a falling object with kinetic energy so that rocket thrust is going to be very problematic for that boat especially if it' hitting unevenly.
That and there's no way for it to stand without a catch tower.
These are always exciting, even if it's more of the same. I love that we live in a time where we can regularly watch huge rockets launch into space with intentional issues just to see what might go wrong and how best to monitor/solve them.
Congratulations, everyone, at being alive at the best point in human history so far!
They have really invested focus in creating mass market content lately - like, actually having someone spend some time creating the text on this page. Didn't really see that earlier.
And a number of long form videos (like "Test Like You Fly").
I don't know why they aren't doing more booster catches. Kind of a bit disappointed they keep skipping. Either they can land them or they can't. If it's not consistent then they're avoiding the possible failure so their stock price (launching soon) stays up, otherwise just prove it's solid and actually works.
They can build new boosters pretty quickly. New launch/catch towers take a lot longer, and they don't have any redundancy yet. Also they weren't going to reuse their V2 boosters once V3 was ready, so they could learn more by testing things like intentionally disabling an engine during the landing burn or flying at a higher angle of attack.
V3 booster has a lot of changes, including a brand new downcomer, an integrated hot-staging ring, and 3 instead of 4 grid fins. Chances of a RUD are not 0.
If Flight 12 blows up in space, they've already got Flight 13 almost assembled. It might delay them a month, maybe. But if a returning booster destroys the launch pad, it would delay them much longer--maybe a year.
With those stakes, it makes sense to not try a booster catch until they're sure it's going to work.
I am watching Elon give a long speech about the launch, scarily delivered at high speed, without pause. Including a Bitcoin marathon promotional informercial complete with an on-screen scan code. "That QR code is your boarding pass." He just repeated several paragraphs verbatim from a few minutes ago.
He occasionally mentions the aspirational 100x reduction in launch costs.
AI slop. Yuck, Youtube. Surely Google could have AI moderators catching this crap.
That's a fake youtube channel that is somehow allowed to squat the SpaceX channel name. It's been going on for years, including the crypto scam. Baffling. Maybe a big middle finger from Google to Elon.
My very first exposure to "AI spam" was trying to watch one of the Starship test launches, the second one if I remember correctly.
That was around the time that Elon bought Twitter, so he removed all publicity video streams from third-party platforms like YouTube and moved them to Twitter's streaming service.
I wanted to watch this on my big TV, so I was hunting through YouTube for the stream. I found the most likely looking one and watched as Elon got up on a stage, started waffling on about how this is the "future of humanity" and then with 40 seconds to go before the launch the (entirely realistic) AI voice was dubbed over and started offering "double your Bitcoin if you transfer to this account", with the obligatory QR code in the corner.
I was actually impressed by the audacity!
The really frustrating thing was that YouTube then promptly blocked all content even vaguely related to the launch! It was impossible to keyword search for anything that said "starship", "spacex", etc.
It was a scary preview of instant corporate censorship.
I'm sure the person (or bot!) at YouTube "meant well", but sheesh... they just erased the online presence of dozens of legitimate space-fan channels like NASA Space Flight. And NASA. And SpaceX's official channel too!
Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.
The incredible thing to me is that I've reported one of these videos to YouTube and got an answer back via email saying "we checked the video and it's fine for us". This should be enough to sue Google on the basis that they made an active choice to keep it up.
Wake me up for the launch of the v7 engines. SpaceX is like an incompetent AI agent, blundering their way to convergence, one painful launch at a time.
There is a lot riding on V3. SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. If 2026 is another 2025 (3 V2 failures in a row followed by 2 V3 successes), then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030.
My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August.
If they can demonstrate in-space refueling by the end of 2026, then they have a shot at a lunar-landing demo in 2027 and a crewed-landing in 2028. But a lot has to go right for that to happen. Here's hoping it does.
> then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030.
A crewed Moon landing before 30 is really implausible. Everyone is late, but the latest NASA OIG report put the Axiom suits very late (somewhere ~2031 if everything holds, but it notes it might not hold).
I am pretty sure that at least some SpaceX engineers are reading HackerNews.
But I don't think I ever seen any insiders comments here, even anonymously.
Small edit, 2 V2 (not V3) successes (flights 10 and 11).
question: what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?
All Starship test launches are suborbital so if anything goes wrong, the ship and debris fall back to Earth.
Even if it was put in orbit, debris are not an issue because orbital decay at Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is significant. A satellite orbiting below 250km will fall back to earth within a few hours, and at 400km within a year. LEO below 500-600km has enough atmospheric drag to be self-cleaning.
Debris issues are more significant at higher orbits 800km and above.
> what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?
No. What is the mechanism through which you suspected this could happen?
Kessler syndrome presumably?
Keeping the orbits low enough, and/or intentionally going suborbital after docking/before starting the fuel transfer, will make the chances of that being possible very low.
It's also worth considering that they have demonstrated cryo propellant pumping between two tanks within a ship, so, AFAIK, transfer between two ships is more about testing the docking systems, than it is about the pumps. They could probably rig the system to first pump some inert gas to verify the quality of the docking, then try to pump propellants.
...caused by what?
Presumably the effect of any explosion would decrease proportional to the volume as it expands. Is there much volume in space?
Liquid handling in microgravity has always been weird. Big gas bubbles in the fluid, surface tension effects causing liquid to float in balls in the ullage, stuff like that. Turbopumps break if they ingest a larger bubble.
There could be some odd failure modes I would think. Failure to pump the liquid, broken pumps, who really knows? My guess would be that a failure mode would be a big spill, a failure to pump, only partially refilling, or broken turbopumps before an explosion.
For something like a transfer between Starships you can resolve a lot of those problems by (very) gently spinning the 2 craft. It won't take much force for the liquids to settle at the bottom of their respective tanks where you would presumably put the intakes.
A probably very naive question: why not pistons?
Because there’s a much, much simpler and easier way:
1. Connect the two ships
2. Connect the liquid valves from both cryo tanks together.
3. Spin the ships about the short axis
4. Open the vent valve for the cryo tank to receive liquid.
5. Lock closed the vent valve for the cryo tank to supple liquid.
Steps 2, 4 and 5 are how you normally transfer cryo fluids between dewars on earth. You just to create pseudo gravity / acceleration in the body frame of the ships to make it work in space.
Seems like you could use peristaltic pumps
That would take ages!
This is the first flight of the new engines. They look so much sleeker and simpler than the previous two generations:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGMtnP...
* And supposedly with a 20% power increase to boot!
Oh wow that photo is from years ago but you’re correct, this is the first flight of that design
SN1 was a test engine, the flight engines are even cleaner https://fixupx.com/interstellargw/status/2057165036196409820
Booster dry mass savings of around one ton per engine iirc.
The stats are pretty out there. Iirc just the fuel pump, which you can probably pick up and put on your desk, generates 100k HP.
Well, it's powered by bleeding exhaust from a very big rocket.
One of my favorite clips to give a sense of scale for rockets is this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u748VALt4
I show someone and then I tell them, that's not the rocket exhaust. That's the exhaust for the engine that runs the fuel pump for the rocket.
Nope, Raptor is full flow staged combustion, so both the fuel and oxidizer have dedicated preburners and turbopumps each.
Thanks for that correction!
> The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions
Hope we get to see those images. Would be awesome to see a 3rd person view of starship in space.
Dang, they aren't catching the booster this time, but I guess V3 is practically a new vehicle and validating the next Starship launch is probably too critical to risk damage to the launch site for now.
The booster catch is a useful trick but when the focus is just getting SS3 into orbit without incident, you can drop a few of the boosters in the ocean with the intent to fix at a later point.
Oh hey, you're right! Somehow I read "water landing" and interpreted it as landing on one of the barges (ocisly or jrti) any clue why that isn't the case? Is super heavy just too big for the barges maybe?
They won't use barges because the booster has no landing legs (to save weight), and because the booster is massive compared to Falcon 9. Also Starship is meant for rapid reusability, and it can take days to return a barge to port and unload the booster. Getting barge landings to work would be a distraction from the goal of Starship, and SpaceX already has Falcon 9 for current payloads.
And they won't attempt a catch with the first V3 booster because it's not worth the risk. They can build a new booster every couple of months. It takes much longer to build the launch/catch tower, and they don't have any spare towers yet. A catastrophe during a booster/ship catch would set them back a year, so they'll only attempt a catch if they're confident it will succeed.
It doesn't have landing legs so it has to be caught by chopsticks. They're skipping the barges; either it lands back at the pad or it doesn't land.
Superheavy is 10x larger than the Falcon. Its thrust would sink the barge.
Yeah. Rocket first stage Approx. unfueled mass:
Super Heavy: 200000 to 280000 kg
Falcon 9 first stage (without Falcon Heavy side boosters): 25600 kg
So 200-280 tons. A standard barge can support 1500-3000 tons of cargo. Even with the added weight of a catch tower and a healthy factor of safety thrust isn't gonna sink the barge. Far more likely the major hurdle would be stability issues with how tall it is.
It's not 280 tons... it's a falling object with kinetic energy so that rocket thrust is going to be very problematic for that boat especially if it' hitting unevenly.
That and there's no way for it to stand without a catch tower.
These are always exciting, even if it's more of the same. I love that we live in a time where we can regularly watch huge rockets launch into space with intentional issues just to see what might go wrong and how best to monitor/solve them.
Congratulations, everyone, at being alive at the best point in human history so far!
With super high res onboard camera footage too.
Everyday Astronaut has posted a video on this launch https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/2057163096817332576?s=20
I'm watching it now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ecCDqTSJs As always, Tim is doing a fantastic job.
There is a 70% chance for storms in the area tomorrow so it's very likely going to be a scrub tomorrow.
Possible, but that is still reasonable odds.
Reminds me of the line from The Naked Gun "Doctors give him a 50% chance of living, but there is only a 10% chance of that."
AccuWeather has it at the infamous 51% probability level for thunderstorms at 5 CST, so there’s still a decent chance for success tomorrow.
Time will tell!
Sergei Korolev's ghost is looking at those 33 raptor engines and crying.
Really looking forward to seeing raptor 3 fly. Those engines are insane.
They have really invested focus in creating mass market content lately - like, actually having someone spend some time creating the text on this page. Didn't really see that earlier.
And a number of long form videos (like "Test Like You Fly").
IPO time: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4pe2953q1o and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933 (in the last few hours)
I don't know why they aren't doing more booster catches. Kind of a bit disappointed they keep skipping. Either they can land them or they can't. If it's not consistent then they're avoiding the possible failure so their stock price (launching soon) stays up, otherwise just prove it's solid and actually works.
They can build new boosters pretty quickly. New launch/catch towers take a lot longer, and they don't have any redundancy yet. Also they weren't going to reuse their V2 boosters once V3 was ready, so they could learn more by testing things like intentionally disabling an engine during the landing burn or flying at a higher angle of attack.
V3 booster has a lot of changes, including a brand new downcomer, an integrated hot-staging ring, and 3 instead of 4 grid fins. Chances of a RUD are not 0.
If Flight 12 blows up in space, they've already got Flight 13 almost assembled. It might delay them a month, maybe. But if a returning booster destroys the launch pad, it would delay them much longer--maybe a year.
With those stakes, it makes sense to not try a booster catch until they're sure it's going to work.
>Either they can land them or they lose a billion dollars and 9 months when they crash the tower.
I am watching Elon give a long speech about the launch, scarily delivered at high speed, without pause. Including a Bitcoin marathon promotional informercial complete with an on-screen scan code. "That QR code is your boarding pass." He just repeated several paragraphs verbatim from a few minutes ago.
He occasionally mentions the aspirational 100x reduction in launch costs.
AI slop. Yuck, Youtube. Surely Google could have AI moderators catching this crap.
That's a fake youtube channel that is somehow allowed to squat the SpaceX channel name. It's been going on for years, including the crypto scam. Baffling. Maybe a big middle finger from Google to Elon.
It probably is AI generated.
My very first exposure to "AI spam" was trying to watch one of the Starship test launches, the second one if I remember correctly.
That was around the time that Elon bought Twitter, so he removed all publicity video streams from third-party platforms like YouTube and moved them to Twitter's streaming service.
I wanted to watch this on my big TV, so I was hunting through YouTube for the stream. I found the most likely looking one and watched as Elon got up on a stage, started waffling on about how this is the "future of humanity" and then with 40 seconds to go before the launch the (entirely realistic) AI voice was dubbed over and started offering "double your Bitcoin if you transfer to this account", with the obligatory QR code in the corner.
I was actually impressed by the audacity!
The really frustrating thing was that YouTube then promptly blocked all content even vaguely related to the launch! It was impossible to keyword search for anything that said "starship", "spacex", etc.
It was a scary preview of instant corporate censorship.
I'm sure the person (or bot!) at YouTube "meant well", but sheesh... they just erased the online presence of dozens of legitimate space-fan channels like NASA Space Flight. And NASA. And SpaceX's official channel too!
Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.
> Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.
I am wondering if some of this is unmarked paid advertising. I can't imagine any other incentive for Youtube to effectively align its brand with Ick.
Ads, as one of the prophets said, are the Devil.
The incredible thing to me is that I've reported one of these videos to YouTube and got an answer back via email saying "we checked the video and it's fine for us". This should be enough to sue Google on the basis that they made an active choice to keep it up.
Ignorant eyeballs are also eyeballs. One might argue - sometimes even more profitable eyeballs.
Silicon Valley built this machine. Many tens of thousands of software engineers worked on this.
Wake me up for the launch of the v7 engines. SpaceX is like an incompetent AI agent, blundering their way to convergence, one painful launch at a time.