SpaceX Posts Huge Starship Reveal! Flight 14 Launch Window!

Video from the channel What about it!? about SpaceX, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 22:43. Language: English. Video type: News.

The channel What About It!? analyzes SpaceX's first quarterly earnings call as a publicly traded company, held at the Starlink facility in Bastrop, Texas. Elon Musk said he considers the Starship heat shield problem solved and sees no technical obstacles to full, rapid reusability. Even so, he wants to examine Ship 40 first, which will be recovered for analysis. He announced that Flight 14 will attempt to catch the ship with the tower, provided authorization arrives. That flight is tentatively planned for late August and will carry the first V3 Starlinks to their operational orbit. According to Musk, within a year Starship will fly at least once a day.

The finance leadership talked about building infrastructure for thousands of launches a year, with several pads at Starbase, pad 39A at Kennedy and pad 37 at Cape Canaveral. Falcon logged 78 launches and 1,041 t to orbit in the first half of the year. Gwynne Shotwell explained that on Flight 13 all the V3 Starlinks connected to each other via laser links. She added that the constellation needs on the order of a thousand V3s by around the second quarter of 2027. The host infers from this about 17 Starship launches, nearly double the monthly pace Shotwell cited. Second-quarter figures were revenue of $7.8 billion (up 92%) and net losses of $541 million. The IPO brought in $85.7 billion net and a bond issue another $25 billion, leaving cash at around $100 billion. Quarterly investments totaled $18.4 billion and the launch segment lost about $205 million at the operating level.

Musk aims to put more than a million tonnes a year into orbit, and eventually ten million; today SpaceX launches about 2,500 t a year with Falcon. For the lunar program, orbital propellant transfer is the critical milestone. After that come Artemis 3, with docking to Orion in 2027, an uncrewed cargo mission to the surface, and the crewed landing in 2028. Musk believes Starship will reach the safety level needed to carry people by around late 2027. Also planned for that year are computing and direct-to-cell Starlink satellites. The host insists a statement is not a demonstration: the real test will be the inspection of Ship 40 and the same ship flying twice.