2026 Is Going To Be An Incredible Year For Starship - Spaceflight Weekly #191 [10:16]

YouTube ^ | November 2, 2025 | LabPadre Space

[SunkenCiv]

This week at Starbase, construction continues on Giga Bay and the Flight 12 vehicles at the build site, work continues on the Pad 2 launch mount and launch tower hardware, and teams aren't wasting any time demolishing the Pad 1 launch mount and reconfiguring the supporting infrastructure. Meanwhile in Florida, SpaceX launches another pair of Starlink missions as Blue Origin, Stoke Space, and ULA are all hard at work preparing infrastructure and vehicles for upcoming operations. 

2026 Is Going To Be An Incredible Year For Starship - Spaceflight Weekly #191 | 10:16 
LabPadre Space | 249K subscribers | 13,984 views | November 2, 2025

 

00:00 Intro 
00:40 Fabrication 
01:20 Launch Site Construction 
02:52 Build Site Construction 
03:30 Testing 
04:17 SpaceX Gives HLS Update 
05:32 Falcon 9 Updates 
07:14 Other Spaceflight News 
09:57 Outro

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Travel
KEYWORDS: axiomspace; blueorigin; elonmusk; falcon9; honda; investing; nasa; spacex; starship; stokespace; ula; vastspace

[SunkenCiv]

Had to look it up — Leopold Aschenbrenner?

[SunkenCiv]

https://situational-awareness.ai/leopold-aschenbrenner/

[ckilmer]

Yeah that’s the guy. He’s made some brilliant calls already. I looked at his list two months ago. It was mostly energy and infrastructure companies. Makes perfect sense. I have not looked this list lately. You can download his paper.

[SunkenCiv]

There was a suggested vid this morning on the YT app, an energy company that turned out to be Australian. I think that’s on the list too.

[ckilmer]

I asked grok the other day what start ups have said they could in the future produce electricity for .01@kwh . Grok gave a list of 5 companies. Then I asked by how much their development would be accelerated with digital twin product design and manufacturing. Grok answered that most of them could be producing electricity at .01 @ kWh within a year or two.

.01@kwh roughly speaking changes civilization about as much as the falling cost of compute.

[SunkenCiv]

Good point. It’ll mean dragging a series of global warming hoaxters out into the desert, at night, then filling in the hole.

[SunkenCiv]

https://search.brave.com/search?q=methane+reformer+fuel+cell

[ckilmer]

out into the desert,

imho one of the by products of cheaper energy will be the ability to make desalinated seawater at a cost cheap enough—including the cost of piping freshwater inland 1000 miles— to make desert farming anywhere in the world profitable.

basically the habitable size of earth will double.

that will bury the ideas of the malthusian population bomb people and give people on earth the runway needed to develop warp drive or faster than light travel speeds needed to spread people out into the galaxy.

that’s the full tree. We’ll see the seed next year.

[SunkenCiv]

There's not much of an impediment to desalination right now, but there's always been a lack of will because control of resources is a big favorite of the Party of the Single Party State (the Demagogic Party).

[cgbg]

“producing electricity at .01 @ kWh within a year or two”

Great news there—definitely the key to a new golden age.

[ckilmer]

agree. but desalinated seawater is still too expensive for most agriculure. after the cost of energy, the key to piping desalinated seawater from the west coast to desert inlands is to turn the salt and trace elements in the seawater into a profit center from a cost center.

I’ve seen plenty of work on that lately.

[ckilmer]

Great news there—definitely the key to a new golden age.
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the done deal part is that it will happen.

what’s not a done deal yet is the timing for it to happen