SpaceX Starship Flight 13 Final Prep! Two Starships At Once? [22:28]

Transcript [SpaceX Starship Flight 13 Final Prep! Two Starships At Once?]

SpaceX just did something unusual with Ship 40. A Starship static fire where 5 of the 6 engines stayed completely silent. That one detail tells us something important about Flight 13. Meanwhile, a second ship is already at the test site, those mysterious white heat tiles are back, and SpaceX is about to set a Starship record no rocket has ever held.

My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It!? Let’s dive right in!

Let’s start with Ship 40, and a rather important correction from the last episode, because what happened at Massey’s on June 25th was not what anyone expected. At first, it looked like a completely normal static fire setup. A regular six-engine test, the kind Ship 39 did before Flight 12. That’s what I expected and what I predicted. But then something changed.

SpaceX began fueling the vehicle. Then they stopped the fueling process with the oxygen tank only about 2/3 full, and only a tiny amount of methane was loaded. That’s not how you set up a full six-engine static fire. Then SpaceX fired a single engine. One of the center sea level Raptors, engine number 142, for about 15 seconds. Every other engine stayed completely silent. And SpaceX released a genuinely beautiful video of the test, filmed from the inside of the engine skirt. The burn itself looked clean and healthy. But it was just that one engine. Alongside the video, SpaceX stated that a full-duration single-engine test was performed. That’s not the norm.

Look at how Ship 39 did it. It rolled to Massey’s, went through a spin prime and tanking runs, and then performed a full-duration static fire on April 14th. All six engines. Then it went to the launch site on May 8th. No single-engine test anywhere in that sequence. So why did Ship 40 only fire one engine?

Here’s my theory. I think SpaceX was setting up for a normal six-engine static fire, and something went wrong during the lead-up. Some issue appeared during fueling or pre-test checkouts. Rather than scrub entirely, they might have repurposed the attempt into a single-engine test to gather what data they could from that one engine. And then they stopped, and rolled Ship 40 back to Mega Bay 2 on June 26th. So if that is correct, it tells us something useful. The problem, if there was one, was not likely related to the engines or the ship-side systems that feed them. Not the airframe or the tanks. If it were a tank or structural issue, you wouldn’t have fired any engine at all. The fact that engine 142 fired cleanly says the core vehicle is healthy. The issue is narrower than that.

So I expect SpaceX to roll Ship 40 back out to Massey’s very soon to complete a proper full six-engine static fire, exactly the way Ship 39 did. By the time you’re watching this, that rollout may already have happened or is about to. Fingers crossed. The ship side of Flight 13 isn’t done quite yet, but it’s close.

And here’s why I’m not worried about the Ship 40 situation slowing things down. Because while Ship 40 was rolling back, Ship 41 was rolling out.

On June 28th, Ship 41 made its way to Massey’s to begin its own cryo test campaign. The plan is very likely an ambient pressure test first, then a cryogenic test run right after. The typical procedure.

This first cryo test matters more than people realize for a brand-new vehicle. It’s the initial validation of the tank structure. Before you ever put combustible propellant in a ship, you fill it with inert cryogenic liquid and pressurize it, to confirm the tanks are well built, properly welded, and free of defects. It’s the structural proof test. You don’t move forward until the vehicle passes it.

And yeah, we are spoiled. Don’t be fooled. The cadence is nuts. Version 3 Starship is still very new territory. Flight 12 was the first flight of any version 3 hardware, just weeks ago. And yet here we are, watching two version 3 ships move through their test campaigns at the same time. Ship 40 wrapping up, Ship 41 just starting. This parallel processing is exactly the operational tempo SpaceX has been building toward. This new generation of vehicles is designed to collect as much data as possible in as little time as possible.

Let me put some numbers on it. Ship 40 went from the start of its cryo test on May 3rd to static-fire testing on June 24th. That’s 52 days. A little under two months. Now apply that to Ship 41. It rolled out for cryo on June 28th. Add the same 52 days, and you land on August 19th for Ship 41, hopefully being test-complete and flight-ready.

From that, we can extrapolate numbers, and I love doing that... If Flight 13 launches in the middle of July, which is my current estimate, then a flight-ready Ship 41 around August 19th puts Flight 14 toward the end of August. And Flight 14 is the one that could include the first ship catch, if everything goes well on Flight 13. There’s your possible Flight 14 launch date before Flight 13 has even taken place. But wait, there’s more! Let’s extrapolate. Flight 12 launched May 22nd. If Flight 13 is mid-July and Flight 14 is end of August, SpaceX will have flown three Starship missions in just over three months. If we say Flight 14 goes on August 31st, that’s 101 days for three flights. And these test campaigns are only going to get faster from here. That’s the monthly cadence Shotwell was talking about, taking shape right there.

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Now, to a mystery that just came back around. Remember the white heat tiles? Back in March, I reported on white heat shield tiles spotted on a Starship nose cone inside Starfactory. They were the same size as the usual black tiles, sitting on the lower end of the sloping nose cone hull. We speculated about all kinds of explanations. One theory was insulation tiles for an HLS or tanker Starship, because the white reflective surface would help with thermal management for long-duration missions. Well, the white tiles are back. And this time we can see more.

New images from Jordan and Amy from inside Starfactory show very similar white tiles, but now on the nose tip itself, where the tiles are usually half the normal size to accommodate the tighter curvature. And these new white tiles are exactly that. Half-size, matching the form factor of the regular tip tiles.

Because Jordan was so good at sniping this image through the windows at night, it’s from the side. Thank you, Jordan and Amy! We can see a few important things we couldn’t see before. These white tiles are thicker than the regular black tiles. And underneath them, there’s nothing. No black insulation layer. No white mineral felt for burn-through protection. Instead, there’s a visible gap below them. And here’s what I think that gap tells us.

The tiles attach to the same fastening pins on the hull as the normal tiles do, but without the usual layers underneath, leaving a gap. And that leads me to a different conclusion than insulation. I think these might be fit-check tiles or protective tiles. Either they’re there to verify that all the attachment pins are correctly placed and in working condition, or they’re there simply to protect those pins while the vehicle is in the factory. Think about it. If someone bumps into an exposed attachment pin and bends it, that’s a lengthy repair.

And worse, if a damaged pin goes unnoticed, it could cause a tile to fall off during flight, which we’ve seen many times. Covering those pins with these white placeholder tiles during factory work would dramatically reduce that risk. So, that’s my idea. I know, it’s more boring than insulation tiles for an HLS. But I genuinely want to hear your idea. Are we on the right track with fit-checks or protective tiles? Or are these really insulation tiles for a tanker or HLS Starship after all? Let me know in the comments. I’ll be reading the answers.

Now to Pad 1, where the update process continues, and where SpaceX is teaching us something about how they build. The latest aerial images show SpaceX hard at work removing the old steel-reinforced concrete piles from the ground where the new flame trench is going. Massive thanks go out to RGV aerial photography for these excellent images! This is genuinely tough work. These aerial images are essential for my reporting! If you’re down at Starbase, make sure to pay our official partner SPI Helicopters a visit and book a flight! The same views our photographers get! It’s unforgettable and worth every penny! Click the card or the link in the description! Help WAI in return! Check it out today!

Going back to the images we took in January and February of 2025, when SpaceX started building the Pad 2 flame trench, the difference in the process is clear. At Pad 2, the site was relatively clean. SpaceX just had to excavate the trench and then seal it with a rebar-reinforced concrete floor. At Pad 1, they’re dealing with the buried remnants of the original launch pad. Tons of old rebar and concrete have to be dug out and broken apart before the new trench can even take shape. It’s slower, harder work, just because of the history of the site.

But there’s good news, too. It’s a perfect example of SpaceX iterating on more than just rockets. Look at how they’re building the GSE bunker. At Pad 2, SpaceX built that bunker in its final location. At Pad 1, they’re building the bunker frame next to the pad, not where it will ultimately sit. When the frame is finished, they’ll likely just lift it into place. So, why is this good news? Because it means they can build the bunker frame in parallel, before the spot where it’s supposed to go is even ready. Parallel work saves time.

SpaceX isn’t just learning how to build better rockets. They’re learning how to build pads faster, making each pad build quicker than the last. They’re optimizing even on this aspect. Always on the lookout for even faster ways to achieve the goal. And they need that speed.

SpaceX wants five Starship pads operational by 2027. Two at Starbase, three at the Cape. And that may not even be the end of it. Remember the story we covered exactly 10 episodes ago? Do you? Do you do you do you? SpaceX may be acquiring around 136,000 acres of land at Pecan Island, Louisiana. That’s about 550 square kilometers, an area roughly the size of Chicago, sitting halfway between Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral on the Gulf Coast. If that comes together, Pecan Island could become a site substantially larger than Starbase itself. The pad count could keep climbing well beyond five.

When all five Starship pads are operational, SpaceX will set a record that no orbital rocket in history has ever held. Five launch pads operational at the same time for a single orbital rocket design. Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, the Soviet N1, Ariane 5, Long March 5. All of these legendary rockets had or have two operational pads at most. The current record holder is Falcon 9, with four because of course it is three operational and one planned. Starship is going to blow past all of them. Five operational pads. That’s raising the bar. With the largest rocket ever built.

This connects directly to what we talked about in the last episode. Remember the NASA report? One HLS Moon landing needs at least 15 Starship launches to fuel the depot in orbit and to send HLS on its way. You cannot do that from one or two pads. The orbital refueling campaigns, running in parallel with Starlink launches, AI satellite deployments, and SpaceX’s own ambitions for lunar and Mars bases, demand a fleet of pads firing constantly. The five-pad record isn’t vanity. It’s the physical requirement for everything SpaceX has promised. And we’re in the lucky position of watching that infrastructure get poured into the ground, one flame trench at a time.

Flight 13 is next. A few weeks at most. And it has one job above all others. Show us reliability. Fingers crossed! Excitement guaranteed!

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Over in Florida, Blue Origin is in a race against its own calendar. And the finish line? Getting New Glenn back on the pad. Fly again. All before the end of the year. Impossible? Let’s take a look! On May 28th, a New Glenn blew up during a hot-fire test. And as it violently self-destructed, it took Launch Complex 36 with it. At least, that was the initial fear. Fortunately, the team caught a break. A big one! The incident could have completely obliterated everything at LC 36. But especially the long-lead stuff. The gear that takes forever to replace survived. Mostly.

The tank farm with its storage facilities and the water tower are in good shape. And even the only flight-proven booster, “Never Tell Me The Odds,” that was stored in a nearby hangar, it’s fine. One piece of hardware that was destroyed and until now was vital for New Glenn: the transporter-erector. But incidentally, this was going to be retired sooner or later anyway. It was already planned to transport the rocket to the pad upright. So this machine will not be coming back. Nonetheless, Blue Origin teams are in for months of rebuilding. But progress is visible. After the initial investigation was done, workers could enter LC 36 and start to untangle the debris.

Dave Limp posted this amazing time-lapse of the cleanup efforts, showing that Blue is fully committed to returning New Glenn to the launch site ASAP. And the urgency is real because the backlog is growing. Amazon’s LEO satellites are waiting. So is NASA. The Blue Moon lander relies on New Glenn. NASA needs it to be ready for Artemis III next year. If Blue Origin can’t make it on time, it won’t be part of Artemis III. Out even before the kick-off. This would complicate things for NASA. Even if the HLS Starship is ready in time. They don’t want one vehicle. They’re planning for two.

The company has promised to perform its own Moon lander’s test flight in early 2027 to remain on schedule for Artemis III. Now its task is to deliver on this promise. While the pad gets rebuilt, the rest of the shop hasn’t stopped. Another post by Dave Limp showed a lunar lander engine test fire lasting 41 minutes straight. The longest burn in the company’s history. This test resulted in something that was unexpected, but soothing: boredom! Limp wrote he’s learned to love a boring hotfire. After May? Yup. Boring sounds just fine. So, a few months to pull off what most of the industry figured would take a year? That would prove Blue Origin doesn’t just recover. It would show that they can take a punch and stay in the heavyweight fight. Fingers crossed for team Blue Origin!

And now to something completely different. On June 17th, China launched a Long March 12 rocket. Its mission was a routine flight, carrying a group of internet satellites. It went up without a hitch, and no one thought much about it. But did you know that this rocket is hiding one of the most interesting stories in Chinese spaceflight right now? It’s not one rocket. It’s three. Three machines are chasing three different goals while wearing the same number. One is a proven workhorse. One tried to land itself and face-planted in the desert. The third is the tallest new Chinese rocket of all, quietly built to do the one thing China still hasn’t pulled off.

So first, the confusion that trips up everybody. “Long March 12” might mean the plain 12, the 12A, or the 12B. These letters aren’t trim levels of the same car. The differences are huge. Different propellants, engines, launch sites, hardware, even partially different manufacturers. It’s kind of like three engineering teams got handed the same number and told to solve the future of rockets, each in their own way. The original Long March 12 is the boring-on-purpose one, and I mean that as a compliment. A two-stage rocket burning kerosene and liquid oxygen, built by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, 62 meters tall, lifting 12 tons to low Earth orbit. This was the first Chinese rocket with a 3.8 m wide body, whereas most before it were 3.35 m across and more diameter equals more payload, more flexibility. It first flew at the end of November 2024. Five launches since, and five successes.

Why does the boring one matter? Because it’s the foundation. While its flashier siblings run science-experiment landings, the plain 12 quietly flies real missions for real customers, building a track record. So the boring one is the setup. Now it gets fun. In December 2025, China rolled out the Long March 12A. That humble “A” hides an almost completely different animal. Where the original burns kerosene, the 12A burns liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Seven engines on the first stage instead of four, and it’s taller at around 69 m. But those differences aren’t the headline. This is. The 12A was built to come back. The SpaceX trick. You know? The thing that revolutionized spaceflight.

This was China’s first real swing at bringing an orbital booster home propulsively. So how did it go? The good news: it reached orbit clean. A success. It carried a mass simulator, a dummy weight, not a real payload. The bad news: the soft landing wasn’t exactly soft. The booster came back down about 320 kilometers downrange, failed its braking burn, and crashed, missing its target by 2 to 5 km. That’s a big miss. Likely a guidance or engine problem that showed up well before the rocket got near the ground. Comparable to the first New Glenn flight. To be clear, China hasn’t published a report because of course, they didn’t. Still: It flew. The concept got off the ground and reached orbit. The rest will likely follow.

And now the big one. The Long March 12B. The one to watch. First, its height: about 72 m. That makes it the tallest new-generation Chinese rocket. It out-towers everything in the fleet, and the only Chinese rockets that’ll beat it are still on the drawing board. But the stat that should make you sit up straight is the development time. China designed, built, and flew this thing in roughly 20 to 21 months. That’s brutally fast for a brand-new orbital-class rocket, which usually takes many years. How? Partly by not reinventing everything. The 12B uses the YF-102 engine family that had already flown, nine of them on the first stage. Around 20 tons to low Earth orbit, roughly Falcon 9 territory. That’s exactly what China is after: a Falcon 9 style workhorse with partial reusability.

The maiden flight on June 1st went great. It reached orbit and deployed two satellites for China’s Qianfan internet constellation. But the 12B, designed to land its booster like the 12A tried to, didn’t even attempt it. It flew with grid fins and landing legs, but the legs were mockups. Real-looking hardware, no actual landing, to test aerodynamics, not to touch down. When they’ll try for real is unclear, but it’s rumored for the second flight. And the June 1st launch happened with no public NOTAM or Notices to Mariners, the standard heads-up that warns pilots and ships a rocket’s about to fly through. Those are normally public. This time, nothing visible to outside trackers. And it happened before with a Chinese launch back in October. That’s so... China.

China is running a parallel experiment with one family. They’re trying multiple roads to the same destination. Speedrunning reusability made in China. China has flown reusable-by-design rockets, but it hasn’t landed one. Yet. That’s the open question. Not “can China build reusable rockets?” They can, and fast. It’s “Can China stick the landing?”

And that’s about to get more interesting because the Long March 12 family isn’t the only contender. There’s a private company that already got agonizingly close, meters from a perfect landing, and they’re about to try again. The only questions left are when and which Chinese rocket gets the glory.

And that’s it for today! Smash that like button. Subscribe for more! This is what fuels the Algorithm! And this is how you can help us for free! Check out our epic shirts in your favorite space nerd store! Our all-time favorite Raptor Engine design, and countless others, are there for you to explore! Click the card or the US or worldwide link in the description! History is being written in real time. If you want to catch the other historic stories from recent weeks, click the video on screen and continue the journey now. Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you again in the next episode!

Transcript [SpaceX Is Getting Ready For Flight 13! NASA Reveals 15 Flights per Artemis Launch]

They said it couldn’t be done. Too many launches. Too much refueling. Too complicated to ever work. SpaceX’s Moon plan, they said, was simply too much. This week, NASA gave us the number. At least 15 Starship launches to reach the Moon once. It should have proven the skeptics right. Instead, the math tells a very different story. And at Starbase, a mysterious new part just appeared on a Starship nose cone. I think it’s the first hardware for the one capability that makes the whole Moon mission possible. Oh, and Ship 40 just rolled out for its Flight 13 static fire. A July Starship launch? More likely than ever.

My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It!? Let’s dive right in!

Let’s start with the mystery, because it’s been evolving day by day, and I think I finally know what we’re looking at. There’s a Starship nose cone at Starbase that SpaceX has been modifying in a very deliberate, very unusual way. Let me walk you through the sequence, because the progression is the whole story.

First, SpaceX installed a bracket on the cone, near the top. At first glance, it looked almost like a manhole installation, the kind of access hatch you’d expect for a crew or inspection port. But the position was strange. Almost at the very top of the nose cone. Then they tack-welded a jig underneath that bracket. A jig, in manufacturing terms, is a temporary guide. You use it to position something precisely before you commit to the final hardware.

Then, a few days later, the picture changed again. SpaceX attached a short pipe socket to the bracket. And the jig was gone. In its place, six distinct holes in the hull, arranged in a pattern, directly under that pipe socket. You tell me! Does this look like a fuel transfer interface? The pipe socket isn’t wide enough for people. At most, it’s around 80 cm across. That’s too narrow for a crew transfer tunnel. But it’s exactly the kind of size and configuration you’d expect for a propellant transfer connection. And that points in a very specific direction. HLS. But not the crew side of HLS. The fuel transfer side.

Here’s the logic. Refueling a Starship in orbit, which is the single most important capability SpaceX needs to unlock for the Moon and Mars, requires a docking and propellant transfer interface between two ships. If SpaceX is building a test article to demonstrate that transfer, this is exactly what the hardware would start to look like. Now, if this is a fuel transfer interface, there’s a question worth asking. A Starship has two main propellant tanks: liquid oxygen and liquid methane. So you’d expect two transfer interfaces, one for each tank. This nose cone interface could be one of them. The other could be at the engine section, where the existing fueling interface already sits, so there might not be a need for a second added part up top.

Put it all together, and we may be looking at an HLS propellant transfer test article. If that’s what this is, it would be a sensation. It would mean SpaceX is moving toward the orbital refueling demonstration that NASA has been waiting on, the single biggest technical gate between where Starship is now and a crewed lunar landing. So, I want to be clear, this is an interpretation, not a confirmation. But the progression of that hardware, bracket to jig to pipe socket with six holes, is exactly the kind of connection pattern you’d see for a propellant interface. The large tube for propellant, the smaller holes for data, and other connections. This might not be flight hardware yet. This nose cone might very well be intended for structural testing at Massey’s. But we’re getting closer.

Speaking of Massey’s, here’s the most direct Flight 13 news. In the night from June 23rd to June 24th, SpaceX rolled Ship 40 to Massey’s with all of its engines installed. Jordan and Amy were out there again. Three sea-level Raptor 3 engines, three vacuum Raptor 3 engines, all in place. This is the rollout we’ve been waiting for.

So what’s next for Ship 40? The static fire campaign. With engines installed, Ship 40 will likely go through a spin prime first, where the turbopumps are spun up without ignition to verify the fuel flow. Then the main event, a full 60-second static fire on the Massey’s test stand, the same kind of test Ship 39 passed before Flight 12. That long-duration burn validates the entire propulsion system at flight conditions. If the static fire goes cleanly, Ship 40 rolls back to the production site for final checkouts, then it’s flight-ready. The ship side of Flight 13 is almost done.

On the booster side, the next move is Booster 20 rolling to the launch site for its own static fire at Pad 2. And once both vehicles have completed their static fires, we’re only a very short stretch from the launch. So how short are we talking? Let’s look at Flight 12 for reference. But with a caveat. Flight 12 was the first flight of version 3 hardware, on a brand new pad, with multiple static fire aborts and reworks along the way. From Booster 19’s successful 33-engine static fire in mid-April to the actual launch on May 22nd, you’re looking at roughly 5 weeks. But a big chunk of that was the extra wet dress rehearsals and the careful, deliberate pace SpaceX took, specifically because everything was new. Flight 13 should move faster. The pad is proven. The hardware is a known quantity now. There’s far less first-time risk. So once Ship 40 and Booster 20 clear their static fires, I’d expect a tighter timeline to launch.

We’re talking a couple of weeks, not five, assuming no surprises. That keeps us right in line with Shotwell’s early July target. Maybe slipping a touch, but close.

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Back to Starbase and a gas problem. A couple of episodes back, we covered SpaceX’s plan to build a natural gas pipeline from the Port of Brownsville to Starbase, to solve the tanker truck problem. We now have more information, including a name. SpaceX is calling it Starpipe. Star-Lord. Who? Yeah. So, just to be clear, we have Starpipe going to Starbase, fueling Starship... with Starmethane?

To recap the why. A single Starship launch needs around 230 tanker trucks worth of propellant and commodities. At the cadence SpaceX wants, daily and eventually more, trucking that volume becomes physically impossible. Starpipe is the answer. A dedicated underground pipeline carrying natural gas from the port directly to the launch site, where it gets liquefied into methane on site. This is the kind of permanent infrastructure investment that tells you SpaceX isn’t planning for a handful of launches a year. They’re planning for an industrial operation that runs continuously. And they’ll need these pipelines for every single Starship pad they are planning.

Let’s continue the paper trail. Here’s a NASA report that dropped this week. It contains some genuinely eye-opening Starship numbers and shows why SpaceX will need these pipelines soon. We finally have some hard numbers. NASA’s Office of Inspector General released a report on June 22nd about the agency’s launch infrastructure. It’s creatively titled IG-26-010. The headline finding is that NASA’s launch infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center is aging and lacks the capacity for the launch cadence that’s coming. Nothing new. But buried inside are two Starship facts that are worth pulling out.

First, the cadence. According to this report, SpaceX plans to launch Starships as often as every 8 days from the Florida coast, as an early step. Every 8 days. That’s 45 Starship launches per year from KSC alone. Second, and this is the number that’s really a small sensation. The report states that a single HLS lunar landing requires at least 15 Starship launches just to deliver propellant to low Earth orbit.

Understanding the Artemis Architecture

We finally have a confirmed number! Let me explain how that works and why, even if it sounds crazy, it makes a lot of sense, because it’s the key to understanding the entire Artemis architecture.

To land humans on the Moon with Starship, you can’t just launch one rocket and go. Blue Origin won’t do that either. The HLS lander needs to be fully refueled in orbit before it can make the trip to the Moon. It’s way heavier than Apollo with a lot more ambition. So the sequence is this.

First, SpaceX launches a propellant depot, a Starship configured as an orbiting fuel tank.
Then a series of tanker ships launch, one after another, each one rendezvousing with the depot and transferring its load of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. According to NASA, that’s at least 15 launches just to fill the depot.
Then, finally, the HLS lander itself launches, docks with the full depot, takes on all that propellant, and only then heads to the Moon with full tanks.

And this is why the infrastructure report matters. The report estimates that this Starship operation will generate around 19,000 additional heavy truck trips per year at Kennedy Space Center alone, just for hardware, propellant, and material. Roads and bridges at KSC, many built in the 1960s, are already in marginal condition. NASA is openly flagging that its own infrastructure may not be able to keep up with what SpaceX is about to do. So the picture this report paints is striking. One Moon landing equals a campaign of at least 16 Starship launches in total: 15 or more to fuel the depot, plus the lander itself. So, one launch every eight days… that’s 120 days!

Wait! Don’t forget about Starbase and later SLC 37. SpaceX should be able to fill the depot for Starship launches roughly every two months if they have two pads running a refueling flight every 8 days. And that would even leave them with one pad for other things, and once SLC 37 is ready, they can get this time down to around a month, still just holding the 8-day cadence.

And before you ask, the 15-flight number likely already includes boil-off. Why? A reasonable number for fuel payload on a propellant flight to a depot would be around 150 tons. That’s on the lower end of what we can expect. A version 3 Starship has a capacity of roughly 1,600 tons. That’s a bit more than 10 flights. So, the boil-off could be as much as 33%. A reasonably well-insulated Starship should be able to keep the boil-off percentage at around 10% per month. So, the boil-off problem is factored into this.

“Maybe a month-ish away from Flight 13. Okay? And then we should fly every month. When Shotwell says monthly cadence for the rest of 2026 and more later, this is why. The Moon program literally cannot happen without it. Testing alone will require many launches.”

So, what about those other pads? We were back in the air over the Cape this week with a fresh flyover, and the Florida buildout is picking up speed in a big way. Let’s start at SLC-37. The first Mechazilla tower is now stacked up to two segments, and we got a beautiful view of it from the helicopter. It took SpaceX 43 days to stack the last tower at Pad 2. By that estimate, we’re looking at yet another Mechazilla by the end of July.

I know, there will be a flood of comments asking if 15 tanker flights for one HLS flight to the Moon are worth it. Think of it this way. If it takes only about a month to fill the depot and costs about 10 million per flight, we’re looking at $150 million for about 100 tons of payload to the Moon. Blue Origin plans for Mk2 to send 20 tons to the Moon for $3.4 billion for Artemis V. That includes development costs. But they will need to refuel several times as well, and a New Glenn flight costs around $80 million. You see the problem? Per-flight costs will make a huge difference if you need to launch frequently. And SpaceX is really good at lowering per-launch costs. They did this with Falcon 9 like no one else.

So, if SpaceX is able to lower these to, let’s say, 10 to 20 million per Starship flight, it will be incredibly cheap. Here’s the fun part. Let’s look at the worst-case scenario. Let’s say they keep it at 100 million per Starship flight and just can’t lower it further for whatever reason. That would still make it far cheaper than an SLS launch, even though it would include 15 $100 million launches. And instead of not even being able to land on the Moon like SLS, it would send a fully reusable lander to the Moon with substantial crew and cargo capabilities. And that’s the worst-case scenario. I personally expect them to go below 10 million eventually. Mass production and full reusability will likely make these prices possible, even if it feels unachievable right now.

So, they have at least three pads operational by early 2027. Likely 4 with a fifth in active production. The tower isn’t the only thing happening at SLC 37. You can see tons of pedestals being placed across the ground, very likely the foundations for a tank farm. And SpaceX has started pouring the first concrete foundations as well. After months of this site looking mostly empty, work at SLC-37 is now massively picking up. This is the moment SLC-37 turns from a graded plot into an actual launch complex.

And just as I wanted to finish this episode, Nasaspaceflight’s Max Evans reported a very special transport from Roberts Road to SLC 37. The chopsticks for the first of two towers at SLC 37 have now been delivered to the construction site as well. Over at Roberts Road, the Giga Bay is very far along now. As well, it’s almost entirely covered in cladding, and the gigantic bay door openings are now fully visible. And here’s the detail that really sells the scale. Look at the full-size dump trucks and the heavy equipment parked around the building. Next to the Giga Bay, they look like toys. This is one of the largest buildings SpaceX has ever constructed, and from the air, you finally get a sense of just how massive it is.

And of course, we also got some good images of Pad 39A. The plan here seems to be to finish things up ASAP. Not much is left of the large construction efforts that dominated this site for so long. There’s still plenty of detail work happening, the finishing touches that take a pad from structurally complete to launch-ready. But the heavy lifting is essentially done. Honestly, the pad gets prettier with every flyover we do.

Put the NASA report next to this flyover, and the connection is obvious. Every 8 days, at least 15 launches per Moon mission, an entire second launch complex rising at the Cape. The infrastructure we’re watching get built is the physical answer to the cadence NASA is writing about. SpaceX is constructing the capacity to actually do this. And this doesn’t even include the efforts I reported on earlier last month. Pecan Island in Louisiana could become substantially larger than Starbase. The pieces are all moving at once. Flight 13 is the next one to fall into place, and it will need to show the most important metric: reliability.

And that’s it for today! Smash that like button. Subscribe for more! This is what fuels the algorithm! And this is how you can help us for free! Check out our epic shirts in your favorite space nerd store! Our all-time favorite Raptor Engine design, and countless others, are there for you to explore! Click the card or the US or worldwide link in the description! History is being written in real time. If you want to catch the other historic stories from recent weeks, click the video on screen and continue the journey. Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you again in the next episode!

Transcript [This Orbit is the WORST]

Intro

In my previous video on space navigation, we talked about some apparent paradoxes, like how to catch up with someone in the same orbit, you first have to slow down! Or how you have to speed up (twice) to switch to a higher, slower orbit. Here are three more even weirder paradoxes of space navigation, including the most surprising one I’ve ever come across — which I only found out about recently, and which is truly bonkers.

The Worst Orbit

There’s a worst orbit to get to. It seems like the further out your destination orbit is, the more fuel would be required to get there. But in fact, after a certain point, going out begins to require less fuel. The worst orbit to aim for is about 15 times farther out than your current orbit, which for us is between Saturn and Uranus. This fact is profoundly bizarre. Ultimately, it has to do with the interplay between how much you slow down on the way out to the new orbit versus how much speed you need to stay there.

The simplest method to get to a different circular orbit — which we talked about in the last video — requires two changes of speed: the first burn puts you onto an elliptical transfer orbit, and the more you increase your speed with that burn, the higher the high point of the ellipse. This makes intuitive sense: the more fuel you use, the faster you’ll go and the further out you’ll end up. Except you’re not done — gravity constantly pulls to slow you down as you go out along the transfer orbit, so when you arrive at your target radius, you need to speed up in order to get into a circular orbit there (otherwise you’ll keep falling back to where you started). And this second, re-circularizing burn is what makes things downright weird.

The amount you need to speed up to circularize your orbit depends, of course, on the difference between your speed upon arriving at the top of the elliptical orbit and the speed you need to be in a circular orbit there. It turns out the arrival speed at the top of the ellipse falls roughly like one over r, while the target speed needed for a circular orbit falls roughly as one over the square root of r, which is bigger — comparing the two, you can see that the difference between the target speed and the arrival speed initially increases for short-range transfers, then shrinks once your target radius is more than around six times farther out than your starting point. You might think that the worst orbit is therefore around six times farther out, but this is just the worst point for the second, circularizing burn — once we remember to add in the first burn (which is the speedup orbit necessary to get onto the transfer orbit in the first place) we find it’s hardest to get into an orbit around 15 and a half times larger than your starting orbit. Beyond 15 times, it’s easier to get there!

A bizarre consequence of this ‘worst’ orbit is that it takes less fuel to escape the solar system entirely than to go into orbit between Saturn and Uranus. Actually, it’s easier to escape the solar system than to go into a circular orbit anywhere beyond the asteroid belt; between Saturn and Uranus is just the hardest possible place to get to. And the difference is pretty substantial — it takes almost 30% more fuel to transfer to the “worst” circular orbit than it does to go to infinity! This fact applies generally, whether you’re orbiting the sun and trying to go out to Saturn, or orbiting Earth and trying to go to the moon. Like, it takes almost the same amount of fuel to get into a geostationary orbit 6 and a half times out from low Earth orbit as it does to get to the moon, which is sixty times farther out.

Bi-elliptic is Better

The general inefficiency of medium-range orbital transfers leads to — what’s to me — the most surprising paradox of space navigation, and one I didn’t know about until recently: it’s that you can actually save fuel by going out too far, and then coming back. Basically, you do the orbital transfer with an extra step: rather than going directly out to the destination orbit and circularizing, first, you completely overshoot your destination, then come back and circularize. It’s called a bi-elliptic transfer, and it saves fuel because it does its intermediate burn out where gravity is really weak, AND because circularizing an orbit is much easier when you’re arriving from above, rather than arriving from below.

For bi-elliptic magic, you first boost yourself onto an elliptical orbit that overshoots 100 or 1000 times further out than you need to go — it doesn’t cost much extra fuel vs going directly to your final destination because a gravitational well requires less and less additional speed to go further and further out. Then when you’re at the furthest away point, you’re going so slowly and gravity is so weak it takes almost no effort to change orbits, so you can speed up just a minuscule amount to get onto a new transfer ellipse back down to your destination orbit. Then, since you’re coming from above you’ll be going too fast and need to slow down to circularize your orbit — but it turns out it’s much easier to circularize an orbit arriving from above than below. We already mentioned that the target speed for a circular orbit is proportional to one over the square root of r, while coming from below your arrival speed is proportional to one over r, which is much smaller, you might only have 1% or 5% of the target speed, so you need to speed up a lot to circularize from below. Coming from above, though, your arrival speed is proportional to one over the square root of r, just like your target speed — and in fact, it’s just roughly 1.4 times your target speed, meaning you need to slow down only ~30% to get onto a circular orbit from above.

The takeaway is that when you come from above and then circularize your orbit, you don’t have to work nearly as hard as if you come from below and circularize. So, the genius of the bi-elliptic transfer is this: you do a little bit more work to go out farther than you need, and from where it’s very easy to come back, in order to save effort on circularizing the final orbit. All-in-all, overshooting is more efficient when your destination is more than around 12 times farther out, but it’s not particularly big savings. If your destination is 20 times out and you overshoot to 40 times out before coming back, then you save 1.7% compared with a direct transfer. If your destination is 100 times further out and you overshoot all the way to 1 million times out before coming back, then you save 7.6% over a direct transfer. Not very much... and there’s a big cost: time. Overshooting so far takes a long time since you slow down more and more the further out you go (so you’d be traveling farther AND doing it more slowly); going 10, 100, or 1000 times further out than your target takes around 600, 20,000, or 700,000 times longer than a direct transfer. So: what’s more valuable, your fuel or your time?

Travel Further With Less Fuel

Well, if you have a limited amount of fuel, but all the time in the world, then you may want to hear about this last paradox: when doing a bi-elliptic transfer, the more you overshoot, the more fuel you save. Here’s the total fuel needed for a bi-elliptic transfer vs how far out you overshoot, and you can see clearly that the more you overshoot, the less fuel you need. This fact seems ridiculous, because the further out you go, the more fuel is needed during the initial burn to get out all that way, and then, because you’re falling back down from further away, you’ll arrive at your destination going faster and also require more fuel to slow down and recircularize.

The reason overshooting farther actually does save you fuel is that you get a bigger saving from the middle transfer burn being really, really far out, than the extra fuel required to get there and return. Specifically, compared to the fuel savings for the middle burn, the extra fuel cost for the final burn is roughly half as much, and the extra fuel cost for the first burn is roughly half times one over the square root of r as much. Since a half plus a half divided by the square root of r is less than one, that means you save more fuel the more you overshoot! The natural conclusion is that, to be as fuel-efficient as possible, your best course of action is to overshoot all the way to infinity!

An infinite bi-elliptic transfer is the most efficient simple way to transfer to any destination more than twelve times further away than you’re currently orbiting, saving up to 8% of your fuel. The only problem, other than the savings are not that great, is that it takes an infinite amount of time...

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