Starship Flight 14: Is This The Most Important Launch Yet? Will It Go To Orbit? [21:55]

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

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Transcript

Chapter 1: Booster 21’s Static Fire and Pad Wear

On Friday evening, Booster 21 fired all 33 engines. SpaceX says: full duration. But the burn was 10 seconds shorter than on the last two flights, and SpaceX doesn’t say why.

I have a theory, and it tells us a lot about what one launch really costs a pad.

Ship 40 is sailing the wrong way around the planet, on purpose. Louisiana has already started work on its $100 billion Starbase. And Flight 14? Two weeks out. What did SpaceX just quietly change, and why?

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

Starship Updates

Let’s start with the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Booster 21 has done its static fire! On Friday evening, all 33 Raptor engines came to life at Pad 2. SpaceX calls it a full duration burn. And still, it was around 10 seconds shorter than the ones from the last two flights. Around 15 to 16 seconds this time. So SpaceX says “full duration,” which means they reduced the full duration length by roughly 10 seconds. My thought is that this might have happened due to the wear after the past two flights. We saw SpaceX install extra burn plates in the trench, in locations where the wear from Flights 12 and 13 was stronger than expected.

A fun fact on the side: the trench has to endure more stress during a static fire than during a launch. During a launch, the booster stays attached to the pad for around 3 to maybe 4 seconds. Then it takes off and immediately provides relief for the flame diverter system. During a static fire, the booster doesn’t move at all. It sits there, blasting all 33 engines down into the trench, making the deluge system work hard and the diverter wear fast. So, SpaceX might have reduced the static fire length to preserve the pad? At least that’s my theory. If you have a better one, in the comments are right below.

Chapter 2: Flight 14 Preparations and Timeline

So Booster 21 was rolled back to Mega Bay 1 already and is now going through final preparations for Flight 14. Two weeks out. During Flight 12, there were 14 days between the booster static fire and a first launch attempt. And on Flight 13, there were only 6 days in between. Add a little extra care for everything this mission is supposed to do, and September 15th is now hard locked in on my calendar. That’s what we can expect, and that’s what the WAI team is working toward. And we still have no definitive answer if this flight will enter orbit or not. I’ll report as soon as there’s any sort of information!

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Final preparation, by the way, means exactly what it sounds like. Final inspections after the static fire, closing out open work items, and waiting for the pad to be ready to receive the full stack. The next time we see Booster 21 roll down Highway 4, it’s hopefully going to the launch mount. And even without a catch attempt, this is the launch I’m most excited about in years.

If Ship 41 enters orbit, Starship makes a huge step forward. Real satellites, into a real orbit, from the vehicle that is supposed to carry the future of spaceflight on its back. So, the last two weeks of waiting are going to be the hardest. And because we still don’t know which mission we’re getting, let me explain both variants.

If Flight 14 goes orbital, you know the profile from our earlier coverage. A minimum of 3 orbits to line the ground track back up with Starbase. Roughly four and a half hours between launch and landing. Starlink V3 deployment somewhere in the middle, and this time the satellites would stay up. So, a launch in the morning and a splashdown in the early afternoon, and one very intense half-day for the WAI livestream team.

If SpaceX decides on one more suborbital rehearsal instead, we get the familiar profile one more time, flown by the most refined Starship yet, with the orbital attempt moving one flight down the line. I know which version I’m hoping for. But I’ll take either one over an empty pad.

Over at Massey’s, our old friend S43.1 has begun testing. The mystery nose cone is in business. Jordan and Amy caught it on Wednesday afternoon. And Starship Gazer captured it at night with a fully frosty LOX header tank, standing in the super crusher. SpaceX’s quest for either a stronger or a lighter nose cone continues.

Remember how SpaceX launched Flight 13 into the fastest Max Q ever for a Starship stack? So this research is either done to determine how strong the current assembly is, or to find a way to keep it strong while reducing weight. Weight reduction is an aspect of development that comes after reliable operation has been established for Starship. Iterative design and I do expect SpaceX to take quite a few tons of weight out of both upper and lower stages of the Starship as time progresses. Version 3 was a first step. And every ton that comes out of that structure is a ton that goes into the payload bay instead. That’s why this unglamorous test stand work matters so much.

Chapter 3: Ship 40’s Surprising Route Home

Now to Ship 40

And to a little surprise. For weeks, we assumed the trip home would go east. Across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and into the Gulf. Guess what? Ship 40 is doing the opposite. Forte turned west and is taking the Cape of Good Hope route around Africa. And I want to know why. And so I did some digging. And the answer makes a lot of sense once you look at a globe instead of a flat map.

First, the Distance

Christmas Island sits in the eastern Indian Ocean. From there, going west around Africa to Brownsville is about 12,400 nautical miles. Our Panama estimate was around 13,000. So the “long way around” is actually the shorter way.

Second, There’s No Canal

No Panama slot booking, no tolls, no sitting at anchor with a priceless rocket on deck, waiting for a transit window ‘cause that place is pretty busy. But wait, if you’re going west anyway, why not Suez? That route would save another 400 miles. It would also lead straight through the Red Sea, though, and that is not a neighborhood where you send a cargo that cannot be replaced. So 400 extra miles for open ocean the entire way is the cheapest insurance policy ever written.

Third, the Season

The Pacific typhoon season peaks exactly now, in September and October. On the southern route, Forte has room to steer around weather systems instead of threading through them. Forte is currently making 14.8 knots, and the tracking data says it’ll arrive at the Port of Brownsville on October 8th. Our “first half of October” estimate from last episode holds.

Itinerary

And for everybody following along on the trackers, the itinerary looks like this: across the Indian Ocean now, around the Cape of Good Hope in the coming weeks, and then the long diagonal across the Atlantic and into the Gulf at the start of October. A flown Starship, coming home past the Cape of Good Hope. Magellan would be proud. And confused.

Chapter 4: Breaking Ground at Starbase Louisiana

Starbase, Louisiana Update

From the oceans to the swamps. Starbase, Louisiana is already moving! RGV Aerial Photography has done a first flyover at the new Louisiana site! Thank you, Mauricio! And SpaceX is not wasting any time. Mauricio found core drilling operations in several locations where SpaceX will build infrastructure. And that is one of the first things you do when you want to determine your next steps. You pull samples, and you learn what the ground can actually carry before you design a single foundation on it. And pay attention to the drilling pattern. The machines are working in the area where Starfactory and Terabay are planned, and the drill plan appears to trace the launch site locations down the coast. The master plan from the announcement video is being checked against reality, hole by hole. A dredge and its pipeline were also spotted near the port access. That’s either routine waterway work, or the first step toward bringing construction material in by water. SpaceX said so. We’ll keep watching to find out.

Felix Needs Help Getting a Green Card

So now I have a very important announcement! For the middle of the video, I have something different for you this time. We are still trying to desperately get a US green card. Yeah, that’s harder than you’d think. But you can help! We need to prove to our case officer that WAI has a real impact on the US. So if you work in the education system in the US, if you’re a teacher or a professor, and you’ve used our material in class before, send me an email to contact@whataboutit.net! Whether you’re showing our live streams to your students or using a passage from a video to explain something, send us a description of what you’re doing and what impact it has! Also, if you were inspired to enter a STEM field through watching What About It?! do the same thing! Did you choose aerospace engineering because we inspired you? Are you becoming an engineer because you rock twice a week? Help us! Send us an email explaining what you did, how we influenced your path, and what impact WAI had on your students or your career. Thank you so much. And for all the others, remember to like, subscribe, and become a channel member or Patron to help us grow further! You’re the reason we keep doing this. Thank you so much! You rock!

Water Table at Starbase

So, if you followed our Starbase, Texas coverage over the years, you know what comes after the drilling in the ground like this. Marshland doesn’t carry a launch pad on its own. Expect surcharge preloading to squeeze the water out of the soil, piles driven deep, and pile caps on top. The same playbook we basically just watched at the expansion site at Starbase, Texas, again. The samples they’re pulling right now will show how deep those piles have to go. Louisiana’s swamp is about to be studied more thoroughly than it ever was in its life.

And the state of Louisiana? They can hardly believe their luck. Governor Jeff Landry put it like this on Friday, quote: “The numbers speak for themselves. SpaceX’s $100 billion investment will transform Louisiana as we know it.” When we covered the announcement last week, we talked about 3,000 jobs to start and up to 10,000 in the long run. For the parish where the loudest thing until now was the shrimp boats, that is a radical change.

Chapter 5: Star Shield’s Expanding Military Role

StarShield and SpaceX Updates

Now, let’s look up again. Have you ever heard of StarShield? StarShield is SpaceX’s military Starlink constellation, which just got another major contract. For everyone newer to the channel: StarShield is the government version of Starlink. Dedicated Starlink military satellites are operated for the US government instead of for consumers like you and me. And this constellation isn’t done yet. The US Space Force signed up for a fleet-level service that will provide StarShield connectivity to military aircraft worldwide. At least 500 megabits per second down and at least 100 up, anywhere the soldiers are, delivered through StarShield Tile and Tile Mini aviation terminals.

So remember what we learned on the first-ever SpaceX earnings call? Commercial aviation is less than 10% penetrated, and passengers are booking connecting flights just to sit in a Starlink-equipped plane. Now the same story is playing out on the military side. SpaceX is quietly becoming critical communications infrastructure for aircraft, civilian and military alike. And every one of those contracts is feeding Falcon 9 and later Starship.

Where 10 years ago people were wondering what payloads SpaceX could even fly with a reusable rocket, we’re now looking at a situation where, even with reusable rockets, SpaceX can’t launch enough. So, Booster 21 and Ship 41 are both through their test campaigns, and Pad 2 is getting its final checks. Two weeks, if my calendar is right, and this is not a joke. Whatever Flight 14 turns out to be, suborbital or orbital, it’s going to be yet another spectacular Starship launch with all the excitement guaranteed.

Orbit or not to orbit on Flight 14, what’s your bet? I’ll be reading every single one, probably while refreshing Forte’s position on the tracker. What a time to be alive. And all of it to venture further and to stay. In fact, the Moon really starts to become the place to be.

Chapter 6: iSpace’s Third Attempt at the Moon

Exploring the Future of Lunar Landers

Here’s a fact to consider. Never in history were so many landers prepared to make the trip to our natural satellite at the same time. And not all of these landers come from the United States. Over in Japan, a Tokyo-based private company is racing to establish regular delivery service to the lunar surface. And it isn’t their first attempt either. ispace has tried this twice before. Two landers, two crashes. Both times they made it all the way to the Moon, and then lost the spacecraft in the final minutes before touchdown. And now, guess what? They have signed up for attempt number three. This time though, the whole mission is Japanese. The lander, the rocket, and a good part of the money behind it. No chopsticks involved, though. So, let’s take a look at what went wrong on the first two missions. And at why a launch contract signed a couple of weeks ago might be a bigger deal than it looks at first.

Mission 1

Mission 1 launched at the end of 2022 and arrived in April 2023. And it got so close! The lander was already descending. Everything looked nominal. And then the software got confused about its own altitude. It thought it was on the ground while it was still kilometers above. So it hovered. And hovered. Until the tanks were empty. And then it dropped and crashed.

Mission 2

Mission 2’s lander was named Resilience. It launched in January 2025 on a Falcon 9, sharing the ride with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander. And that ride-sharing must have hurt until today. Because Blue Ghost went on to nail its landing and became the first private spacecraft to fully and cleanly touch down on the Moon. The most amazing imagery. Resilience, from the very same rocket, did not. It reached lunar orbit. It started its descent. And then, around 90 seconds before touchdown, the telemetry went wild. The altitude reading jumped from 52 m above the ground to a number below the surface. After that, all contact was lost. Resilience came down hard in a region called Mare Frigoris. The “Sea of Cold.” Up in the Moon’s northern latitudes. Two failed landings. Not the best start. Damn.

But after Mission 2, ispace did the right thing and took its time analyzing the data. The verdict: a hardware fault in the laser range finder. That is the lander’s altimeter. It fires a laser down at the surface and tells the spacecraft exactly how far it still has to fall. And that part didn’t work. On Resilience, this sensitive instrument failed to deliver valid measurements until it was too late to slow down. Engines and power systems performed as expected. The laser did not. So, ispace’s scorecard after those two missions reads two “almosts.” Landing on the Moon is unforgiving, and ispace has the scars to prove it. But if you want to learn how to walk, you are bound to fall now and then. The important part is getting back up and improving.

The New Lander: ULTRA

Which brings us to the new lander. And it is called ULTRA. And no, this is not Resilience with a fresh coat of paint. It is a genuinely new vehicle. Because here’s something not everyone knows. ispace was quietly running two separate lander programs in parallel. The company has a Japanese arm and an American arm located in Colorado. The Japanese team was building something called a Series 3. The American team was building a bigger lander called APEX 1.0, meant for a NASA delivery contract. And in March 2026, ispace asked itself a very reasonable question. Why are we building two things? Wouldn’t it be better to merge them? ULTRA is that merger. It takes the structure from the Japanese Series 3 and combines it with the propellant tanks and the communications gear from the American APEX design. Especially the coms gear got a major update. It is built to talk to relay satellites in lunar orbit instead of only beaming straight back to Earth. And that matters a lot if you ever want to land somewhere Earth can’t see. Like the far side.

There was also an engine swap along the way. The lander was supposed to fly with a new engine called VoidRunner. But the supplier ran into performance problems. Critical ones, unfortunately. The engine simply didn’t reach the efficiency it needed. So, to not waste more time, ispace pulled the VoidRunner and switched to an engine that has already flown on past lunar missions. And after two crashes, I fully understand that decision. Flight heritage is suddenly worth a lot. And the two previous failures? The fixes for both are baked directly into the ULTRA design. Whether they actually work, we’ll only see when this vehicle makes its own landing attempt.

Launch Contract

Now to the part that made the headlines. At the end of July 2026, ispace signed a launch contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to fly ULTRA on Japan’s H3 rocket. The target is 2028. And you know how it goes with dates like these. A target, not a promise. Pencil it in lightly. But the date isn’t the important part here anyway. Think about this. ispace’s first two landers both rode on an American rocket, the Falcon 9. The rocket did its job just fine. But it also meant that Japan’s showcase lunar company was renting its ride to space from overseas. ULTRA on H3 changes that. For the first time, a Japanese-built lander flies on a Japanese-built rocket. Don’t get this wrong, though. Japan is part of the Artemis program, it’s contributing hardware like the planned pressurized rover, and there are no plans to change that. This is more about the supply chain. About Japan being able to send payloads to the Moon without asking anyone else for a lift.

But while all this sounds nice on paper, there are some rough edges as well. H3, the rocket half of this partnership, has been on its own rollercoaster ride. Since the old H-IIA was retired in June 2025, H3 is Japan’s only heavy lifter. And in December of the same year, it failed. The upper stage engine had a problem during ascent, and a navigation satellite was lost, and so JAXA grounded the entire rocket for 6 months to find out what went wrong. In June 2026, H3 returned to flight with a stripped-down version, the H3-30. That variant flies without any strap-on boosters at all. Just its core engines. And then, just weeks ago in August, it flew again and put another navigation satellite exactly where it belonged. Two clean flights in a row after the failure. So, the rocket ispace is betting its third Moon shot on comes freshly tested out of a difficult year.

And it does have the muscle for the job. In the right configuration, two main engines plus four solid boosters, H3 can send more than 6,000 kg onto a path to the Moon. That’s a fully grown African elephant on its way to the lunar surface. Yeah, more than enough for a lander like ULTRA.

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I need to buy a little more SpaceX stock before it takes off like a rocket (pun intended).

I can’t wait til they start paying dividends. I think it’s still running about $140/share?

My return so far is neutral percent.

President Asks For 1000 Launches, SpaceX Promise 10,000 Launches!
Deep Space Updates August 31st | 28:20
Scott Manley | 1.87M subscribers | 223,505 views | September 1, 2026

Space news for the second half of August, covering:
Recovery of Starship 40
Sucessful Zhuque 3 landing
Unsuccessful Zhuque 3 standing upright.
Launch of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
Starbase/Swampbase Louisiana
And so much more.....
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

It’s a longterm buy, and that’s evidenced by the large holdings by big funds and whatnot. If the speculated merger of SpaceX and Tesla takes place, it’ll be a breathtaking valuation and/or market cap.

Terrestrial cell networks will not vanish overnight, they’ll probably have decades of continued use to amortize the sunk costs and keep service working right (in moving cars, for example). Terrestrial mobile phones (including those on aircraft and in orbit) will require Starlink somewhere in the chain, and it’s a growth area.

It seems likely that the EU will want their own system, but that stubborn elitist parochial police state xenophobic stupidity will hold them back, because the launch cadence will have to rise on a curve that just doesn’t seem likely to materialize.

The first Earth colonists on Mars will be robots, which will prepare the habitats, clean up soils, landscape, erect structures, etc. First human colonists will probably arrive from the colonist population that’s shortly going to be developed on the Moon.

My guess is, by the time the Terafab comes online it’ll be arriving earlier than projected (nice change, eh?) and at least one other will be under construction by then.

"It’s a longterm buy"

Yup.

I was too young to buy into that 'fruit company' that Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan bought into (Apple). Haha

"stubborn elitist parochial police state xenophobic stupidity will hold them back"

Aaaand, they (EU) have handed back almost all their near-equatorial launch sites in their former colonies. Whoopsie. What space-faring countries own ideal real estate now? China, Russia, and the United States. Maybe India as well.

I think Cuba would be an outstanding place for a Spaceport. Imagine a pre-Castro sugar and tobacco economy combined with high-tech computers and space. What a paradise it could be.

Great idea.

And Cuba could be turned into a paradise. Make it a space port and a space junkie viewing vacations!

Russia’s primary launch site is leased, and in Kazakhstan, and even that one is high latitude. High latitude launches are better for polar orbits (the reason the ISS wound up in that orbit was the “I”) and LEO.

India’s in better shape, and gets a lot of bang for the buck, but I have my doubts that they’re going to keep up. They do have appropriately ambitious plans, but other priorities are emerging for India.

In the Scott Manley vid earlier in the topic the shift to LEO from geostationary is mentioned, and that’s probably a consequence of SpaceX’ launch cadence and the economy of the Falcon 9. Also that’s where the money is for the time being.

Just speculating, SpaceX may spin that off, and will if they’re smart — Merlin has the best thrust to weight ratio of any rocket engine, and the F9 system has massive reliability and is more economical than other operational systems. It’ll continue to be NASA’s ride to the ISS, but the clock is almost up for that.

Apple’s another long term buy.

Scott Manley Transcript

Hello, it’s Scott Manley. It is August 31st. I’m finally back home after a week learning how to fix aircraft. And really, it is time for me to get down with a whole bunch of deep space updates. And so, we go and look back at the launches we’ve had in the last few weeks.

So back on the 16th of August, we had a Falcon 9 launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base carrying Star Shield Group 1-14. So, uh, this was also known as USSF 366 and it contains apparently 23 modified star shields which are believed to be part of the new space data network. Now, somebody pointed out there was like a government publication which, uh, specifically referred to star shield support for military aircraft. So that sounds like US military aircraft are now going to have the equivalent of Starlink, albeit over the Star Shield network. That’s sort of unrelated to this launch, but I thought it was interesting that the Department of Defense will now have in-flight Wi-Fi.

On the 16th of August, we have a Long March 12 launching out of Wang Chang carrying SATNET, uh, LEO Group for 24. That is the 24th batch of satellites in Google Wang, which is, of course, aiming for like 13,000 satellites. They have a long way to go. And note, by the way, this is different from the 12A and the 12B which are aiming for reusability. This was the non-reusable version.

On the 18th of August, in China, 3 launched from Jichuan carrying Hongghu 3 and this was China’s first successful booster landing using landing legs because, of course, the last the first one we had was a Long March 10 which was caught by some wires and hooks and all sorts of cool stuff. Now, uh, this was the second attempt by Landspace to perform this with their GJ3. So, G3 is like a, um, 4 and a half meter stainless steel about 570 tons. Uh, 66 m tall. It has nine engines on the first stage. It runs methyloxs, uh, you know, liquid oxygen, uh, and it aims to be about 20 tons to low Earth orbit. Now, that puts it very comparable to a Falcon 9 and definitely it looks very similar albeit more shiny and stainless steel.

So anyway, yeah, after about 2 minutes, seconds of flight, the first stage separated and it performed its sort of casual flip maneuver as it headed down range to a landing site about 400 km away. And, uh, this time it actually landed successfully on those landing legs. Now, apparently they changed the landing profile a bit compared to the previous flight. They used fewer engines which meant that they ended up using more propellant but they had a bit more margin for error on this. Um, the previous attempt was a failure and we’d only ever seen the wreckage from this and the odds still. This time after the success they felt comfortable sharing some more video of the failure that previously happened and that was a pretty spectacular failure. You know, booster exploding a whole bunch of wreckage landing on the ground and I’m really happy to see that Landspace shared that.

Now, after landing, there was apparently a bit of a fire and we can see the little robot servicing robots driving up to try to deal with the fire and it then cut away. And we weren’t sure what happened. Well, uh, in the meantime, a bunch of, uh, news outlets reported that Landspace were planning to refly this booster in 6 months. I suspect that is not true because we’ve actually seen images of it and it is now lying on its side. One of the legs failed. But regardless, this is China’s first successful landing of an orbital class booster on legs. And so, yeah, respect for that. It is interesting that since they have a fixed landing pad unlike a drone ship, that will constrain what inclinations they can hit with this. But that might work just fine if they’re, say, launching a constellation like Starlink.

Speaking of which, uh, on the 19th of August, we have a Starlink launch out of Vandenberg Space Force Base. On the 20th of August, out of Mahia, we have Rocket Lab launching the Electron carrying QPS S18. The lightning god defends. This is the 8th of 17 launches to support IQPS synthetic aperture radar constellation.

On the 21st of August, out of Slick 40, we had a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink. On the 22nd of August, in Russia, out at Plasets, we had a Soyuz 2.1B with a Fregat to stage carrying GLONAS K19L. So that is a, you know, medium Earth orbit radio navigation satellite part of the GLONAS constellation. There was apparently this launch was also sort of kept secret. There weren’t any airspace closure announcements because, of course, they’re concerned about, uh, you know, Ukrainian drones penetrating that far through Russian airspace and hitting these, uh, launches.

Anyway, um, on the 15th of August, a Long March 6C launched out of Thai and that carried six small satellites for various educational institutes. Apparently, there was a Bayou 4 which was a Cubesat from the Harbon Institute. There was one called, uh, JAMX1 which is a radio science experiment from Shanghai Youth Center. There was one called Lingio9 for Thailand which was actually built by Galaxy SAT, uh, which is, you know, obviously a Chinese organization and Jangi 14 and 15 they’re like synthetic aperture radar satellites with significant onboard compute capabilities which is important if you’re sort of trying to be rapid and responsive in terms of the data the stuff you’re finding and, uh, yeah, the also Beijing Normal University launched a pair of satellites called Muo 1A and 1B. So anyway, uh, now that was all great. Those satellites went into orbit and then about 10 to 11 days later, uh, Leo Labs found that the stage which had been left in orbit had exploded and shattered into tens if not hundreds of fragments in space debris. So that will be up around 400 to 480 kilometers. These fragments are going to take a while to filter out. They are potentially crossing space station orbits at those altitudes. Uh, I’m guessing this is not the first time this has happened to A6C. And you know, China has guidelines that rocket stages should be deorbited where possible. And I’m guessing that since Long March 6C isn’t de-orbiting, it’s not capable and therefore isn’t a very good rocket. That’s what I’m going to say. If your stages keep blowing up and you can’t de-orbit them, you’re not a very good rocket.

Moving onwards, we have quite a surprise. It is a Starlink launch. Now, I know you’re saying, “Wait a sec, another Starlink launch.” Seriously, what’s surprising about that? Well, this was launched out of Slick 40 on the east coast out of Florida. Um, and this was also the first booster 1067 to fly 37 missions. But also, this is apparently the last Starlink launch on a Falcon 9 out of Florida, which I’m going to say seems pretty premature to me. But SpaceX apparently thinks that they can start launching enough spacecraft, enough Starlinks on a Starship to start, uh, you know, making a difference and well, we’ll talk more about that later but they are going to be using these in fairly expendable mode for a while.

Anyway, yeah, on the 26th of August was another Starlink out of Vandenberg. Vandenberg is going to keep launching Starlinks for the foreseeable future because it can reach latitudes or inclinations that Starship will not be able to get to. On the 27th of August, we have Arian 62 launching MTG, Magic the Gathering, obviously no, um, Meteorat 14, right, which is a geostationary weather satellite. It’s the third satellite in the third generation program. And this is going to cover Europe and Africa from its position 9 degrees east of the meridian. It’s a 3.8-ton satellite. And this is interestingly the first GEO satellite launched by Arian 6. And I was kind of surprised by that because Arian 5 was the GEO workhorse from their launch site in Kourou. They were very close to the equator and they would deliver satellites with the most excess propellant because they didn’t need to perform these plane change maneuvers or not nearly as large a maneuver. So the fact that Arian 6, this is the first GEO satellite just shows how much the market for GEO satellites has dropped off. Now granted, SpaceX are still launching a few of those and I think we’ve had some on Atlas and stuff but, uh, you know, again Arian 5 used to do this all the time and I think this is really showing that the communication satellite market has lost a bunch of applications that would otherwise go to GEO satellites. They’re now going to LEO satellites. But anyway, that was successful nevertheless.

Finally, on the 30th of August, we had perhaps the most important launch of the last few weeks. Falcon Heavy launching out of Slick 39A carrying the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This satellite was, it was called WFIRST for a long time, Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. This began as spy satellite hardware which didn’t quite satisfy the NRO’s requirement. They tried a project which was going to do some new things. Turned out those new things weren’t going to deliver what they wanted. So the satellite, the spacecraft with their mirrors and hardware, whatever they were, donated to NASA and said, “Hey, you know, you can probably make this into a space telescope since that’s what you did with Hubble,” right? Well, uh, yeah, this successfully launched, uh, and, uh, it’s on its way to the Lagrange point at L2. I say Lagrange point, it’s more like a giant Lagrange zone. It is a humongous volume of space you could put tons of satellites up there and they would not come close to each other. Uh, so anyway, it’s going to take about 100 days to get there. They’re going to start their commissioning after about 10 days. By the time it gets there, they should have done all their setup and they should be ready to start science right away. We’ve already heard that they have completed successfully their first, uh, course correction burn that will take them in the correct direction. And, uh, yeah, I mean, so this was a return to launch site where the boosters came back.

Unfortunately, someone at NASA didn’t get the memo and had the camera pointing at the wrong landing site. So we only see one booster with the other booster being off elsewhere. Also interestingly is, uh, this mission, this project, um, well, during the press conference, Jar Eisman gets a call on his cell phone and he gets up to take it, and he comes in and it’s like, yeah, President Trump saying yes, we really appreciate the work NASA’s doing on this; we thank you for all your success. I don’t know the exact words, but look, I’m happy to have a president who is very happy to be engaged in space stuff and promoting it, but I would have preferred that he didn’t try to cancel this project three times through the presidential budget. Right? So, regardless, uh, this thing did launch early, ahead of schedule, and it just shows you, you know, that NASA is capable of doing these things if it’s given the right opportunities, the right management, the right incentives.

So anyway, I’m very excited to see what we get out of this. It will obviously be looking at, you know, um, it’s got an amazing coronagraph. That’s the thing actually I’m most excited about because this thing will be able to very carefully put a shade over the light of a star so it can see objects nearby, such as exoplanets. And this is going to have the most capable, uh, spacecraft to do this. Anyway, so yeah, that was all the launches. Um, as I said, SpaceX, you know, they’ve had an interesting few days. First of all, we’ve heard about how there’s no Starlink launches now going forward from Slick 40. The Starship launch, which we are expecting at some point later this month. We had a Starship 41 had its test fire and so did, uh, the booster, all 33 engines. Um, we’ve now heard that they will be carrying live Starlink satellites to operational orbits, but now they’ve stepped back and they say they are not going to attempt a catch of Starship back at Boca Chica.

And you know that was that’s contrary to previous statements. I suspect it’s because Starship has to come out over Mexico and they have to come to an agreement presumably with that because, you know, there’s some sort of, you know, international agreements that need to go on with that. Um, but that does sort of dovetail nicely with SpaceX announcing that it is setting up a new spaceport in Louisiana, of all places. Now, uh, a lot of people looked at this site and they are confused because what they see is that it only has south coast available. It’s not really, they don’t think it’s going to be able to handle like launches, you know, to the east. They’re like, “Oh, shouldn’t launch sites be able to launch with the rotation of the Earth?” Well, this place can’t do this. So, anyway, this is in Vermilion Parish. Uh, it’s like a whole bunch of swamp land. I think we could call it swamp port. Instead of starport, we’ll call it swampport or swamp base one.

They SpaceX say the aim is to launch a thousand times per year from the Actually, no, sorry. They’ll want to launch 10 times per day here. 30 times per day. Wait a second. These numbers just keep on going. Look, they’re just going to be launching all the rockets from here. They’re going to have 10 launch pads. They’re going to be twin, well, five launch pads with twin launches, whatever. They are going to be able to throw rockets out of here. And because it sits on the south coast, they can actually launch into medium inclination orbits by heading east. And then, you know, a little later, the starships will be able to come out of the west from the same angle. They’ll be able to stay way above 100 km until they get over this landing site. So, they should be able to reliably launch over water and return over water. And I think this actually makes more sense than landing at Boca Chica or landing at Florida where the launch approach corridor will keep them over land for a long time. Now granted, SpaceX will hope to achieve the kind of reliability where they can do this, but you know, sonic booms and chances of failure mean that flying in over the ocean is probably going to be, uh, more acceptable initially.

Also, Louisiana has strong links to the Gulf, you know, oil industry, and they need lots of methane, lots of hydrocarbons to fuel these things. So, it also works like that. They have existing port facilities which are being dredged as we speak. This is going to be an absolute monster starport. It’s going to do, and I mean, it sounds like if they get their 10 pads going and they really can deliver that kind of cadence, you know, this could be launching more than Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral. Anyway, we’ll see what happens. As for right now, Starship 40, of course, is getting recovered and it has now finally been picked up out of the water by the 40, which is a recovery ship, which was a sub semi-submersible. It’s designed to carry big ships. Starship is a whole lot smaller, but I do find it amusing that they picked up Starship 40 by a ship named Forte or, you know, and you there’s a subtle pronunciation in there, right? And if you can’t tell the difference, well, I guess understanding my accent isn’t your forte.

Whatever. I found it was kind of funny that they had both very similar names. So, that is going to be coming home. The course has been set apparently for Brownsville, but it looks like it’s going to go east from Christmas Island around the Cape of Good Hope probably. They’re staying away from the sewers. Uh, and that’ll get them there. And by the time they get there, they should have launched flight 14. So maybe flight 14 will be the first one to actually go around the world. Otherwise, uh, this isn’t going around the world. Well, never mind. Okay, let’s take a look see what else is going on out there.

Firefly, uh, they have announced that they are tackling the survive the night challenge that NASA has set. This is like there’s incentive payments for some of the eclipse missions if they can demonstrate payload and spacecraft survival through the night. Obviously, 14 days of darkness is a tall order. It’s really tough on spacecraft, especially with modern electronics and stuff. Uh, so they have got a payload, a radioisotope heating element from a company called Zeno, which is going to use Americ 41, and that’s going to produce like about 5 watts of thermal energy. It’s not much, but it’s probably enough to keep the electronic heart of Blue Ghost 2 alive. So Z X Zeno is a new company that’s aiming to sell these kind of radioisotope heating systems. They use aum because, uh, it doesn’t generate, it doesn’t have nearly the energy density of plutonium 238, uh, because its decay rate, sorry, its half-life is way longer. It also generates a bit more gamma rays and X-rays. So it’s a little bit, uh, harsher, but making plutonium 238 requires like pulling out plutonium after a short amount of time, isolating some neptunium and sticking that back. It’s a whole very complicated process. Whereas this aum, whatever you want to call it, recovering that is actually like a standard. It’s almost like you can reprocess that from regular nuclear, you know, spent nuclear fuel. So, it’s a lot easier to get that and it makes a bit more sense if you want to offer an alternate path for radioisotope and electric generator. So, anyway, yeah, Blue Ghost may survive the night. That’s its plan.

A company called Ho, you’ve seen a few posts from me about them. They basically take photographs of satellites in orbit and they have announced that they are teaming up with Planet, you know, or Planet Labs, I tend to call them. They used to be Planet Labs, now they’re Planet. And they’re going to use planet satellites to perform non-earth imaging. Now, it’s interesting. I sort of never had realized that HO’s model is that they actually use other people’s satellites most of the time. You know, they’ve previously used like Black Sky to take photos of satellites. And I now understand that what they do is they essentially say, well, we’ve got all these spy satellites, all these observation satellites up there. We want to get an image of this particular spacecraft. So they can go through the entire catalog and figure out when one of these, you know, earth imaging satellites is going to be in the right place. They can work with the owner of that satellite, task it, and then get that image. So this means that they can much more quickly get these images. They obviously need to do some processing on it and all that, but they do actually own their own satellite as well, but that’s one that can do very specific tasks and can make some maneuvers. But anyway, yeah, they’re going to be working with Planet going forwards.

Okay, another uh on orbit rendezvous which was supposed to be much more planned is h it’s going to happen but it’s not going to have the outcome that we all hoped. The Swift rescue mission is now the Swift get one last look at it mission. So, Catalyst Space, I actually visited them a couple of days before this announcement and you know, they told me then, but it was all sworn to secrecy. So, yeah, this was this amazing Hail Mary plan to spend only $30 million, develop a satellite, a spacecraft in a very short time window, launch it, and then save this one-of-a-kind space asset. Now they got to space, they were maneuvering and then they had a technical problem which led to the safe mode being activated which actually led to damage to the uh momentum wheels the reaction wheels and ultimately they were able to save the spacecraft and get it back under control and they are going to be able to perform a rendezvous but they used too much propellant during that recovery process and they are unable they want if even if they were able to dock with Swift they would not be able to raise this the orbit sufficiently and that is unfortunate. You know, we all we all knew this was a long shot and uh you know, respect to the team at Catalyst for getting this far, for getting a spacecraft, for handling its various trials and tribulations. Even if you fall short, I think it’s an amazing achievement. It’s unfortunate that Swift is not going to survive. So, for the last few months, Swift had stopped operating in science mode and had taken an attitude which was like low drag. It is now back in science mode. It’s it’s going YOLO. It’s getting the last uh bits of science out of it before it actually burns up. And maybe we’ll get some close-up shots of it, even if they can’t save the spacecraft.

Um, okay. Elsewhere, so I mentioned Trump earlier talking phoning into the uh into the press conference of the Nancy Grace Roman. Well, there’s a couple of executive orders that’ll come out. First of all, there’s a new like national space transportation policy which has been updated. The last time this was updated was 2013. The new one basically sets the goal of 1,000 launches per year from the US which SpaceX will probably manage just fine. It directs like NASA, you know, Department of Defense, uh Pentagon, sorry, Department of Transportation, basically to identify new launch site locations, develop new scheduling criteria, integrate launches with the national airspace system, and develop new re-entry locations. All that. The other thing that came out was Trump signed an executive order creating a commission to study the creation of a federal space academy, right? US Space Academy. Now, interestingly, the way he spoke about it was it made it sound it was more like Space Force and it could definitely feed into Space Force, but the text of the thing that was signed made it clear that this is a NASA thing. So, more like civilian. This is actually very similar to something that was in Jared’s Project Athena stuff that was leaked uh where they basically set talked about setting up a US Starfleet Academy. I’m not sure those exact terms were used, but hey, I would at Starfleet Academy. I’m all about it. I would totally teach there if it was in San Francisco if they would let me. Um, you know, come on. It’s the future that we want. Starfleet Academy, right? Anyway, that will create that the idea is that yeah, you’ll have an academy where people can learn and you know there will be some sort of agreement for public service as well coming out of that.

Um, speaking of public service, one person’s public service who’s ending uh well at least with the astronaut corps is Johnny Kim who you know astronaut seal medic whatever he is uh stepping back from his astronaut role. He’s returning to the military to finish up his last year as like a you know helicopter trainer in the airwing. So yeah, he only flew once 245 days across expedition 72 and 73. He was on a Soyuz, returned in December 2025 and announced that he’s basically retiring as an astronaut. So uh I don’t know. I think he’s looking to add some other career to his book because he seems to have done everything and astronaut is clearly he’s been there, done that. He’s probably got something else awesome lined up at some point in the future. Also, Michael Frink, if you remember, he was the one behind the emergency medical evacuation. He also has retired as an astronaut in the last couple of weeks, too.

So, when I ended last week’s or last previous episode, I said the thing to look forward to would be Changa 7. Well, that launch was expected to happen. It was rolled out to the pad. They were getting prepped for launch and there was some concern about uh a typhoon, typhoon Nara, which was in the area generating some bad weather. And after one launch delay was scrubbed, they uh scrubbed a second time and they said that they were delaying it for much longer and have rolled the booster back. Now, we are still not clear about when the launch window might be, but some sources are suggesting that the next time that they can launch to this trajectory needed for their polar landing site will be early 2027. And that’s really interesting because this spacecraft was really going to be the first spacecraft to land near Shackleton Crater. This is one of these permanently shadowed craters near the South Pole. Obviously, an important place if you’re looking for water deposits. The US also plans to land all sorts of stuff near Shackleton Crater. And we thought that China were going to get this before the US, especially when New Glenn exploded since the spacecraft that was going to go there was going to be um you know the blue moon number one. So anyway, uh it looks like this is being pushed back by several months. We don’t know if it’s for the weather or some other reason, but yeah, landing at Shackleton Crater remains uh, you know, a goal to be achieved by someone. Changa 7 is a very impressive, very capable spacecraft. It’s going to do sample return. It’s going to have like an orbiter. It’s going to have like a hopper and u yeah, it was like again iterating on China’s moon missions. Obviously building up towards their idea of having a lunar base, the international lunar research station on the south pole.

Uh, okay. Elsewhere, Ursa Major. They make rocket engines, but they really only have one flying engine right now, the Hadley, which is used by Strato Launch on their Talon. It’s also supposed to be powering the upper stage of Astro’s rocket 4. Well, um, yeah, they’re going public via a SPAC deal for $2.3 billion. And you might think that’s a lot for a company that only has one rocket engine that really flies. They also have their Draper engine which is a small storable propellant rot engine which may be used for munitions and they’re also developing a line of solid rocket motors. So this feels very much like we are going to do a lot of defense and that’s where the value is.

Crew 13, we were expecting them to launch on September 12th. Now we have heard that that mission uh is being pushed back because there is an oxygen leak on the Dragon capsule. This mission is going to carry Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Jos Kutri of um Canada and Sergey Teteran Teter Teter. I can’t get the Y and the A to go together. Teteranit. I’m sure like he’s a Russian dude, right? So that that that was going to launch. It’s going to be pushed back. We’re not sure how far back, but obviously then we’ll be looking to Dragon Coming Home. And that is the end of my note. Uh, another final thing is that Burning Man is happening this week in the Black Rock Desert, and I’m not going to be there, but I know a lot of people who are, but I like showers too much, but if there’s a space adjacent event sculpture installation, somebody set up a row of lights which will pulse in the exact sequence to illustrate the rotation of the Earth and just how darn fast that is. I think that’s pretty cool. I’m sure we’ll see some images of that. If anyone gets it from the air, it’ll be kind of neat. But looking forward, what were we going to what you know what’s cool happening? Well, uh, is Aerospace, they are going to attempt to launch Spectrum again. The current launch window is 4th to 10th of September from Andoya out in Norway. Maybe this will fly this time. Who knows? The other one of course that’s looming is Starship Flight 14 that is currently middle of September. We don’t know for sure, but uh yeah, that could well happen before we get another one of these deep space updates. I’m Scott Manley. Fly safe.

Thank you for the transcripts.

So, he’s looking for a green card, eh? I’m not education removed, but I’ll write.

Can’t blame him for wanting to move out of Germany.

"And Cuba could be turned into a paradise. Make it a space port and a space junkie viewing vacations!"

I want to see that before I die.

Hahahahahah! Would that not be awesome?

"Hey, I am going to Cuba for two weeks to enjoy their fabled white-sanded beaches, and there should be six Starship launches while I am there...even if one gets cancelled, I will see at LEAST one or two as I sip my Mojito on the beach only a mile or so away! WOO HOO!"

They are stupid if they don’t do it!

"They are stupid if they don’t do it!"

Communists are stupid. They need to go away first.

Imagine the Carib paradise Cuba could be if it weren't for the Castros. And Che. And the CIA ("proudly overthrowing Castro since 1962").

Within 3-5 years they could be absolutely booming. Tourism, fishing, space launches, agriculture, rum, and maybe the old style cigars with a sparkly finish!

You surely are correct!

SpaceX Starship may soon take over Falcon Heavy missions as we analyze the potential orbital trajectory for Flight 14.

Following the launch of the NASA telescope on Falcon Heavy, Elon Musk is weighing a shift in operational strategy. New FCC filings suggest Flight 14 could reach orbit as early as September 15th, potentially carrying a massive payload designed to map a billion galaxies.

We examine the evidence within the spectrum license and the newly observed payload door on the vehicle. This analysis connects the dots between current hardware testing and the future of SpaceX Starship missions, clarifying what this means for the broader launch schedule.
SpaceX Starship Flight 14: Is This The Massive Orbital Shift? | 23:04
What about it!? | 666K subscribers | 38,581 views | September 4, 2026
00:00 A New Era for SpaceX and NASA
00:41 Transitioning Contracts to Starship
02:18 Clues from the Latest FCC Filing
06:11 Expanding Infrastructure at the Port
10:57 Inside the Gigabay Expansion
15:29 The Legacy of the Roman Space Telescope
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.