Starship now NET Sept. 28, plus Starliner may have a future after all [21:53]

Jacob & Isaac Transcript

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Every day on this channel, I cover everything Elon Musk says on X over the last 24 hours. [music] And here’s everything he said. As always, I’ll cover one category completely before moving on to the next one. And starting with Starlink, Elon reveals that Starlink version 5 terminal is now in production. The next generation Starlink version 5 has a smaller form factor and lightweight design with greater power efficiency. With speeds up to 375 plus megabits per second, Starlink version 5 delivers reliable home internet for streaming, video calling, gaming, and more. And it’s now available in select areas.

And let’s take a look at what it looks like. You can see its sleek and slimmed down design despite delivering a lot more bandwidth. When breaking, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites perform 27,152 proactive collision avoidance maneuvers in just 6 months. The advanced autonomous system detects potential close approaches, calculates the level of risk, adjusts orbital paths when needed, and acts at a highly cautious threshold of just three and ten million. SpaceX is managing the world’s largest satellite constellation with precision automation and a safety-first approach.

Chapter 2: Starlink (2)

And Elon reposts this. And here’s a flashback for you guys. It’s Elon Musk explaining SpaceX in 2008. It was so long ago Elon needed a name tag. This is a 25-minute video. If you want to check it out, it’s going to be in the description. You guys might remember this moment right here. It’s the night SpaceX had everything on the line. Look at Elon’s stressed expression right here. They needed a successful launch and they all celebrated the moment they got it. Stage one has landed. LZ1, the Falcon has landed. Landing operators. This was December 21st, 2015. Doge designer says nearly 11 years later and it hits just as hard.

Return to flight after a rocket failure 6 months earlier. First full thrust Falcon 9. It was the first attempt to land an orbital class booster on land. They had tried the drone ship and failed. They had never successfully landed anything and mission control. It was a tense count. They went for it. 9 minutes, seconds later, a rocket that had just thrown satellites toward orbit dropped out of the Florida dark. A camera on the back of the booster caught the engine’s lighting. Still one of the most insane images in spaceflight. Legs out the Falcon has landed. That was the peak of everything they had been working towards. The whole industry said it was impossible. They bet the company on that night anyway. Spaceflight has never been the same. And Elon reposted that.

And right here is Europe’s response to Falcon 9 exiting the market. Some customers who had been turned away by SpaceX used the International Space Summit in Paris last week to lobby European institutions for financial support that would help offset the higher cost of launching with the European provider. They said actually all these customers I was here at the conference. They went to European institutions and asked if they can have a fund or something, some money to sweeten a little bit the price for them to launch with European rockets because now they no longer have a SpaceX option.

Avio’s Vega C a launch system is currently configured to support up to four flights per year. Ronzo explained that AIO may need to move more quickly toward a flight rate of six Vega missions per year. An increase he said would require additional investment and support from the European Space Agency, only six Vega missions per year. And Neil responds to Eric saying Starship will deliver somewhere between 1 million and 10 million tons per year to orbit. Even if non-SP SpaceX tonnage to orbit were to triple, it would still be less than 0.1% of what SpaceX plans to do. And he says all this is still small potatoes compared to airflight tonnage.

And China’s commercial space sector is taking major pages out of the SpaceX playbook. Land space has been progressively testing its FFSC BFF20. Now we have space pioneer revealing Tano 21 methylox engine obviously for some Starship analogy. And you can see right here, this is the Chinese engines that are copying SpaceX. Here’s a side-by-side comparison with Raptor 3 and the Tanahu 21. Very similar designs. Eric Burgerer quotes this saying, “Chinese private space companies are not screwing around. Space Pioneer, which has raised nearly $1 billion, is seeking to build a similar looking engine to Raptor 3 with virtually identical thrust.” Elon says, “I would recommend against a new company trying to make Raptor 3.” While it appears simple on the outside, necessary to survive extreme heat without a heat shield, the inside has very complex geometry that can only be manufactured using highly modified 3D metal printing.

And SpaceX shares this video. It’s 28 minutes, seconds of Starship. They say a fully and rapidly reusable rocket will fundamentally change how humanity accesses outer space. The holy grail of rocketry continues the ongoing Starship series with a look back at the scrappy days of SpaceX engineers proving reuse was possible and takes you on board a high seas race to recover a floating starship. Elon quotes this saying a new episode of SpaceX documentary and this will be in the description if you guys want to check it out. And Aaron Bernett shares his favorite phrase from this episode, the symphony of iteration. He says also one SpaceX engineer estimated that Starship surviving accelerated their learning by at least 3 months. Save this if you don’t have 20 minutes, seconds to watch now. It’s inspiring. And Elon reposted that.

And here’s Falcon 9’s liftoff yesterday. 5 4 3 2 1 ignition and lift up 259 pitching down right also shares Falcon 9’s first stage landing on the of course I still love you drone ship and moving on to Grok only Grok is the most neutral AI literally and this has been consistent across different neutrality and political bias tests. Grok stays grounded in reality and answers as truthfully as possible. Grok is an AI you can trust to give you reality, not drenched in woke garbage. And you can see on the leaning against intelligence who’s actually neutral. Grok scores the most neutral. Grok 4.3 was a close second. And you can see no other models compare. This is another test right here, the political compass test. Grok scored exactly in the center. And he reposts this. And this is day two of three SpaceX employees building a company in 3 days with Grokbot. Elon quotes this saying, “Watch a company being built live with Grokbot.”

Chapter 5: Space (1)

And on space, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman says, “The moon is not the finish line. It’s the next starting point. There’s a lot we can do with the resources already on the moon. We’re going to put them to work as we build the moon base and prepare for Mars.” And Elon reposts.

Chapter 6: AI (3)

That. And on AI, Arthur McWaters provides a recap of the last week of everything we saw on this channel. We saw Daario agree with an NGO coded whistleblower named Jacob Coxin that AI has a greater than 10% chance of ending humans and we should pace the frontier.

We saw Sam and Elon Musk agree, but they kept accelerating nonetheless with Elon posting about Gro 5 and Chad GBD6 dropping. Trump posted the Trumpest post of all time and he said, “Nah, bro. We’re accelerating even harder now. Get back to work, nerds.” Also, Daario said, “AI might kill us, but it’ll also help you do lead scoring in Salesforce.” Mark Beni off framemoged everyone at Dreamforce who realized for the first time he’s 6’5 and built like a 1950s refrigerator. Trump called Jensen during the all-in summit and reiterated that there’s a hoax against data centers and we’re going to be China. And Kavvicular the streamer also went on the all-in stage and rated Chimoth a 4 out of 10 and then bragged about mogging the VC cells and getting the hottest girl at the afterparty. I’m not quite sure about this one. We did see the rest of this on the channel. Elon reposted this and Jacob Coxin just spoke on CBS. Here’s what he said.

People who are very used to computers Mhm. might think it’s kind of crazy that a computer could wipe them out, but it doesn’t look that different from say Terminator or from science fiction films. It really is just if you have a super advanced intelligence, it will be smart enough to kill us. And concrete examples might be it could we can’t just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers. Like it’s not that difficult to find yourself cuz an AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place. And then you unplug it here, but it’s actually still over there. And maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they’re all cooperating. So you unplug half of them, they’re still half going and they’re still copying themselves. It could convince blackmail or persuade humans into buying more computing software to copy it. And we’ve already seen examples of the AI trying to blackmail or trying to convince people or impersonating other people online.

Elen responds to that video saying, “He really does look like Harry Potter. It’s uncanny.” And Gavin Baker says, “We’ve experienced extraordinary share gains for OpenAI versus Anthropic over the last two months. Per Open Router, OpenAI has gone from 20% share to 50% share versus Anthropic, meaning Anthropic has gone from 80% to 50% since June. And you can see in the race to build the frontier, OpenAI is now winning. Fable had a vast majority of the market share, but when OpenAI launched Astra, it just took over. And so this trend really just was over the last couple weeks. Anyone says AI is the highest ELO competition ever. Moving on to politics.

Chapter 7: Corruption (2)

Released emails show an FBI agent requesting to criminally investigate Elon for facilitating an email asking government employees to list five things they accomplished that week. And you can see it starts off by saying, “Steve, I would like to recommend the opening of a criminal 58 matter on the person at OPM who approved the transmission of the earlier email.” It goes on to say, “Furthermore, Musk used a non-government system, Twitter, to relate information that allegedly was for official purposes.” And he ends it with saying, “And no, I’m not kidding. We should investigate Musk.” And Arthur McWaters quotes this saying, “Imagine being so terrified of this that you want to criminally investigate Elon.” And that’s Elon asking, “What did you get done this week?”

New House Judiciary Report just dropped screenshots of Act Blue, a Democrat super PAC’s internal Slack messages. They show that staff knowingly waved through foreign donations using verification methods you won’t believe. Act Blue told Congress its passport verification stops foreign donors. Their own policy says otherwise. It only checks that the number has the right number of characters. No database check. No real verification ever. So what actually gets a foreign donation approved for Act Blue? Well, a supervisor’s own words make it clear. The donor is foreign but correctly entered their billing address. So it was approved. And here’s another one. A donor sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong, but none of their other signals raise any eyebrows. Approved. Here’s the one that should end the debate. A donor’s information pointed entirely to Canada. Act Blue approved it anyway because, and this is a real quote, “Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person,” and it happened more than once. Another foreign flag donor got waved through because they had a LinkedIn.

When Act Blue’s own legal counsel, Zayn Ahmad, tried to report this, it deleted his messages in real time. This one says, “Please stop deleting my request. You are violating the laws and policies of our company.” And it was deleted 5 seconds later. It happened six times that night. He even sent ACLU’s own whistleblower protection policy, which was deleted. Then the non-retaliation policy, which was deleted, too. Outside counsel told Act Blue’s CEO this looked knowing and willful, and warned her to get a personal lawyer. She fired the law firm instead. Every lawyer in Act Blue’s legal team was gone within 4 months of the 2024 election. Neil reposted Joe Lonzio says, “Wow, got them dead to rights. A main fundraising apparatus of the left was consistently and knowingly breaking the law and hiding it. If it was the right caught doing this, it would 100% be top news stories for weeks in the legacy media. And India has 1.5 billion people. Africa is 1.6 billion.

Chapter 8: Wokeness (4)

The US has 340 million, the UK with only 69, France 66, Spain 49, Canada 41, Sweden 10, and Ireland 5. Greger Capital says if mass immigration continues, western nations, cultures, and peoples will be gone. Anyone says that is a simple statement of fact. And Elizabeth Warren says, “Today I’m calling to immediately pressure pause on the development of advanced AI while lawmakers and regulators put systems in place to keep people safe.” Eric says, “Thank you because I think your public support for a pause will help prevent it from happening.” And Elon has a laugh at that. And the rabbit hole says, “If everyone is a far-right Nazi, then no one is a far-right Nazi. Words can be diluted of meaning. Anyone says 100.” And here’s Gad Sad on the Katie Miller podcast talking about transgenderism.

Why do you think more kids than ever in the United States and of the Western world have identified as transgender and non-binary than previous decades? So there is what happened that suddenly caused a rise? So there is a paper that was published I think in 2018 by a pediatrician where she argued that transgenderism is akin to a social contagion and then I don’t know if you remember she I think she was an instructor or something at Brown University and at first they hailed the paper then there was big blowback are you calling transgenderism of a disease that spreads remember this and then they kind of sort of retracted it. It is a fad right so many people wish to stroke their luxuriant hair in the mirror of moral pining look how beautiful I am. Look how good a person I am. And so transgenderism becomes a pathway to demonstrate how enlightened and accepting and compassionate and kind and empathetic I am. And when I am a Hollywood superstar, as you said earlier, I mean the stats on having one transgender child are abysmally low. Having two, three, or four is non-existent. And so it just becomes a pathway for me to demonstrate that I’m deserving of empathy. And by the way, there’s a term here that you may have heard. Munchausen syndrome is I had written a paper in a medical journal in 2010 on this which I then picked up in parasitic mind. It’s a form of Munchausen, right? Because what’s happening with Munchausen? So Munchausen syndrome is when I feign an illness to garner sympathy and empathy. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when I cause injury to someone that I care for, my biological child, my pet, my elderly parents, because I’m going to get the empathy and sympathy by proxy through harming them. Look, I’ve got an ailing child. And so the transgender parent that you see with the Hollywood stars, they’re engaging in munch by proxy.

And Elon reposts that video. And moving on from politics, Elon Musk says, “My mom’s book is coming out soon,” tagging his mom. It’s called Timeless Reinvention and Resilience at Any Age.
Chapter 9: About Elon (3)

You guys might remember this post right here going through everything we’ve seen about artificial intelligence, including that Kavvicular, the streamer, also went on the all-in stage and rated Chimoth a 4 out of 10. And then bragged about mogging the VC cells and getting the hottest girl at the afterparty to this. Hobby says, “Man, I’m effing tired.” Neon says, “Me, too.” Having a laugh.
And this right here is the rise and fall of wokeness. These are DEI commitments and corporate security disclosures filed with the SEC. You can see under Biden, they peaked and they dropped dramatically around this point in 2025. But look at this right here. The real decline starts when Elon bought Twitter in November 2022. Right here, Arthur McWaters says, “Elon buying Twitter and restoring free speech was unironically one of the most pivotal moments in the 21st century. Its effects will be studied for generations.” And he quotes this today saying, “I still think about this all the time.” And Elon reposts this. And so that, my friends, with everything Elon said [music] today. We saw massive numbers on SpaceX’s Starship tonnage and we saw that Chinese companies [music] are trying to copy Raptor. Starlink revealed the version 5 terminal and how much is going to increase Starlink bandwidth and that’s coinciding with Starlink [music] version 3 that we saw will be going up on September 22nd with Starship’s first two orbit launch. Grockbot is on day two of building a company and Grock is the most politically neutral artificial intelligence, the only one of the AI models that’s in the center. [music] And finally, we got to see the Act Blue scandal, which they were allowing foreign donations. But anyway, that’s everything I have for you guys. As always, if you guys would like early access to these videos and a weekly summary of everything Elon says, consider joining this channel as a member, and I will see you guys tomorrow.

What About It Transcript

Chapter 1: The Most Ambitious Starship Flight Ever

Spaceflight is about to change forever. SpaceX just published the complete mission plan for Starship Flight 14. And it is bigger than anything anyone predicted. Six orbits. Almost ten hours in space. 26 real Starlink V3 satellites going into a real orbit. A splashdown on the other side of the planet, off the coast of Chile. And two heat shield tiles that already flew to space once, on Ship 40, now flying again on Ship 41. This is simply the most ambitious Starship flight in history. Maybe the most important single rocket launch ever. So, how does SpaceX do it? What will happen, and does it even have a chance of survival? Here’s your complete rundown of Starship Flight 14! My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It!? Let’s dive right in!

Chapter 2: Breaking Down the Mission Plan

Starship Updates SpaceX published the full Flight 14 mission page this week. Remember our orbital discussion from last episode? My hunch was one orbit, or maybe four, with a splashdown near Hawaii. Wrong. Way too small. SpaceX is going much bigger. Starship will enter an orbit at around 275 kilometers, circle the Earth approximately six times, spend nearly ten hours in flight, and come down in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile. Chile! Not Hawaii. Um, yeah, I’ll happily be wrong like that every week. And it gets better. Much better! 26 Starlink V3 satellites are going up. Not 20, like the suborbital batch on Flight 13. 26. Into an orbit they will stay in. Each one adds one terabit per second of capacity to the constellation. 26 terabits per second on a single flight. SpaceX says that’s around ten times the capacity of a Falcon 9 launch with V2 mini satellites. Remember Episode 570, where we did the math on why SpaceX is pulling Falcon 9 out of Starlink duty? That’s why. If this flight works, Falcon 9 is outdated. And here’s the next wake-up call. Two tiles recovered from Ship 40 are planned to be reflown on Ship 41. The first tile reuse for Starship. The ship that floated in the Indian Ocean for 24 days, that we watched being lassoed by one engine, that is right now sitting on a semi-submersible somewhere in the Atlantic, has already given two pieces of itself to the next mission. More on that in a minute. First, let’s talk about when. It’s official. SpaceX says Flight 14 is preparing to launch as soon as Monday, September 28th, pending regulatory approval. The window opens at 7:15 in the morning, Central Time, and stays open for 75 minutes, seconds. On Tuesday, the first NOTAMs for Mexican airspace appeared, followed by the reentry NOTAM for the Pacific Ocean. And that reentry notice is interesting. Take a look at this. over the South Pacific west of Chile, and the hazard zone is around 1.6 million square kilometers. That’s roughly 49% larger than the one for Flight 13. Fun fact: that’s about the size of Mongolia… A bigger hazard zone comes from more uncertainty.

Chapter 3: Minute by Minute: The Launch Timeline

Everything about this flight is bigger. So, let’s go through it. Minute by minute. This launch timeline is the current peak of rocket engineering. The giant stainless steel rocket the entire world is watching and it starts 50 minutes, seconds before liftoff, when the SpaceX flight director polls the team and verifies go for propellant load. From there, the tank farm takes over. Booster liquid oxygen starts flowing at T-36 minutes, booster methane at T-35, and the ship follows at T-34 with oxygen and fuel almost simultaneously. Then at T-21 minutes, the Raptors on both stages begin engine chill, running cold propellant through the engines so the metal doesn’t get shocked at ignition. I can’t wait for this. Booster load complete at T-2:50, ship at T-2:10. Flight director verifies go for launch at T-30 seconds. And at T-17 seconds, the flame diverter activates, and the deluge system floods the trench, the one we just watched get new burn plates. At T-3 seconds, the booster engine startup command is sent directly to 33 hungry Raptor 3 engines. And at T-0, the SpaceX timeline literally says: excitement guaranteed. Let’s go Flight 14!

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Chapter 4: Overcoming the Booster Ice Problem

All right. where were we with our mission rundown? Oh, yeah. Right. Liftoff! 33 Raptor 3 engines push the stack off Pad 2. Max Q, the moment of peak aerodynamic stress on the vehicle, comes at only 58 seconds. That’s insane. At 2 minutes, seconds and 20 seconds, most of the booster’s engines cut off. Two seconds later, hot staging. The ship lights its own engines while still attached and pushes away from the booster. And then comes a moment of truth for Booster 21. Both v3 Flights we’ve already seen, 12 and 13, had massive booster issues. The boost back burn starts at 2 minutes, seconds and 27 seconds, shutdown at 3 minutes, seconds and 7 seconds. Forty seconds of burn to turn Booster 21 around and send it back toward the Gulf. So on Flight 12, SpaceX had the wrong ignition timing for Ship 39. This made the booster flip go 90° in the wrong direction. The engines also had heat-related problems during ascent, and very tight engine alarm settings. And all that got fixed.

Then came flight 13. During the boostback burn, three engines showed signs of clogging due to ice. Ice ice, baby. That shut the boostback burn down early. During the landing burn, only 8 of 13 planned engines lit up, delivering too little thrust for a nominal soft landing in the water. Yep. And this isn’t a new problem either. So, Starship Super Heavy has a long history of beef with ice or carbon-contaminated fuel intake. What? Flight 2, November 2023. LOX filter blockage. Almost certainly ice-related. Flight 3, March 2024. SpaceX never officially stated ice blockage, but during the Flight 4 broadcast they stated they had updated the filter system even further. Hint, Flight 4, June 2024. This is the “we fixed it” flight. Everything worked. Now the problem seems to be back with the v3 hardware. So what did SpaceX change from flight 13 to now? How is SpaceX fixing the booster problem? Booster 21 has hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines, plus software changes to enhance relight reliability. The landing burn start is planned for 6 minutes, seconds and 35 seconds, shutdown at 7 minutes, seconds and 1 second, and the target is a soft, on-target splashdown at an offshore landing point in the Gulf. No catch this time. The reason is obvious if you research carefully. Fix the ice first. We’ll come back to that problem in a minute. A very interesting gremlin!

Chapter 5: Achieving Orbit: The Final Piece of the Puzzle

Now for the ship. This part is a perfect explainer for the answer if SpaceX could have reached orbit with a Starship long ago. Yeah, they could have. But they’re not stupid. No, then they’re really not stupid. At 8 minutes, seconds and 11 seconds, Starship’s engines cut off. At that point, Ship 41 is not in orbit yet. On purpose. Same as on all previous flights. The initial insertion is suborbital, the same passively safe kind of trajectory every Starship flight has flown so far. If nothing else happened, the ship would come down into the ocean on its own. That’s the safety net. And then the flight control team goes to work. Their job in the next 17 minutes, seconds: verify that every piece of hardware needed for the deorbit burn has sufficient redundancy. Only if the answer is yes does Ship 41 get permission to go further. And that permission gets executed at 25 minutes, seconds and 28 seconds into the flight: the orbital insertion burn. And it lasts just 19 seconds.

That’s how little is missing from a suborbital flight to an orbital one. 19 seconds of burn time. I tried to explain this to skeptics for so long. Now we have the answer in seconds. Shutdown at 25:47. With that, for the first time in history, a Starship is in orbit around Earth. 275 kilometers up, circling the planet. So, just for fun, here is a small list of very large records to be broken if it does happen. Largest object ever orbited in one launch. Starship has a 9 m diameter and is 52 m long. Heaviest single spacecraft ever orbited in one launch. With a dry mass of about 160 to 180 tons, including leftover propellant and a hefty 52-ton payload of 26 Starlink v3 satellites, Starship comfortably exceeds 200 tons total. And finally, the heaviest total mass a rocket has ever put into LEO. 52 tons of payload. Now, please don’t hit me. Skylab might arguably be larger at 77 tons, but I have a hard problem counting an upper stage as the payload itself. Either way though, once SpaceX flies the full Starlink v3 stack, that payload could reach 100 tons per flight, safely silencing even Skylab. And if there’s any doubt about the way home, the ship simply never leaves the suborbital arc.

9 minutes, seconds after insertion, at 34 minutes, seconds and 18 seconds, payload deployment begins. Yeah, it runs until 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 50 seconds. Half an hour of satellites sliding out of the pez dispenser, one after another, 26 of them, each one around 10 times as capable as the V2 mini Falcon 9 flies today. And after deployment, they unfold their antennas, deploy their solar arrays, make contact with the ground and with the rest of the constellation via radio and laser links, and then start raising their orbits with their own thrusters. And here comes the crazy part. SpaceX says they could be serving customers as soon as a few weeks after launch. Three of them carry a suite of cameras again. After deployment, they turn around and document Ship 41’s heat shield. SpaceX is developing methods to assess a ship’s heat shield readiness in orbit. The satellites are basically the inspection crew. And from about the one-hour mark until nearly nine hours in, Ship 41 orbits the Earth. Around six times. The webcast will broadcast hours of live views from Starship as it circles the planet. Sunrises and sunsets every 45 minutes, from a stainless steel spaceship the size of a 15-story building. It’s totally crazy.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep watching. And during those hours, the data collection will run hot. If something doesn’t look right at any of several decision points, the ship performs an early deorbit and comes down in the Indian or Pacific Ocean instead. Again: a door back out at every step. Because a Starship is heavy and very good at surviving a re-entry. Now, at 8 hours, 52 minutes, and 18 seconds, the deorbit burn begins. A single Raptor engine, relit in the vacuum of space after almost 9 hours of coasting, burning for 11 seconds to bring the ship back into the atmosphere at the right place. By my rough estimate, that burn happens roughly half a world away from the splashdown point. Get your cameras ready, Asia! You might be in for an epic show! The ship then coasts down across the Pacific. Entry interface at 9 hours and 28 minutes, seconds. The plasma phase. And at 9:47:30 the ship goes transsonic. Subsonic 37 seconds later. The landing burn starts at 9:50:11, the flip two seconds later, three engines down to two, two down to one, and at 9 hours, 50 minutes, and 30 seconds, in SpaceX’s own words: an exciting landing. Man, it hasn’t even happened yet, and I’m so hyped. If that happens, Starship will have launched from Texas, orbited the Earth six times, delivered 26 satellites, and landed itself gently in the ocean in the Pacific off the coast of Chile. 10 hours. Let that sink in. And that reentry is not a repeat of the last one.

Chapter 6: Heat Shield Upgrades and Tile Reuse

Ship 41 carries several heat shield upgrades and experiments, and some of them come directly from the data SpaceX pulled off Ship 40 while it floated in the Indian Ocean. The Christmas Island side quest is paying off. They literally pulled it off the ship. Additional retention mechanisms on tiles in the areas most at risk of falling off during ascent. Remember the aft skirt on the last flight? Yeah. Fixes for recently discovered flow paths that let plasma sneak in behind tiles. Multiple areas flying a curved tile design that has shown to reduce heating in the gaps between tiles. And finally, and that’s what I meant with they literally pulled it off Ship 40, two tiles recovered from Ship 40, cleaned up, inspected, and installed on Ship 41. They’re flying again. I mean, Ship 40 itself is still at sea, riding on Forte around the Cape of Good Hope with an arrival in Brownsville scheduled for early October. Those two tiles must have been pulled during the inspection off Christmas Island and flown home ahead of the ship. I mean, see those guys on the Starship heat shield as Ship 40 floated in the ocean? See the tile missing in the middle? Bingo. But think about what that means. The entire heat shield debate we’ve been having since Episode 564 was about whether tiles can be reused at all. Whether the shield has to be stripped after every flight. Two tiles say differently. It’s a tiny number. But it’s also the first non-zero number in the history of this program. Every reusable heat shield starts with the first tile that flies twice.

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Now, let’s put Flight 14 next to everything before it, because it’s easy to underestimate it, and comparisons are an excellent eye-opener. 13 Starship flights so far, and every single one on a suborbital arc. Roughly an hour from liftoff to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Yeah, that was the deal. Flight 13 even deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites, but on that same suborbital arc, and they came right back down around the time Ship 40 did. Useful test. But not a payload delivery.

Seven years ago, Starhopper lifted off from Boca Chica on one engine and climbed 150 m. That was the whole program. Now a ship from the same beach is scheduled to spend ten hours in orbit with a commercial payload. Nobody in 2019, and I mean nobody, including me, would have put that on a seven-year calendar. Quite the opposite. Back then, almost every expert chuckled at the thought of SpaceX succeeding. So, if Flight 13 was the final exam of the test program, Flight 14 is the first day at work. But there are problems left. We’re not there yet.

Number one. The booster’s ice problem. So, where does that ice even come from? Super Heavy pressurizes its tanks with gas from its engines after partial combustion in the turbopumps. It’s called autogenous pressurization. Maybe you heard it before. And it saves the mass of separate helium systems to repressurize the tanks. Ever sucked on a thin plastic bottle just for fun and watched it crumple due to the low pressure? Oh. Oh, this is class. That’s what would happen to a rocket if it didn’t repressurize while the engines suck out propellant and oxidizer. The catch of replacing the helium system? The partially combusted gas from the turbopumps isn’t perfectly clean. It carries traces of water and carbon dioxide, and inside a tank full of liquid oxygen at minus 180°, those traces freeze. So ice crystals form; they float in the propellant, and when the engines try to relight, the ice can clog the flow to the pumps. The reason for the gas to come from the pumps is that you need gas to repressurize. And that system already turns the cryogenic liquids into gas. If SpaceX can’t solve the resulting filtering problem, they could also build a heat exchanger that produces clean pressure.

And number two. The relight in space. The orbital insertion burn is one thing; it comes only 17 minutes, seconds after engine with everything still warm and settled. That de-orbit burn is another. One engine, after almost 9 hours of cold soaking in vacuum, with propellant that has been sloshing around in microgravity the whole time. If that single burn doesn’t happen, the ship can’t target its landing zone. It’s the one moment where the whole mission hangs on one engine start.

Number three. Even if Tuesday goes perfectly, nothing gets reused yet. The booster swims. The ship swims. The catch, the refurbishment, the second flight of the same ship, all of that still lies ahead. Flight 14 might prove Starship can deliver. It does not yet prove Starship can come home and do it again.

So, just for giggles, what if it works? What if at 9 hours and 50 minutes, seconds we see a stainless steel ship settle gently into the Pacific with 26 satellites already raising their orbits above it? Then Starship is operational. Not fully reusable yet, but operational. From that moment on, every Starship flight can carry paying cargo, and the first customer is SpaceX itself. Remember Episode 570: Falcon 9 stepping back from Starlink duty at the Cape, one Starship flight replacing around 20 Falcon 9 launches worth of capacity. Tuesday is that day. 26 terabits per second on one flight. Flight 15 hardware is already in testing at Massey’s. Pad 39A in Florida is closing in on its first Starship. Louisiana got its first drill holes. The whole machine we’ve been learning about together for years is waiting for one thing: proof that the ship can go up and come down on command. That’s Tuesday. And it’s way more important than Starlink. Every one of those six orbits is also a rehearsal for missions that need a Starship to stay in space and do work. The propellant transfer flights. The tanker runs that fill a lunar lander in orbit. Artemis III next year. Remember the possible docking hardware we spotted at Starbase last episode? That vehicle needs exactly the capability Ship 41 is about to demonstrate: fly to orbit, coast for hours or even days, relight an engine on command, and hit a target. Tuesday is the first time all four of those happen on one Starship.

Each Starship launch could generate a billion dollars in revenue. 10,000 flights a year would mean 10 trillion dollars by 2030. I’ll take those numbers with a very large grain of salt, and so should you. 10,000 flights a year is a launch every 52 minutes, seconds. We’re currently at one every two months. But notice how the conversation has moved. Nobody is asking anymore whether Starship can work. They’re arguing about how big it actually gets. We’ll be counting orbits together! Which brings me to us. You and I, my spaceflight enthusiasts! This mission runs for nearly ten hours, and our stream starts about two hours before liftoff. So here’s our crazy plan: we will be live for at least twelve hours straight. From before the window opens, through liftoff, hot staging, the booster’s landing burn, the orbital insertion decision, the entire deployment, every orbit with whatever live views SpaceX gives us, the deorbit burn, reentry, and that exciting landing off Chile. Hopefully, Jordan will be in the helicopter for the launch. The slow-motion cameras will run. The whole team will be there, and the chat will be the place to be. I’ve been doing this for years, and I can say without any doubt: this is the one you don’t want to miss.

If you ever wanted to see a moment in spaceflight history unfold before your eyes, that moment has a date and a window. Monday, September 28th, 7:15 in the morning Central time. Set the alarm. Bring snacks. Bring lots of snacks. Does Ship 41 make it all the way, orbit, 26 satellites, deorbit burn, and a soft splashdown off Chile, and will booster 21 encounter another ice problem? I want to know your prediction! Put them in the comments now! I’ll read as many as I can before the stream, and then I’ll see you all Tuesday morning. Live. For twelve hours. Let’s [ __ ] go!

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