Transcript
Starship’s first flight to orbit is looking absolutely fantastic, my friends. It has been a big week getting ready to fly in just a few days, but there is a lot to learn around everything going on here. While all those eyes are on Starship Flight 14, a couple of newly posted dates hint at what could happen next, including a rather intriguing possibility in Florida. That is just the start of another busy week of space action. We have Starlink, Rocket Lab packed in a full one, and Vast revealed some monster plans too!
Hey, hey, Marcus House with you here, and yes, although the wait for this next flight feels excruciating as we keep counting down, with all the exciting milestones ahead, that wait is almost over, my friends! Starship vehicle rollout preparations started shortly after I published last weekend’s video with a booster transport stand rolling into Megabay 1 and shortly then coming back out with Booster 21 on top. It was parked in the ring yard for several hours before the road closure started and it could begin to make its way. Shaun was right there at the exit of Remedios Avenue as Booster 21 made its way onto Highway 4 and headed on down to the launch site! Check out these drone shots by SpaceX too!
I’m going to jump into some of the Gigabay updates here shortly, but just take a look at it there, almost finished with the Super Heavy here to compare the size! We also got some shots as the Booster entered the launch site; over the next couple of hours, workers had it positioned between the arms and lifted on top of the launch mount ready for Ship 41’s arrival! Just a day later, on Monday morning, a transport stand was also revealed in the doorway of Megabay 2. The Ship was then rolled forward just a little and parked in the ring yard in order to allow the team to roll the Starlink loader into the bay and lift it with the bridge crane.
As a side note here, during this whole operation, the Starship for the next Flight 15 to follow, Ship 42, had its engines rolling into Megabay 2. In fact, if we look even further forward into the future, Ship 44’s nose section rolled in after them to kick off its own construction! I mean, we could even guess and assume that this one could be for Flight 17, but by then SpaceX may even have a caught Starship ready to refly, so this is all somewhat speculative. I tell you what, with all these ships in progress, construction is really starting to heat up!
Getting back to Ship 41, though, preparing for this first orbital mission with Starship Flight 14, while it sat in the ring yard, it gave the photographers a great opportunity to photograph its heat shield. Max here with NSF was able to spot what appears to be the two tiles recovered from Ship 40 out in the ocean that will be flying for a second time! Their color is interesting when paired with surrounding brand new tiles. They almost look like metal, don’t they!? But no, they would have a unique coating thanks to the material covering it from Flight 13’s entry and time in the ocean. We can see the huge differences in the tile colors thanks to their absolutely brilliant docuseries episode last week. I’m really eager to see how the future ships are going to look after a few flights, and how many tile replacements will be needed for the first few reuses!
Anyway, I digress. With the loader now in the air, it was time for Ship 41 to reenter the bay to get loaded with all 26 of its version 3 Starlink satellites! Based on previous hints indicating that the weight for each satellite unit sits at around two metric tonnes or so, this will be a roughly 52 metric tonne payload we believe. All heading into the very first orbital mission. Given the 6 full orbits that SpaceX wants to do, they likely want plenty of propellant margin to play around with the best strategy to limit boil-off while in the sunlight. With Starship currently having no active cooling systems to keep that propellant in its cryogenic liquid form, it’s going to be really interesting to see what passive methods SpaceX uses to keep it all cold enough.
With those V3 Starlinks loaded, Ship 41 was finally ready to begin the roll down to the launch site where SpaceX prepared for the lift on top of Booster 21! A temporary flight restriction was posted around the launch site to the height of 10,000 feet. This is what we normally see when SpaceX is anticipating completing a Wet Dress Rehearsal. That is exactly what they did here on Thursday by filling both vehicles to the brim with Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Methane. Clearly, the tank farm was still working perfectly, and any changes made to either vehicle had obviously checked out well for this initial pre-flight test. That is hopefully very good news there and a clear path to getting ready for Flight 14 in just a few days.
Don’t take this sort of seemingly benign test as uninteresting either. I must admit, after seeing New Glenn back in May, the paranoia around any of these tests is real, I tell you. I am extremely grateful that we’ve never seen a Starship vehicle lost here at the launch site. Anyway, how is the launch date currently sitting? Well, so far there hasn’t been any movement of that all week. We still see the No Earlier Than launch window on the 28th of September, so that is great news. Elon seemed confident in this on Monday as well, stating the launch target as 7 days away, which matches up nicely.
As an unexpected side note, by the way, this week we’ve even had some early notices for two more future Starship flights. As with any estimated flight timeline this far out, these dates are likely to push ahead, so take this with a handful of salt. It does, however, give a good hint on SpaceX’s intentions for Flight 15 and 16. Here we see Flight 15 shown with a no earlier date on the 19th of October, putting it just 3 weeks after Flight 14 at this stage. The second, however, is even more mind-blowing. Aiming for just another 11 days later on October 30, is the mission labeled as Starlink 30-1. Now, this is wild because the 30th shell is believed to be reserved for Florida launches. If so, we could be seeing our very first Starship launch from the Starship pad at 39A here on Flight 16. But the pad there isn’t ready yet, I hear you exclaim in the comments. Well, hold that thought because SpaceX has just fired the top deck of the deluge system for the first time on Thursday, which is one of the last milestones before the pad is ready to begin with vehicle integration and validation testing!
Now, before we leave the launch site, it’s worth mentioning here that SpaceX has started, and has actually almost finished installing and welding steel plating along the blast wall located behind the tower! This started recently, but it wasn’t obvious what they were actually doing here at first. It makes total sense, though, considering it gets absolutely blasted by the vehicle during that pitchover maneuver at lift-off. The base of the tower behaves like a flame diverter as well, which sends all that exhaust belting out in the blast wall’s direction.
Now remember that barge full of goodies that left Florida last week? That all arrived this week! And surprisingly, when it entered the port of Brownsville, we could actually see two top deck pieces on board, not just one. The most exciting component on board, though, was the Starship Horizontal Transport frame, which we will hopefully get to see in the not too distant future, potentially with one of the ships currently being built inside the Megabay! It’s going to be wild seeing that first Starship and Super Heavy on their way to Florida for launch. And there are increasingly more and more vehicles rolling back and forth; check this out, though. We’ve got some pretty intriguing information dropped here about the roads this week!
Whenever we see a road closure, we know this causes a bunch of disruption, but perhaps not so much here soon. These documents have been released proposing additional lanes along Highway 4. Shown in red is the path you may all be familiar with when SpaceX rolls a booster or a ship towards the Masseys test site. In blue, this is where two extra lanes were previously proposed heading all the way back to Brownsville to deal with increasing traffic requirements. This would turn the two-lane highway into four. But in addition to that, SpaceX is now asking for yet another two lanes, this time on the north side of Highway 4 shown in green! Yes, make that a six-lane highway! These lanes only go as far as Massey’s for the time being, though, so the main focus of the 5th and 6th lanes looks to be essentially trying to almost entirely remove the need for road closures at all. It’s also labeled as a haul road too, so it should be designed right from the start for heavy load vehicles.
To go with all that, there will be a brand new interchange here headed towards Masseys, where there is already a brand new warehouse going up in the area shown in pink. This land is SpaceX owned, and as seen from above thanks to RGV Aerial Photography, we can see the footprint of this building is huge! Shaun picked up some fresh views of this during the week from the ground, and it is growing really fast! In fact, the supporting areas expanding around the area are substantial. Up by the Brownsville port facilities, you may know SpaceX has just recently requested annexation of a 444-acre plot of land between Highway 4 and the port itself! In fact, you can see that they are already doing an absolutely insane job clearing it out and grading it all! Just take a look at all these vehicles swarming around!
Now we don’t have a huge idea what they intend to put here just yet, but I’m sure that will become much more obvious soon! The expansion isn’t limited to Texas, obviously! You may recall the recent announcement made by SpaceX a few weeks ago for this gigantic Spaceport capable of supporting up to 10 or more launch pads, which will be known as Starbase Louisiana! RGV took a quick trip up to the state soon after and had captured a team kicking off one of the very first core boring operations!
[ad text redacted]
Now getting back to this already witnessed boring operation process, this needs to be done in 25 different locations across the projected construction zone. This data is going to give them a thorough idea of what sort of land challenges SpaceX will be dealing with. Thanks to everyone that supports that RGV Aerial Photography work by the way. The hope is that they can be documenting this crazy location as it evolves over the years just like we’ve seen at Starbase Texas. Shoutout as well to Lance Woolie, who has been shooting some neat drone footage over the area too. Yet another great contact to follow there as we watch this currently very wet, marshy chunk of land slowly transform. It will eventually be filled with the roar and might of a powerful collection of Starship launch pads and all the colossal infrastructure that goes with it. Crazy times!
Now Ship 40 riding along on the ship FORTE has now crossed the Atlantic and is moving along off the coast of Brazil. Think about this, Ship 41 is going to be orbiting overhead with the two tiles from Ship 40 while that is still slowly shipped back to Starbase in Texas. Last week when SpaceX dropped that Episode 3 of their Docuseries, a number of you commented that this was indeed quite a personal journey from the team again. It absolutely was and as they went behind the scenes with the SpaceX team, I’ve just so loved getting to see this side of the work they do! When Ship 40 came whipping down from space back in July, and landed softly in the ocean without exploding, the team were just as shocked as we all were! “NO WAY!” Of course, Elon being Elon had to ask… “What’s the closest like, ship or plane or whatever?” Well, this is where those imaginations went wild to figure out a plan! This being where GO AUSTRALIS arrived on scene and the crew quite literally lassoed that single raptor engine. They used that to tow Ship 40, but as we now know they had gigantic issues with the weather and they weren’t able to progress any closer to Australia. The change of plans was decided on to instead follow these currents, and tow Ship 40 towards Christmas Island. I do have the full video linked for you here because it is so great to see all this. The recovery team made their rounds across the entire ship gathering samples and making observations which has all gone into influencing some of the changes on future ships! Just imagine riding on the back of a starship here or being able to snorkel below one! What an experience that must have been!
It’s so easy to forget how big Starship is, but also how monstrous these ocean transport ships are compared to that. There’s loads more in the episode about the heat shield tile creation process which are continually being optimized and lots lots more so do give it a watch.
I mentioned the Gigabay earlier but there are a few things here which are certainly noteworthy. The exterior looks to be only a few weeks away from completion at this point, and as you can see, the roof is making huge progress. They have already begun laying rebar and pouring concrete at the back here which will finally close off the top of this monstrous building. The Four Tower cranes up here on top are quickly running out of work to do in fact and they are likely to soon be dismantled. This LR1300 crane involved in the cladding installation around the sides of the bay is almost done as well. There are only two more levels to finalize at the top. From Shaun’s shots standing beside Highway 4 and SpaceX’s own drone shots we are able to see clearly that the smaller strip of windows continues around the entire circumference like it does in SpaceX’s model. I think that looks much better than the Florida Gigabay. That has the same strip of windows but doesn’t continue right around. It has instead these gaps in between. With that we watched as the team began welding tabs to the side of the Gigabay! Now this will eventually support a roof over this alleyway to allow sections to roll right from the Starfactory and over without ever having to go outdoors. That is not so fun for us missing the detail but it’s going to keep everything nice and clean from debris blowing around the outside which can harm those sensitive components. Really appreciate you being here subscribed and helping us catch everything here. Do double check you are subscribed by the way. We’ve seen some pretty bizarre changes to YouTube over the past month or so. Quite a few comments popping up saying you guys have been having issues so make of that what you will.
Anyway, taking a look at the bay there has been a bunch of deliveries recently! The bridge crane sections which were recently sitting over here at the Sanchez area were moved one by one into Gigabay and assembled in the middle of the aisle. The size of this thing is no joke, and thanks to Avid Space’s live camera views, that shows the humans for scale quite nicely. To continue closing off the external views inside we’ve also seen the installation of the first back door. The lifting frame was raised and then they performed the first close going on right behind the crane in front there. That was open again soon after but yet another reminder how lucky we’ve been over the years to be able to see so much of this out in the open. I mean we should have plenty of frequent vehicle roll events between sites to dive into as we transition into orbital missions, so I don’t think we’ll have any less to talk about.
In Falcon 9 action this week we kicked off at Vandenberg Space Force Base early Saturday evening where SpaceX was busy adding another batch of Starlinks to the constellation with the Group 15-27 launch. Heading up past MaxQ you could see the sun lighting up the underside of the Falcon 9 beaming in from the horizon. There was stage separation leaving this booster number 1093 here on its 17th flight coasting away on its trajectory to land downrange. I’m going to specifically point out the fairing separation here on this flight because one of these fairings was actually on its 40th mission! That is just a mind-boggling number. And it comes just as we are witnessing SpaceX begin to slowly phase out the Falcon 9 to focus on Starship. Actually, can you believe this was the only Falcon 9 mission for the entire week? In fact, the next Starlink mission that we see should we hope be with Starship Flight 14. That one flight is worth about 10 of these Falcon 9 missions, so as soon as SpaceX has Starship flying in a more routine way, there will be no reason to really use Falcon 9 on Starlink missions at all. It feels like SpaceX are kind of willing, at least for the moment, to leave a gap in the launch market with Falcon. We know that they aren’t accepting any more commercial rideshare bookings past the end of 2028. I mean even if Starship begins flying missions consistently by then, it looks to leave a big opportunity for other launchers to grab chunks of the small satellite market in the meantime. I’m kind of wondering if SpaceX is already making so much revenue from just Starlink and then even plan to make plenty more with future data center satellites, that they can almost shrug off other customers in the shorter term.
Anyway, back to this one and only Falcon 9 landing for the week, there was Booster 1093 extending those landing legs and making that always iconic propulsive touchdown on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You. We also had a bunch of Rocket Lab Electron action this week. On Saturday Rocket Lab flew Electron for the 96th time, in fact, launching another synthetic aperture radar satellite for Synspective from New Zealand. A nice afternoon mission this one too, and as usual you can’t beat those scenic shots of the 18 meter or near 60 foot tall rocket climbing away. Synspective’s StriX satellite was soon deployed of course into a 572-kilometre orbit at a 38 degree inclination. Now Rocket Lab has of course been the sole launch provider for Synspective’s constellation since 2020, and they still have another 15 missions booked up through until 2030. However, that sole provider status is no more. That is because Synspective is adding a little diversification to their access to space, by booking in two future StriX satellites to launch aboard Japan’s H3 rocket next year. Together they weren’t done for the week either. Here they were back here in New Zealand just hours ago with the mission “Owlright, Owlright, Owlright”. This Saturday afternoon launch, local time of course, was obviously another one of those StriX satellites heading into orbit from the same pad. This one was the 97th Electron launched in total, so Rocket Lab is really getting close to that big 100 mission mark there.
Also, we have a fun announcement from Vast this week too. They’ve established a Lunar Programs division, and with it they plan to assist NASA in their goals of setting up a permanent lunar presence on the surface of the Moon in the coming decade. They are already getting busy working on a heap of different space systems that might eventually be scaled to support that human presence. Their Haven space station design has common architecture that should be nicely compatible to use for lunar surface bases. Think of those primary and secondary vehicle structures, those pressure vessels, life support and thermal systems, avionics, power, and just the various operational processes involved. I mean, if you think about what you need for a space station in orbit with stuff like an airlock, that is still needed for a lunar base as well. Eventually, they also plan on building full-on habitats designed to support longer duration crewed operations, and they are even working on prototypes for their own Power Station using solar. With that, energy storage systems are a crucial part of any settlement and these renders and prototypes look pretty cool so far. Vast has also proposed lunar communications and positioning satellite constellations, which would provide continuous lunar South Pole coverage. That’s a nice way I think to end out the week!
So there we go my friends. I hope you enjoyed this video! If you did, don’t forget to hit subscribe so we can keep making them. If you want to continue with more space goodness, check out this video here next. Thanks for watching all this way through as always! With any luck, we’ll be covering a Starship launching in just a few days, so stay tuned for that!
