Why Is SpaceX Concerned About the Next Starship? [25:53]

Transcript

Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

As always, my friends, after a Starship mission we get much so much flowing in after the fact to dive right into. Yes, we’ve got ridiculous views from that extraordinary first Starship mission to orbit, but then what’s this!? Indeed, after months at sea and a painstaking journey halfway around the world, Ship 40 has finally made it back to Texas, and what a sight this is! Meanwhile, the next Starship for Flight 15 is rolling out for testing already, but with a few intriguing new insights, and that’s just the start. We’ve got SpaceX’s concern about near misses in orbit, the old switcheroo at the International Space Station, new updates dropped by Blue Origin, and a little spacecraft autonomously keeping pace with another in orbit? Thanks to Starfish Space service satellites instead of just replacing them may be closer than you think! This video is sponsored by Surfshark VPN!

Chapter 2: Starship Flight 14 Analysis

Hey, hey, Marcus House with you here. Since the first orbital mission with Starship Flight 14, SpaceX has shared a load of extra goodies to explore. Tons of views of the liftoff, drone views from a distance, and even this sweet perspective from a camera mounted right on that ship quick disconnect arm! Check out the ice breaking free of those frosty lines at ignition and then the quick disconnect itself retracting away from the ship! This was actually released in super slow motion, and even sped up a lot, this is still obviously much slower than real time. It’s a beautiful thing, and as the upper stage disappears out of view, watch the shockwaves in the plume below as the Superheavy’s 33 Raptor 3 engines beat that atmosphere in complete mayhem.

One of my favorite posts, though, was further on that uphill climb with these hot staging videos. We’ve got two shots from the booster’s point of view. This first one is a view from the top of the booster looking down, and as it flips around to reignite the remaining engines for the main boostback sequence, you see the flame from the Starship belt down onto it, followed by seeing the Starship itself there firing away with all 6 of those engines. The second shot is from the bottom of the booster located on one of those 4 chines just above the engines. If you look carefully at these bursts of vapor, that’s all but the center five engines now shutting down. This is all while that is flipping, and then the relight of the engines again for the rapid boostback.

This time we just see a small glimpse of the Starship as it moves away. Now, from the Starship’s point of view, we then got this entire sequence from above looking down. Again, we see how perfectly that hot stage sequence flips the Super Heavy directly upward toward space, and we get that little glimpse of the booster engine ignition sequence! Slowing that right down, just before it exits the camera view, we see those outer 20 engines just beginning to ignite! It really has been quite intriguing looking further into the finer detail of the flight since last week.

Chapter 3: Satellite Deployment Details

You may recall very clearly, I hope, that epic moment when Ship 41 started spitting out all 26 of its Starlink Version 3 satellites into a full orbit! Right at the end of the Flight 14 broadcast, SpaceX had shared this view from the perspective of one of those satellites exiting the payload bay; however, we got something equally incredible just a few days ago from Starlink’s social feed. This video they posted was from a satellite already at a reasonable distance away, and if you looked in real close, you could see the ship continuing to deploy the following satellites as everything here is screaming around Earth at orbital velocity. If we just zoom that footage right in and play that again, this is just so incredible to me. How absolutely insane is this shot! Anyway, since all this magic happened, of course, people were already able to spot the 26 satellites from the ground as they deployed their solar panels.

Remember, these are in their non-operational low drag orientation, so they won’t be bright like this once in actual operation, but check this shot out by Kevin Parker down here in Australia. This was very soon after deployment, and again, I’ve got this sped up a bunch just so we can get through all this amazing footage. These could also be seen, by the way, on NSF’s Starbase live cameras the day after, and as you can see, they had already spread out a bunch in order to start their orbit raising maneuvers. Speaking of, a big thanks to Jonathan McDowell and his ability to dive into the Space-Track data as soon as it becomes available because we can see that orbit raising is already well underway! In fact, most have already raised their orbits by over 20 kilometers, although they should sit here for a while and individually adjust the orbital plane drift to slowly spread themselves out over time.

Transcript

Chapter 4: Starship Flight 15 Updates

So, of course, the most frequent question I am seeing in the comments is when we might see Starship Flight 15 for the next seconds chapter in this ongoing Starship saga. Well, both Booster 22 and Ship 42 planned for this flight were already having their engines installed prior to Flight 14. Booster 22 is still in Megabay 1 hiding away, so we can’t see much about what’s going on there, but from Megabay 2, we have spotted some interesting developments on the upper stage Starship. Indeed, we’ve just seen Raptor engines leaving one after another. As you may recall with Flight 14, we came very close to SpaceX not attempting to go to orbit at all due to that one Raptor Vacuum engine flaming out unexpectedly a little early. We suspect having the engines removed here means that SpaceX wants to do some additional testing or modifications before pressing on to a static fire.

On Sunday, the newer thrust simulator stand rolled back from Massey’s, so we certainly seemed to be in for some action. Before that, though, interestingly, the test tank S39.1 that was previously used to validate the new version 3 engine bay design was moving as well. This has already performed upwards of 20 tests and was moved off of the can crusher and over to an old thrust simulator stand. Indeed, it was rolling out to the Massey’s for some additional testing, and Shaun was here watching this pass by in the darkness. We appreciated you being subscribed here so that we get to pay him to brave that weather for you. We certainly are grateful for every single week that we get to do this, and with weather like this, that is almost an understatement. Now, right behind this, you may see this Starlink Starship loader rolling along too. Yes, they used the same road closure to transport that as well. I’ll come back to that a bit later because that was instead heading further along to the Port.

Fast forwarding to Thursday, that newer thrust simulator stand picked up Ship 42 and began the rollout to Massey’s. At this point, we’ll just need to wait and see how much testing SpaceX wants to do with this Starship for Flight 15, but I guess with two of the three version 3 flights so far losing a vacuum engine on the ascent, they are still obviously looking to fix what has turned out to be a more persistent problem. In fact, if it wasn’t for Starship’s engine out capability, both vehicles could have been lost entirely. Now they have flight data from both events; they likely have a much higher capability to narrow the issue down and pinpoint exactly where a fix is needed. Cryogenic testing has already kicked off with Ship 42 here on Friday afternoon, so hopefully, they’ll soon have it back at Megabay 2 having the engines reinstalled.

Chapter 5: Launch Site Progress

Now, if we visit the launch site and take a look at Pad 2 after Flight 14, the trench is holding up very nicely after the three launches now. Just a little bit of superficial looking toastiness on the surface in places! Right here, you can make out the individual scorch patterns as the Super Heavy exhaust splits along the exits here! In the center of the launch mount from above, thanks to these new views from RGV Aerial Photography, you may notice the brand new servicing platform sitting right in here. Shaun went out to catch this first, by the way. This was lifted up and carefully placed inside the launch mount for the first time soon after flight, and it is certainly going to make the ground team’s life a whole lot easier when it comes to post-launch inspections and any repair work. Of course, after the previous flights at this pad, SpaceX needed to have a team install a maze of scaffolding up here just to get into it.

Moving further up, interestingly, the crew removed the right actuator from the tower arms again after this launch. We don’t think SpaceX is replacing these actuators but simply working on them and then reinstalling. It is possible that they are taking some damage after flight, but it could also just be the team making some adjustments. That would make sense given they are still relatively new and a custom design. Moving a little further over to Pad 1, being rapidly upgraded, we saw SpaceX almost immediately spring back to action after Flight 14. The bottom of the trench has had that concrete cure now, and the team has already been lifting in the sections of preassembled trench wall that line the sides of the trench. We also had these five A-frames for the water deluge buckets lifted into the center on these embeds! The two flame buckets that go on top are still up the road at the Sanchez area of the build site, but not for long, I suspect, because they appear to be almost complete with all 4 side pieces now in place.

Moving to the launch deck, there are now three top pieces on site. Two of these were shipped in from Florida by barge a few weeks back and have been stacked on one another all ready to be installed. The fourth is yet to arrive, but it can’t be too far away. With this, a lone booster quick disconnect hood section was delivered too. Each of those hoods has 3 separate pieces, so there’s plenty more of these parts yet to arrive. I think what has moved along fastest of all here, perhaps, is the brand new ship quick disconnect arm for Pad 1. The main tower joint was lifted this week, and once that is fully attached, they’ll start installing all of its raceways for electrical, pneumatic, and cryogenic lines, just like we saw with the arm for Pad 2. Now, heading back up the road to check out the rest of Massey’s action, as already hinted at, there has been a bunch going on here.

Chapter 6: Sponsor Message

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Chapter 7: Massey Test Site Expansion

Ok, so let’s dive into all this action going on at the Massey’s Test Site. On Tuesday night, the booster liquid oxygen landing test tank, which was installed into the smaller testing cage quite some time ago, finally gave in! It appears to have ruptured from the bottom. Now we are wondering if SpaceX was intentionally pushing this well past a predicted failure point. Whether this was intentional or not, we believe they’ve done around 20 or so prior tests on this unit, so it has given them a mountain of data to work with. Along with that, the test nosecone inside the larger testing cage beside is truly strapped in, and as we currently see it, has the tower arm simulators either side ready to squeeze, and rams hooked up to the catch pins to begin giving them a full round of testing! This is going to give crucial information for when an upper stage Starship comes in for a catch with extra mass or speed!

Now I mentioned this new foundation a while back, and right now it looks like a second testing cage is going to rise here, very similar to the one that the nosecone test article is in right now, so they obviously have plenty more work they want to do here with the next test vehicles in the future! Now that’s not the only construction going on here either because this site is going to grow much larger! A permit for an expansion project showed up just a few days ago with a start date for Monday this week and an end date in May 2027. Now it is not clear just yet how this site will be laid out, but we know it’s just to the east of the existing infrastructure and will add 46 acres to this site. We’ve even managed to pick up the very beginning of the road headed in its direction, so it’s going to be interesting watching how everything progresses over the next eight months or so.

Transcript

Chapter 8: Recovery of Ship 40

Ok, so getting back to the news from the Port of Brownsville, the first arrival was Signet Warhorse 1, which arrived on Monday with You’ll Thank Me Later in tow! Of course, that arrived within the dead of night, so we had no direct views of that coming in, but Shaun was out on the water with Captain Darrel and got a tiny glimpse of it on Wednesday. This has travelled from Florida to pick up another Gigiabay stand and, as hinted on earlier, that Starship Starlink loader! Indeed, they are going to need one of these in Florida for future missions. Eventually, of course, this You’ll Thank Me Later ship will be transporting the full vehicles for Cape flights too.

Now along with that port action, the moment we’ve been waiting months for. After a mighty game of tug of war, finally Ship 40, riding along on the transport ship FORTE, arrived this week after its long journey back from its soft splashdown after Starship Test Flight 13! If you had told me a year ago that this was the way we would see the first Starship be recovered and returned to Starbase, I wouldn’t have believed you, but here we are.

It has been an incredible saga watching this play out over the many weeks, and although this is looking a little worse for wear, this represents a vast opportunity to pick up incredibly beneficial information on how it has survived the trip to orbit, the soft splashdown, and the battering it took in the ocean. With any luck, SpaceX will have the next Starship return by catching it intact right out of the air, but until then, they can perform a full autopsy on Ship 40, which I’m sure will inspire many tweaks to the Starship design.

Chapter 9: Falcon 9 Mission Report

Now for Falcon 9 action this week, we were expecting the Space Development Agency Tranche 1 Transport Layer A Mission to be launching on Monday, but no! A scrub right as the count passed the T-1 minute mark. SpaceX didn’t share why, but just said everything remained in good health, so they pushed this to Thursday this week. That then got bumped even further forward to launch just as I really needed to get exporting this video out to go live, but hey, I can’t have you miss out on action just so that I can take an early minute, can I!?

As you can see, this Falcon 9 includes that grey thermal coating on the bottom of that second stage. This is because some of these secretive missions tend to hang around doing multiple burns over a long period of time. This coating absorbs more sunlight to help stop the kerosene fuel from freezing during a long mission. RP1 can start to ice up as it approaches -50 degrees Celsius, so if you want your Merlin engine to start up reliably hours later, you need to use a few tricks to add some solar heat into the system.

Now this was the sixth flight for Booster 1103, and there was that touchdown at Landing Zone 4. Sadly, this was all in the darkness, of course, and given the secrecy of this mission, we didn’t have any views from the second stage after that had separated. That was quite literally it for Falcon 9.

What about all those Starlink missions though, you may ask!? The last Starlink Falcon 9 launch was back on September 19 from California. That makes it about three weeks between missions! I mean, for a program that had already flown about 80 Falcon 9 Starlink launches this year, averaging roughly one every three days, that is quite the change, isn’t it!? Now, of course, we had the first Version 3 Starlink deployment on Starship Flight 14 last week, but not counting that, it has been very quiet.

Chapter 10: Space Safety and Debris

Interestingly, while sharing that incredible view of the Starlink Version 3 satellites ejected from Starship in Flight 14, the crew at Starlink made the point that constant communication is what makes autonomy like this safe. Early contact lets them maneuver the satellites’ responsibility to avoid any known debris and then, at the end of the mission, deorbit these without leaving debris up there themselves. There are over 11,000 of them up there right now, and the key part here is that they treat early communications as a requirement, not a nice-to-have feature.

That is critical information for anyone else in space, and by Starlink publishing high-accuracy data on where all their satellites are publicly every hour, including upcoming maneuvers, all operators can plan around it. I mean, we know this is important, but why are they mentioning this specifically? Well, in addition to the operational active satellites, there are tens of thousands of pieces of debris in low Earth orbit, which everybody is obviously trying to avoid, and as long as everyone has them tracked, that’s fine. What Starlink can’t do is avoid risk when other operators aren’t sharing their current positions and maneuvers.

You can see here that the Starlink cameras picked up some very close calls here, making the point that “This is the biggest risk in Low Earth Orbit.” Anyway, they’ve published this page on Space Safety pleading to all satellite operators to share their data similar to what SpaceX does themselves. In 2026, up to this point, Starlink has so far encountered conjunctions with about 650 unique maneuvering third-party satellites, with only about half of those actually sharing the needed data. We’ve all just got to remember that the Starlink constellation, the future Starmind constellation, and any other constellations growing means it is rapidly getting busier up there.

Yes, the space is big, and the chances of impacts seem low, but the speed everything is whipping around is ridiculously fast. The more spacecraft that’s up there, the more critical these tracking systems are. I just hope they can ensure we have a robust tracking system requirement by all countries before we end up in some sort of Kessler Syndrome scenario where impacts cause debris that then spreads out, impacting other satellites, leading to a terrible cascade of debris making space around Earth almost an impossibly dangerous region for decades to come.

Chapter 11: Starfish Space Missions

Now Otter-1 and Otter Pup 2 by Starfish Space have been particularly interesting little missions to have been keeping tabs on this week. Cast your minds back to June of last year when Otter Pup 2 launched into orbit on the Transporter 14 mission to test rendezvous and proximity operations, and ultimately attempt docking with another spacecraft. This is all with the goal of eventually being able to service them in the future. Well, fast forward to the present, GilmourSpace from Australia has ElaraSat up here as the docking test partner, and here it is just 1 kilometer away from Otter Pup 2 as shown mid this week.

This wasn’t a flyby, but is instead sitting at this distance. With the acquisition complete, it has been able to fully rely on its onboard autonomous navigation system to stay close. In tandem with that, of course, Starfish Space’s first full-size commercial and operational servicing spacecraft called Otter-1 was deployed from the top of Transporter 18’s stack here last week. So yes, we are finally moving into an age where we will be able to autonomously refurbish aging spacecraft, keeping them going for years to come. Very best of luck to all of the teams involved as both of these missions continue to play out.

Chapter 12: ISS and Crew Updates

Along with all that, it has been an incredibly busy time at the International Space Station. Just a little over a week ago, of course, we had that iconic Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon combination lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 with the Crew 13 mission. It is always fun watching those return to launch site missions for Falcon 9 boosters, and of course, we were soon watching that Booster 1101 touching down there at Landing Zone 40 for its 3rd time. A really wild view there of that touchdown from this elevated perspective. Meanwhile, the Dragon and crew there separated away to chase down the station.

Now I’ve got to say, I just can’t understand why SpaceX normally streams in 4K, but then when we get a NASA streamed event, we are essentially getting some kind of scaled up 720p or something. Why is that!? Now in this mission, we have NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins commanding the mission and Luke Delaney as pilot on his first mission to space. Interestingly, Jessica is actually the first NASA astronaut to fly on SpaceX’s Dragon twice, the first being the Crew 4 mission.

From the Canadian Space Agency, astronaut Joshua Kutryk, also on his first mission to space, and that also goes for Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teter-yat-ni-kov. Now I’ve had about 20 attempts at trying to pronounce that correctly. I don’t think I have the ability to, so sorry, Sergey. Expedition 75 here, of course, meant the handover with Crew 12, who have all been handing out up here working away since February. Just as planned, they were all packed and ready to return home mid this week on Wednesday.

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway were commanding and piloting Dragon for the return home and mission specialists Sophie and Andrey also of course on board as the four undocked and drifted away. They splashed down safely in the Pacific on Thursday morning wrapping up a little over 33 weeks in orbit. So yea, it is all happening around the International Space Station updates and of course with new crew, more supplies are always needed.

Actually, we currently have SpaceX’s Commercial Resupply Service mission number 35 for NASA coming up early next week to launch from Space Launch Complex 40. That has just a little under three and a half metric tonnes of cargo heading up on this Cargo Dragon, and that is going to include more Roll Out Solar Array replacements along with a number of fun research elements which we’ll dive into next week, so stay tuned.

Chapter 13: Blue Origin Progress

Now it has been a little while since we’ve seen some Blue Origin efforts as they scream forward to try to get a New Glenn up and away before the end of the year. After that little mishap back in May, they have made some astounding progress though at Launch Complex 36. CEO Dave Limp shared some views showing us the newly upgraded tower modules rising fast. This was only a little over a week ago showing that the tower had already started rising. There were a few stacking views from NSF’s live cameras which we can overlay here too. We can see here that the first module had been placed on the vehicle access tower, and you can see the two new floors and guard rails up top there.

Moving into this week we had plenty more progress too. Module 5 had already been stacked and shared mid-week, so there were only four left at this point. I can’t wait for them to get back into action because the Artemis missions they have planned can’t come soon enough. I just love this animation they released here of the 20-meter-tall Power Tower. If you haven’t seen the concept around this, the idea is to have a completely separate moon lander vehicle based on the Mk-1 lander design, but it instead has this vertically deployed solar array system incorporated into it. They are going to bring that down onto the lunar surface at the South Pole. The tower component itself will then expand slowly upward reaching well above the surface.

The great thing about the solar activity here at the South Pole is if you can touch down at the right spot in a nicely elevated position, Blue Origin should have access to sunlight through much of the lunar month. That is a big benefit as opposed to experiencing the full two-week lunar night you would have if you were further north. These panels should provide over 10 kilowatts of power for the future lunar South Pole Moon Base infrastructure. Because it has a modular architecture the idea is that it will support future surface networks as well allowing other landers and lunar assets to obtain that power where needed. If you recall they had shared a real demonstration of this in action back in July but we hadn’t seen much on it until now, so yeah, we hope to see Blue Origin continuing to keep these updates coming.

So there we have it my friends! Another week wrapped up! I hope you enjoyed this video! If you did, don’t forget to hit subscribe so we can keep making them. Again, a massive thank you to Surfshark VPN helping us to put all the work we can into these videos. If you want to continue with more space goodness, check out this video here next. Thanks for watching all this way through as always. That helps a huge amount, and I will catch you next weekend!

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