"Splashdown?"
Don't they mean "Crash down?"
:D
SpaceX aims Starship for orbit on September 22
SpaceX is aiming for a September 22 launch of its monstrous Starship rocket on a 10-hour mission to deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit. The flight, set to launch at 1215 UTC if all goes to plan and the authorities give the green light, will be the first time Starship has gone into orbit, and the mission is planned to …
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Wednesday 16th September 2026 17:17 GMT Zack Mollusc
Oooh, fingers crossed!
I think they are hoping to loft 44 tons of starlink sats, which is a lot less than they originally hoped the payload would be, but is still a respectable mass for experimenting with boil-off mitigation, larger payload doors etc.
For comparison, a full Soyuz spacecraft is only 7.5 tonnes, Dragon spacecraft are around 12 tonnes, the first salyut space stations and the first module of the ISS were only 20 tonnes. 44 tonnes of payload lets you do a lot of experimenting and should be faster and cheaper as you don't need to save every gram in your design.
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Wednesday 23rd September 2026 16:08 GMT Sproggit
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
I have zero knowledge of their plans, but I'm tempted to suggest not.
My guess would be to think about this from a protect-the-doors-during-heat-of-re-entry perspective.
We've seen just how spectacularly hot the underbelly of Starship gets during re-entry - hot enough to melt the fins off, no less - so I am going to suggest that if I were tasked with designing a decent size of cargo bay doors in Starship, I'd be tempted to replicate the NASA/Rockwell design for the Shuttle. I'd want the edges of any form of opening flap to be as well protected against heat of re-entry as possible - and I am going to venture that an "opening nose", given the re-entry profile, might lead to avoidable exposure.
This is pure guesswork, of course. And guesswork extrapolated from a notion of how the forward section of starship might be exposed to high thermal conditions of re-entry.
If you had a teensy issue with the seals on your opening section - and that opening section was sited in an area of high thermal load during re-entry - then a small defect - like a chip or crease in a seal - could be catastrophic. OTOH, if you shielded your opening section with the body of the vehicle, the result *might* be a bit more fault tolerant.
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Thursday 17th September 2026 08:29 GMT frankvw
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
"After all, nobody wants something the size of Starship making an uncontrolled reentry after its orbit eventually decays."
Yet this is a possibility. And if (!) they eventually start launching this with the frequency they claim to be aiming for, eventually statistics are likely to do what statistics usually do. Then what? We got lucky with Skylab mostly disintegrating and dropping most of its remaining heavy chunks in the Australian Outback, but Starship is designed to hold together during reentry.
Maybe someone should be planning for that eventuality.
Other than that, I'm looking forward to this one!
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Wednesday 23rd September 2026 16:17 GMT Sproggit
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
I did some back-of-a-napkin math on that last week...
To quote:-
"A quick search suggests that Starlink has FCC approval for an initial, first-generation constellation of 12,000 units, but that their declared plans extend to 42,000 - as described in recent regulatory filings.
If we were talking about tens or even hundreds of satellites, I'd accept that a high degree of bespoke or custom construction would be used. Not "manual", obviously, because most of the assembled parts are going to be CNC-machined metal and more-or-less conventional [if space-hardened] electronic components. But certainly there would be enough there to have an actual, honest-to-goodness production line running.
Today - mid-September 2026 - the typical lifespan of a Starlink satellite is 5 years - so 60 months. If we divide 42,000 by 60 we get 700 - so that means that [once complete] SpaceX would have to be launching 700 replacement satellites per month to maintain their network.
A starship/super-heavy launch is estimated to have a maximum capacity of around 60 Gen 3 Starlink satellites...
So that would be 12 Starship / Super-Heavy launches per month, or 3 launches per week just to keep the constellation maintained at a constant size and to offset natural attrition."
Obviously that was all just back-of-a-napkin estimates, sprinkled with some publicly available data. But even if I'm wrong in the decimals, the orders-of-magnitude are likely pretty sound.
So to your point about, "If SpaceX ever get to the frequency they claim to be aiming for..."... the public filings from their own sister company - Starlink - is already hinting that - just for Starlink - we could end up witnessing 3 re-entry cycles *per week, every week*.
That's when your point about this all being basic probability starts to earn it's keep, because that's when we'd get to "statistically significant volumes of launches". To offset that just a bit, though... a modern commercial airliner is almost as complex as SuperHeavy in terms of the number of moving parts... yet commercial airliners fly from one side of the Atlantic to the other and then turn around and fly back with as little as 90 minutes to clean out the cabins and fill the tanks with fuel. At the dawn of the commercial aviation industry, something we take for granted today would be considered beyond the wildest dreams of the craziest optimists. Now - now that's just Tuesday.
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Thursday 17th September 2026 10:00 GMT Annihilator
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
"I think they are hoping to loft 44 tons of starlink sats"
Article states 26 sats. Had to do a quick google, as I assumed they were relatively small satellites and so your maths was out, but good grief if the new V3 ones aren't a massive 2 tonnes now. The previous ones used to be washing machine sized, and relatively "easy" to put into orbit, only about 500kg each.
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Thursday 17th September 2026 12:40 GMT Annihilator
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
You'd hope not, but yeah probably.
I just had to check, the absolute beasts that are the Astra constellation are broadly the same sort of size. I thought the whole point of Starlink was they were small and light enough to chuck 10,000s of them into orbit and not worry about the cost/replacement requirements.
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Thursday 17th September 2026 18:17 GMT Sproggit
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
Guess: maybe the economy of scale comes from the numbers involved: the anticipated constellation for Starlink means that they will need some sort of genuine production line so that they can maintain the constellation as older units lose altitude and burn up...
A quick search suggests that Starlink has FCC approval for an initial, first-generation constellation of 12,000 units, but that their declared plans extend to 42,000 - as described in recent regulatory filings.
If we were talking about tens or even hundreds of satellites, I'd accept that a high degree of bespoke or custom construction would be used. Not "manual", obviously, because most of the assembled parts are going to be CNC-machined metal and more-or-less conventional [if space-hardened] electronic components. But certainly there would be enough there to have an actual, honest-to-goodness production line running.
Today - mid-September 2026 - the typical lifespan of a Starlink satellite is 5 years - so 60 months. If we divide 42,000 by 60 we get 700 - so that means that [once complete] SpaceX would have to be launching 700 replacement satellites per month to maintain their network.
A starship/super-heavy launch is estimated to have a maximum capacity of around 60 Gen 3 Starlink satellites...
So that would be 12 Starship / Super-Heavy launches per month, or 3 launches per week just to keep the constellation maintained at a constant size and to offset natural attrition.
Which is kinda interesting, because it gives us a bit of an insight in to some of the economics of the exercise. A Starship/Super-Heavy launch, with full recoverability, is estimated to cost $100 million in today's dollars. If we distribute 700 launches [the requirement to maintain 42,000 satellites with a 5-year lifespan] then we get 140 launches per year. With each launch costing $100 million in today's dollars, we see that SpaceX/Starlink/Musk are planning on spending $1.4 billion per year to maintain the constellation once it reaches full size.
That's not even all of the Starlink break-even cost - because you've got all their other operational costs - staff, ground-side equipment, etc - to factor in as well.
That's a *lot* of operating overhead....
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Sunday 20th September 2026 07:19 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
"So that would be 12 Starship / Super-Heavy launches per month, or 3 launches per week just to keep the constellation maintained at a constant size and to offset natural attrition."
It's so amazing what can be done with arithmetic these days. /s
It's never been a sustainable network from day one with the promises they've made.
What shows it a poor business is the cost of sats + launch costs without including ground stations and control staff. Those space hardware costs divided by the number of subscribers x averaged monthly fees and it's madness. Nevermind that SpaceX must pay to connect the ground stations to the internet backbone and the bandwidth just like any other ISP.
$1.4bn divided by a wildly guessed at $100/month average fee is 14mn subscriber months just for fleet maintenance.
The total addressable market is those first world people that aren't living in a metropolitan area that is well served with many other faster and cheaper options. The vast majority of people on the planet would be hard pressed to pay $10/month for Starlink. That would be those that could afford some sort of computer AND have access to electricity to run all of the kit.
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Sunday 20th September 2026 07:06 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!
" I thought the whole point of Starlink was they were small and light enough to chuck 10,000s of them into orbit and not worry about the cost/replacement requirements."
The original build out was 42,000 satellites. At 60 per launch it was still a lot of launches but the satellites put on some weight and girth as well as more orbits taking more ∆V on the 2nd stage when wanting the booster back. A typical west coast load is 23 birds. No more Falcon Starlink launches from the Cape. A problem that SpaceX didn't run the numbers on was that they weren't going to get 42k satellites into orbit in less than five years so the earliest that were still working were dropping out of orbit. An even bigger v3 satellite with more bandwidth can lower the number requirements but requires Starship to deploy them.
The threat of orbital AI data centers seems to make getting the Starlink network up and maintained a battle of launch capacity. If v3 reduces the number of Starlink satellites to 30k, that's still another 20k to go in raw numbers plus replacements. Line of sight limitaions mean they won't reduce the requirements enough to halve the deployment unless they go to a higher orbit and knock back the only advantage they have, latency.
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Wednesday 16th September 2026 17:46 GMT NoneSuch
In a July 2019 interview with TIME/CBS, Elon Musk said:
“This is gonna sound pretty crazy, but I think we could land on the moon in less than two years. Certainly with an un-crewed vehicle I believe we could land on the moon in two years. So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside.”
That implied an uncrewed SpaceX landing by roughly 2021, and a crewed landing by roughly 2022–2023.
Stay tuned to see how accurate the Muskenator was...
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Friday 18th September 2026 10:31 GMT awavey
yep cant think what happened between 2020 and 2022 to derail that... I love the way people take random statements from Musk as if theyre concrete project plans and timelines and moan about the way they then miss targets they themselves acknowledge were only implied anyway.
Could SpaceX send something to the moon ? yes, they actually recently did, it took a while to get there, but a Falcon 9 upper stage booster landed on the moon. it was uncrewed, the landing meant its not reusable anymore,but is it any different to how the Indian probe Vikram landed on the moon ? not really because they both crash landed unintentionally.
and do you somehow believe SpaceX dont have that capability to send an uncrewed vehicle to the moon if they wanted to ?
whilst dearMoon was a planned crewed mission in 2019 for SpaceX to do an Apollo 8 style mission around the moon by 2023, which is the timeline Musk was citing, delays in the development of Starship have cancelled that mission, but the aspiration was there to do it.
Whats that old saying about Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
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Thursday 24th September 2026 03:52 GMT MachDiamond
"yep cant think what happened between 2020 and 2022 to derail that..."
That really doesn't matter as it seems the promise was never real to begin with. In the waning months of 2026, there would be at least attempts on the books if there was an intention of doing it. The delay would be excusable.
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Wednesday 16th September 2026 22:16 GMT MachDiamond
Several = 2?
The booster has been caught twice, not several times. Word is that it was rather scary which is why they haven't done it since.
The Starship (upper stage) has never been tried to be caught so that's an unknown. SpaceX also doesn't have a facility to do a catch that doesn't have the rocket descending over population/foreign countries.
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Wednesday 16th September 2026 23:14 GMT John Robson
Re: Several = 2?
Similar to the shuttle return path.
This is exactly why I've always been surprised that they dropped the oil platform idea (though it seems it might be back on the cards). Even coming in across Central America and hitting a platform in the Gulf of Mexico has some population overflight.
How many more flights do you think would be needed for that degree of risk to be acceptable (to the relevant authorities in the US and in those countries being overflown, not the "enthusiastic" musk).
Booster return looked pretty good to me, both times, but the consequences of a failure would be pretty serious for the entire programme, so it's probably not the most important step in the current testing programme.
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Thursday 17th September 2026 08:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Several = 2?
The ship descent has been absolutely fine - to the point that they've had drones and buoys in exactly the right place to video the aquatic 'landing' (unsurprisingly, usually followed by toppling over and exploding due to sideways impact with the sea)
Basically, once it's into lithobraking it's likely to be OK. Once it hits max-q you can be pretty sure it'll be OK.
So I'd have no issues with the descent path going over my house (although I suspect Musk would seeing as I live nowhere near where it would need to be)
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Sunday 20th September 2026 07:32 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Several = 2?
"Booster return looked pretty good to me, both times,"
The first one was a couple of secs from lots of bad happening. The second catch wasn't as bad, but still did more damage to the tower than expected. Enough that a "rapid reuse" would not have been possible.
Catching the rockets is supposed to lead to turning around vehicles and pads exceptionally fast. Needing a week to repair a tower and a month to make the vehicle components ready for another use won't fit in the plans they've laid out. Most importantly, the engines need to be perfect. Elon has said on numerous occasions that they are running the Raptors on the ragged edge of what the engines can do. On flight 13, the issue they had with booster relight is suspected to be from ice getting in the propellant lines feeding the engines. They are recycling pre-burner gases to pressurize the tank(s) and water that is part of the exhaust is freezing in the tank(s). All said, when running that hard, I'm not seeing how they are going to get multiple cycles on engines without rebuilds. Very similar to top fuel dragsters and funny cars that are rebuilt after each run. Even with rebuilds, they do blow up regularly enough. Burning 57L of fuel in one very short go has it's costs.
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Friday 18th September 2026 10:15 GMT awavey
Re: Several = 2?
the word being what ? some bloke down the pub told you ? same bloke who told you the booster had only been caught twice, when its actually been caught three times, ift 5, ift 7 and ift 8, meaning its been caught "several" times.
just stuff you could have looked up for free online, and checked. but you didnt.
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Thursday 17th September 2026 07:45 GMT A Non e-mouse
The vehicle is critical to SpaceX's future; it can loft far greater payloads than the company's workhorse Falcon 9
Aren't they already decommission Falcon infrastructure in Florida to replace it with Starship infrastructure? Winding down your cash-cow before its replacement is fully operational is a brave decision.
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Sunday 20th September 2026 07:46 GMT MachDiamond
"Aren't they already decommission Falcon infrastructure in Florida to replace it with Starship infrastructure?"
SpaceX is standing down Starlink launches from Florida and not booking any more Falcon commercial payloads (on either coast IIRC). They still have a contract with NASA to ship supplies and astronauts to/from ISS. I don't see how they'd be able to get out of that until ISS is deorbited.
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Tuesday 22nd September 2026 23:08 GMT Oneman2Many
Don't forget the de-orbit mission which will be the last mission to ISS I presume.
There was still wishes in in the 2026 NASA Authorisation Act to seek funding to extend ISS to 2032 due to the delay in private stations but I really don't think that is going to happen with the number of issues that ISS is having plus there isn't any commitment from the Russians to support this.
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Thursday 24th September 2026 03:58 GMT MachDiamond
"but I really don't think that is going to happen with the number of issues that ISS is having plus there isn't any commitment from the Russians to support this."
The Russian section houses the control and nav stuff for the whole thing. I don't think that those controls are accessible to anybody else but Russians. The level of cooperation in most things is incredible, but there are closets and dark corners. If Russia is not going to extend, that's pretty much it.
A big question is if SpaceX is going to have a de-orbiting plan and all of the hardware ready.
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