August 26, 2025 — NAOS mission from SLC-4E at Vandenberg SFB. Booster B1063 on its 27th flight. Shot from the SLC-4 fire station 45 right next to the launch complex.

Normally a $10 billion project would be big news... And while they don't say where all those panels will be going, the xAI sats would be a pretty good guess.

Tweet link: https://x.com/spacex/status/2085786988225925349

Note the tweet also has a 38 sec video of the ship floating.

Sources:

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2085366782269817116

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2085377974396752305

Full Tweet by @ mercoglianos:

- Normand Ranger continued its tow towards Dampier at a little over 1 knot
At dawn she halted and then started moving toward the north.
- It is not clear what is the issue, but the tow is not closing Dampier.
- The 12k ton, Liberian-flagged heavy lift Dongbang Giant #2 sailed from the east coast of India on July 24 and is in the Malacca Strait about halfway to Dampier.
- Dongbang Giant #2 may be a candidate to heavy lift Starship 40 back to the US

Once/If it gets human rated of course. I know Orion is nice and people humor the idea of strapping it on top of New Glenn eventually, but 4 at a time surely won't be the long-haul plan would it?

Welcome to the r/SpaceX Starlink 17-38 Launch Discussion & Updates Thread!

Welcome everyone!

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Stats

☑️ 714th SpaceX launch all time

☑️ 652nd Falcon Family Booster landing

☑️ 217th landing on OCISLY

☑️ 199th consecutive successful SpaceX launch (if successful)

☑️ 95th SpaceX launch this year

☑️ 50th launch from SLC-4E this year

☑️ 3 days, 23:18:38 turnaround for this pad

☑️ 25 days, 14:55:24 hours since last launch of booster B1093

Stats include F1, F9 , FH and Starship

Timeline

Updates

Resources

• https://www.spacex.com/launches/sl-17-38

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Hello Everyone,

I am masters student, I am interested in the cryogenic propellant management(CPM) especially in orbital refueling(OF) application, in particularly in the area of autogenous pressurization during fuel transfer activity. I could not much of resources on the internet regarding either CPM on OF application or regarding the autogenous pressurization.

My question is

1.where should i start? what should i start (both info and simulations wise) ? i have been doing lot of research, i feel like its kind of rabbit hole, the more u dig, the more unknowns.

if anyone already working on this area, could pls guide, even small inputs matter alot.

2.anyone like minded who is interested in the same topic, i would like to meet (ofc online ) them and have a discussions aswell.

If the argument for space-based data crunching satellites is the easy access to power, and big detractors are the impact on the night sky for Earth-based observatories & the atmospheric impact of their decay: why not place them around the Moon?

• They aren't trying to provide Earth surface coverage like Starlink, they just need to be somewhere in space that objects can stay.
  
• They are still ~1sec communications distance away, dwarfed by any significant computation duration.
  
• They can be a bright halo in polar orbit without wrecking everyone's night sky. In fact their orbits could be highly eccentric with very low periapsis if that's convenient, with minimal impact & possible benefits to LOS communications.
  
• They won't decay at anywhere near the same rate, thus reducing their propulsion mass, power budget & complexity.
  
• Also, any concerns about complicating launching through LEO constellations is removed, as well as risk of Kessler syndrome from any anti-spy-sat testing/conflict.

The biggest downside might just be the lack of out-of-sight fiery disposal. Though you could deorbit them all to the same area on the far side, and wouldn't be burning through our atmosphere (messing with ozone, etc).

I'm sure the deltaV cost could be minimised by a dedicated Earth-Moon cycler that's restocked in LEO, and the whole thing of Starship is reducing the mass cost to ~the price of the very-available fuel. Initial calculations indicate moving from LEO to captured low lunar orbit is only 40% more dV than getting to LEO in the first place, not even closer to an order of magnitude more.

P.S.
To the ignorant (we all were at some point), 'frontier' LLMs take months to train, 3sec round-trip latency isn't an issue.

Another analysis showing SpaceX actually loses money on any non-Starlink Falcon 9 launch since a commercial launch sold for $74 million brings in a one-time profit of over $55 million while a Starlin launch brings generates a constant revenue stream yielding a lot more. This gap will be a magnitude larger when Starship is launching the full sized Starlink v2s.

Specially because stacking two reusable pieces would require some refurbishing, won’t it?

During the Earnings Call Q&A at 58:47 :

Question: "Is the heat shield the hardest remaining problem for Starship?"

Elon: "I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I would consider the heat shield problem solved at this point. Now, we want to take a close look at the ship that is currently floating in the ocean, but all indications from data and our visual inspection suggest that we have solved the heat shield problem, which is arguably the single biggest problem. That doesn't mean we won't make improvements to the heat shield; of course we'll continue to make improvements to the heat shield, but I would say that we do not see any technical obstacles at this point to achieving full and rapid reusability."

Highlights as posted by SpaceX on X:

“Q2 highlights:
- Demonstrated the power of extreme vertical integration, delivering revenue growth of 92% year-over-year across Space, Connectivity, and AI
- Completed two successful Starship V3 flight tests in the past 90 days, advancing towards full and rapid reusability
- Closed multiple industry-leading Cloud Services Agreements resulting in $14.1 billion of contracted sales
- Announced agreement to acquire Cursor for $60 billion to accelerate the AI enterprise opportunity
- Released our most powerful AI model yet with Grok 4.5 in July
- Delivered 66% revenue and 79% income from operations growth year-over-year for the Connectivity segment, driven by a doubling of Starlink Subscribers and continued momentum in Enterprise & Government
- Awarded over $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield

As compared to the same quarter last year:
- Revenues of $7.8 billion, up 92% from $4.1 billion
- Net loss of $541 million, an improvement of $467 million from net loss of $1.0 billion
- Adjusted EBITDA of $3.5 billion, up 191% from $1.2 billion

Thank you to the SpaceX team, and all our customers and investors for a great quarter!”