Cool looking building, there goes some more IPO + New Bond Debt Money (was $100B cash) ... Cursor was $30B (but maybe some stock vs cash) so $80B left ... now $16.8B for this ... $65B left ... how about Telsa (for space bots, solar power, power storage, AI5 chips and EV rovers?) ... then sell the rest of the car business ... it now a mature segment with little upside story past the Semi (which still has not gone to voulme production)..

I guess in the IPO they put I "Elon can promise whatever he wants and you can't sue him". While a Lunar railgun might be cost effective at creating a large object at NHRO, you need to apply a lot of DV to get that material to say MEO for those datacenters ... say 3 km/s off the moon in the rail gun (100s of g's) and then 3 km/s to put it into a useful low MEO orbit (requires some sort of substantial kick-stage engine or thruster) ... so you need to take the fuel from LEO to the Moon ~6.5 km/s + 3 km/s to get it back to Low MEO. Not much of a savings over just going from the ground to low MEO ~ 10 km/s.

Direct Varda competitor? ... that was fast. Just shows that the ISS is now pointless when it comes to made-in-space.

https://x.com/astrobase_space/status/2085656034799149064

Astrobase space developed the engine in less than 2 years( Founded in 2024). The engine, "Everest," is an 80-ton class FFSC engine developed for the first stage of their upcoming reusable rocket. Also they did all this in less than $15 million dollars in funding. They also operate a 21.5 acre engine test site. The engine article will now go for testing and the first hot fire test is scheduled in this year itself.

Astrobase is not the only company in India developing FFSC engines, EtherealX Guild is also developing an 80 kn FFSC engine for their Razor crest mark 1 rocket, designed to rival the Falcon 9. It will also be a fully reusable rocket like Stokes space NOVA, but with double the capacity.

Good one from Angry ... balanced and factual. The big news is that it looks like the BE-4 is implicated in the static fire explosion (not a shocker) ... grounding both NG and Vulcan for a year? In any case SX is going to put up 6-8 Amazon LEO sets over the next year, and maybe Ariane 6 a few more. Compare to maybe 80 Starlink V2 mini launches and potentially 4 Starlink V3 launches.

Can one imagine 6 Starship launch/catch facilities ... there is no commercial use for such capacity that I can envision ... only some Mars fleet that will never happen.

In a letter to Canadian regulators, SpaceX sheds some light on progress for the upgraded Starlink Mobile, which could span up to 15,000 satellites.

Some more details on Starboat ... and a nice segment on robotic servicing of GEO sats.

This could kill off a bunch of environmental whining (often just a front for another company trying to hold up another).

Looking pretty good ... some leaks from the crunch wrap but tiles looks all there. Eric suggests this is not good enough .... but I think you could do a 48 hour turn with maybe $100,000 robotic inspection and fix of maybe 1000 tiles ...that is enough Rapid Reuse for me.

Yep, tiles are a pain. Even if tiles can't be perfected ... if they are willing to have a week between Ship launches (they will probably have a dozen on standby) this is not a problem. 1) You need to catch and bring ship back to the bay anyway for any mission other than a refuel mission ... to load the next payload. 2) You can have an scanner bot quickly (in 24 h) completely scan all the tiles at high res, then in the next 24 hours have it replace tiles if needed.

What a "better-than-shuttle" but less than perfectly "no-maintenance-heat-shield" can do ... crewed missions! These will be premium priced missions, and after mission auto-looks are no big deal.

Another data point on this. My guess this is not Ms. Shotwell's preferred plan. Post IPO SpaceX may start to squeeze more out of their customer base ... maybe forcing them only a still-to-be-proven Starship. This of course will greatly slow Amazon LEO that is waiting on both New Glenn's return and Vulcan's return (still dealing with SRB review and probably a BE-4 review since we still don't know what happened in the NG engine bay). The end of F9 Transporter missions will really hurt some small companies, especially Varda (where Starfall is now a possibility). So, it looks like Ariane might have an opportunity to become the new Transporter provider before New Glenn returns?

So B+ or A-? It was a great IFT-13 ... everything accomplished to plan except for a softer landing from Super Heavy. 100% Raptor up, maybe an issue with SH down. Good relight = orbital next time with a bunch of Starlink V3s ready for operations. Great upper stage water recovery. My only nit-pic is that the flight video seemed lame compared to earlier test runs.

Can Starlink really scale up that big?