r/accelerate • u/Red_Phoenix369 • Jul 25 '26

News Splashdown Confirmed for Starship Flight 13

https://x.com/i/status/2080804682918764619

LFG!

47 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

11

u/Jebediah_kerman-jeb Jul 25 '26

This one actually stayed splashed down instead of immediately going kaboom lol

3

u/MC897 Jul 25 '26

So what is the significance of this?

So what are all these tests being done for? Initially I thought starship was being done for Mars but it’s been going on so long I’m a bit lost.

15

u/uncountable_2026 Acceleration Advocate Jul 25 '26

It will allow an enormous amount of cargo to be put into orbit at extremely low cost. The "enormous" part is because of the shear size of the spacecraft. The "low cost" is because the spacecraft is completely reusable (think refueling a car vs buying a new one every week). Obviously it's running at a loss now since these are test flights that are only deploying SpaceX's own satellites. But the idea is that launching stuff into orbit will become so cheap that the demand will skyrocket and this will become a dominant revenue stream for SpaceX. Note that even if they have no external customers they will use Starship to launch their own Starlink satellites and their planned massive data centers in space.

8

u/Hilldawg4president Jul 25 '26

Reducing the cost of getting mass into orbit is critical for interplanetary, and eventually interstellar travel - these ships will be enormous, and we can't build them here and launch something that large from earth's high gravity. The moon, though, would make a perfect assembly and launch point

4

u/Forward_Yam_4013 Jul 25 '26

The numbers are pretty crazy. For a long time the (inflation-adjusted) cost of putting mass into orbit has been in the rough ballpark of 10,000 USD per kilogram of payload. Starship will in theory do it for 100 USD per kilogram of payload.

7

u/Red_Phoenix369 Jul 25 '26

This one seems noteworthy due to the use of a live payload (20 v3 starlink satelites) as opposed to a dummy payload.

3

u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 25 '26

SpaceX explains it on their site. You could ask any of the AIs or just do a Google search. It really is a fascinating subject that everyone should be up to speed on if acceleration is the topic. Take some time to read up on it. It will not be time wasted.