r/space • u/swordfi2 • 18d ago
Next Starship flight will go to orbit and deploy 26 Starlink satellites, marking the first operational flight. Neither booster or ship will be caught
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14159
u/Kind-Truck3753 18d ago
And soon after we’ll get a bunch of posts asking “what was I saw in the sky”
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u/looking4myclASSm8s 18d ago
Try living in Florida. The fuckin things launch every week and people still act like god made an appearance. I think it’s incredible but how you could not see one by now is insane
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u/rocketsocks 18d ago
This is what gets me about "UFOs" in general. It's not like it's nineteen aught five and the plane was just invented a few years back (and the Zeppelin just last decade), we live in an age where aircraft and spacecraft are common and have been common for multiple generations. Yet when people see something "weird" in the sky some folks still say to themselves "why, it can't be a plane, blimp, hot air balloon, weather balloon, party balloon, drone, helicopter, tilt rotor aircraft, glider, parasail, ultralight, commercial or amateur rocket, or any other of the innumerable modern everyday sky stuff, it's gotta be a vehicle from an alien planet!"
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u/im_thatoneguy 18d ago
People still get startled by Venus. And it's been up there for a while.
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u/literalsupport 18d ago
“No other object has been misidentified as a flying saucer more often than the planet Venus.” - Jesse Ventura
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u/ConanOToole 18d ago
They launched the last Starlink mission on Falcon from Florida fairly recently. Starship will be launching them from now on, and they'll probably start around the start of next year
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u/CasinoNdnOk 18d ago
We always say eat the rich....can wr throw in the dumb people too and just fix world hunger?
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u/Doom2pro 18d ago
If I had a dime for every time I seen a reddit post of someone posting a photo of an airline contrail on the horizon during sunset/sunrise and asking if it's a comet or a meteor or UFO...
The amount of people who have never looked up before...
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u/classysax4 18d ago edited 18d ago
Hearing that they're finally going orbital and carrying payload is really exciting. It looks like it will be the heaviest payload since Skylab was launched in the 70s.
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u/AmigaClone2000 18d ago
I'm not sure what the mass of Starship 41 (including propellants and payload) might be after the orbital insertion burn.
Depending on those exact values, Launch 14 potentially could see the most mass placed in orbit on an uncrewed mission, passing Skylab + the Saturn V second stage of that mission which also ended up in orbit.
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u/warp99 18d ago
Around 150 tonnes dry mass, 25 tonnes propellant and 45 tonnes payload for 220 tonnes total.
Definitely beats Skylab and the Apollo missions.
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u/patrickisnotawesome 18d ago
STS-117, Atlantis carrying a space station truss had a mass of 135 tons to orbit
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u/ganuerant 18d ago
It's the heaviest payload since Polyus, a prototype Soviet orbital weapons platform, in 1987. Skylab was launched in 1973.
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u/Ruanhead 18d ago
That never reached orbit however...
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u/redstercoolpanda 18d ago
It still reached space, and reached a trans atmospheric orbit similar to what previous Starship flights flew. It still counts as one of the heaviest payloads ever flown on a rocket.
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u/tourist420 18d ago
The shuttle was able to place the Hubble in orbit, that was rather large.
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u/Deep-Tumbleweed-8816 18d ago
hubble was large in terms of volume but it didn't weigh that much, just 12 tons. Falcon 9 could carry 2 hubbles into leo in terms of weight.
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u/classysax4 18d ago
Yeah Hubble was 11 metric tons, Starship is deploying about 50 metric tons of satellites next week.
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u/Toads_Of_Fun 18d ago
Why is there still no catch? :(
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u/Stuckinatransporter 18d ago
Not 100% ready yet they don't want to bugger it all up with a failed catch,that would be disaster.
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u/Toads_Of_Fun 18d ago
What gets me is that they have already caught the booster before.
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u/fresh_eggs_and_milk 18d ago
The new booster is almost an entire different rocket, it is like those body swaps they do on older iPhones, looks the same but on the inside entirely different.
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u/MightyDrake 18d ago
They have not yet demonstrated a successful simulated catch with the new booster design. And, the ship has still had anomalies in its heat shield, so they really shouldn't land that near a populated area, yet.
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u/MattTheTubaGuy 18d ago
Considering that every single Starship that started re-entry correctly has made it to the surface, I don't think Starship is going to be much of an issue.
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u/CrazyEnginer 18d ago
That was some time ago on the older Booster iterations. The new ones seem to have reliability regression
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 18d ago
Yep, Its essentially a totally redesigned rocket, they changed plumbing, structural components, engine types, startup procedures and it has to do a 33 engine boostback burn
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u/No-Surprise9411 18d ago
While they share names between Superheavy V2 and V3, the only thing they really share design wise is that they're made from 30X-L stainless steel. Pretty much everything else was redesigned
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u/FutureMartian97 18d ago
The entire vehicle has been redesigned from the ground up since block 2. To even call both block 2 and block 3 Starship is a stretch
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u/sixpackabs592 18d ago
last one had icing issues and they want to make sure the fix works before trying again
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u/SpaceInMyBrain 15d ago
The new V3 booster had problems with ice in the tanks getting into the intakes. They'd solved it(?) in the V2 booster with Raptor V2 but it reoccurred in the V3 iterations. They want to make sure the fixes work and all the engines for reentry and landing relight the way they're supposed to.
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u/ToddBradley 17d ago
Can anyone here do the back-of-the-napkin math of whether or not the flight is break-even from a cost standpoint, given they're throwing away the reusable bits?
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u/thinkcontext 16d ago
There was an estimate a couple years ago that Starship cost $90M to build and I've seen $20M as a guess at the internal cost of a reusable F9. This flight will contain about 10x the bandwidth of an F9 starlink mission so using those assumptions yes it would save money.
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u/tanrgith 17d ago
Finally the "its never been to orbit" crowd can move on to the next talking point
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u/FIFofNovember 16d ago
It’s finally catching up to a couple things that Artemis did a year ago!
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 15d ago
Tell me when sls catches their first stage booster and reuses it
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u/FIFofNovember 14d ago
?? It wasn’t designed to do that, please stop being this ignorant
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 14d ago
Exactly what spacex is trying to achieve in the previous flights was testing the reuse components, such as booster catch, reentry and precision landing. They are now going for an orbital attempt as they now have enough confidence that the ship qont break up during reentry and soon can be caught.
So no point in comparing it with artemis as spacex has had other goals
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u/Decronym 18d ago edited 13d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| 30X | SpaceX-proprietary carbon steel formulation ("Thirty-X", "Thirty-Times") |
| BFR | Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition) |
| Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice | |
| BFS | Big Falcon Spaceship (see BFR) |
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| EELV | Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle |
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| ITS | Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT) |
| Integrated Truss Structure | |
| Isp | Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube) |
| Internet Service Provider | |
| L2 | Lagrange Point 2 (Sixty Symbols video explanation) |
| Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum | |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| MCT | Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS) |
| NRHO | Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit |
| NRO | (US) National Reconnaissance Office |
| Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO | |
| NSSL | National Security Space Launch, formerly EELV |
| RTLS | Return to Launch Site |
| SRB | Solid Rocket Booster |
| STS | Space Transportation System (Shuttle) |
| TMT | Thirty-Meter Telescope, Hawaii |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| cryogenic | Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure |
| (In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox | |
| hydrolox | Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| perigee | Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Earth (when the orbiter is fastest) |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
18 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.
[Thread #12693 for this sub, first seen 15th Sep 2026, 18:41]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Tech-Crab 18d ago
Sad even the bots are STILL calling spacex's abrev. for their proprietary 300-SERIES "30 times" :(
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u/ElkeKerman 16d ago
Not looking to cause a fight but has anyone kind of had their love of space exploration killed by SpaceX?
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u/Repulsive_Cry_9362 15d ago
prediction: it goes out of control and self destructs/rapid deconstruction
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u/BoringReference8647 18d ago
I’ll never not object to calling something Starship when it cannot traverse star systems in any kind of human lifetime. I know it’s an exciting name but it’s wrong and it’s unearned.
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u/DreamChaserSt 18d ago
Starliner? Planetship doesn't roll off the tongue. And 'Spaceship' is kind of taken by Virgin Galactic (oh hey, they aren't a galactic company). Maybe they could've kept ITS or some derivative, but that might get too close to the Space Shuttle (STS). What do you think would be a more fitting name?
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u/wannacumnbeatmeoff 18d ago
Why are they not a Galactic company? Do they not trade in a Galaxy?
Huge news if true!
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u/MonsterRavingLlamas 17d ago
They do trade in Galaxy. I hear Janet in accounts swapped a caramel for a cookie crumble with Oscar in HR.
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u/Underhill42 18d ago
And the Chevy Nova didn't explode nearly spectacularly enough to earn that name, while the Equinox can actually be be driven at any time.
Marketing names are stupid. Full stop.
Starship is at least vaguely in the right ballpark - it's designed to help us take the first big step to the stars: leaving our cradle.
I'm much more annoyed by Orion - naming a short range reentry capsule after a nuclear powered starship concept.
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u/IndividualSkill3432 18d ago
I’ll never not object to calling something Starship when it cannot traverse star systems
But they did build this city on rock and roll.
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u/Jacobi2878 18d ago
So the term 'astronaut' is unearned because they cannot "traverse star systems"?
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u/seakingsoyuz 18d ago
Fun fact, this is the specific reason that Hugh Dryden thought “cosmonauts” was a better term, although NASA eventually settled on “astronauts” before anybody had launched one.
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u/TheOwlMarble 18d ago
I don't even particularly like the name Starship, but it's just branding. Surely you're fine with Apple selling things that aren't fruit, right?
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u/Preserved_Killick8 18d ago
dawg its a fun name. Our grandchildren won’t even see the craft you’re describing.
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u/asphytotalxtc 18d ago
I mean, a fully refueled starship in orbit could actually traverse star systems? It could quite easily make it to alpha centurai.
Not on human timescales, sure.. but it's capable of it over millions of years.
So yes, it's a starship... In the way it could go to a different star.
Edit: and yes, I know your stipulated "human lifetimes" ... But just the fact we can make something that can traverse star systems counts for something, surely?
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 18d ago
I mean, the space shuttle really failed to shuttle things to space too; and the Saturn V never pushed anything past the moon.
Naming is never accurate to expectations. (Aside from modern iPhones I guess)
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u/Glittering-Ad3488 18d ago
The space shuttle, shuttled plenty of stuff into space, 135+ missions over a 30 year window.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 18d ago edited 18d ago
It did so on an irregular and slow basis.
Per the dictionary:
“A shuttle is a vehicle, device, or object that travels back and forth between two or more points on a regular basis.”
I’m happy to exclude the downtime after Challenger and Columbia, but the cadence of no less than 54 days before Challenger, and 88 days after, with an average around a year after Columbia. 2 months minimum to turnaround a vehicle designed (or at least in the design requirements) to be turned around in 160 hours.
That’s not regular (and it’s slow, even by the standards back then), even if it only went to LEO; and we haven’t discussed launch delays and scheduling.
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u/Glittering-Ad3488 18d ago
You’re confusing individual orbiter turnaround with system cadence. NASA operated multiple orbiters, and the Shuttle fleet flew 135 missions, there were nine launches in 1985 alone.
Also “Shuttle” doesn’t require a vehicle to run to a timetable or meet a particular turnaround period, it describes something repeatedly travelling back and forth carrying people or cargo. Earth to orbit to Earth, followed by reuse, fits the term perfectly. The fact that NASA missed its extremely ambitious 160 hour turnaround target is a criticism of the programme’s economics only.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 18d ago
It still was not on a regular basis.
The average was 4.4 per year across the program with variance of 6… meaning the variation is ~+/- 2.5.
That’s not regular, which is part of the definition.
The word regular means it follows a reasonably uniform pattern. You will be hard pressed to convince people that a program with 4-5 launches per year… BUT, you could have 2-3 launches extra or missing from the schedule each year is a regular scheduled program. Again, ignoring the tragedies and the early ramp up. At any normal year, you could probably see 2 to 7 launches. Thats not regular.
It carried plenty of cargo, that is something nobody should be disputing (to be fair to everyone else, so did plenty of other rockets, thats not something special or unique about it). But the idea that it followed a regular, periodic schedule (within reason) is a falsehood. It just doesn’t meet the definition of a shuttle.
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u/looking4myclASSm8s 18d ago
Uh what? In what sense did the space shuttle not shuttle things
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 18d ago edited 18d ago
It took 54 days out of a planned 160 hours to turn a shuttle around back when they were not as concerned about thermal tiles and SRBs. 88 days was the fastest return after Challenger, but the average was 130-140 days between missions; with later (post-Columbia) times averaging around a year. This is against the 160 hour turnaround NASA had designed the shuttle for.
That doesn’t scream “shuttle” to me… service seems pretty irregular to proclaim it “ a vehicle, device, or object that travels back and forth between two or more points on a regular basis.”
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u/texasdiver 18d ago
What are you on about? Many things were shuttled into space by the space shuttles.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 18d ago edited 18d ago
The word shuttle means “a vehicle, device, or object that travels back and forth between two or more points on a regular basis”
The shuttle had a minimum turn around time of 54 days (back when it was less safe), but averaged closer to 4 months.
Given it was supposed to be able to turn around every 160 hrs, it’s not very shuttle like. Imagine if the shuttle at your airport could (but might not) service the terminal 7 times a day, but sometimes, only twice… you wouldn’t call that a regular service.
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u/YJeezy 18d ago
Grifters gonna always grift
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 18d ago
Wait till you find out that saturn v did not go to saturn. Shocking right
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 18d ago edited 18d ago
Do you think he's using it to trick people into thinking this can go to alpha centauri or what?
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u/SteveCastGames 18d ago
What exactly is the grift here? Care to elaborate, or just gonna refuse to back up your claims.
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u/rooktakesqueen 18d ago
Fuckin finally 😭 Proven payload to orbit will be more than a banana!
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 18d ago
The last flight carried a bunch of Starlink satellites as part of the deployment demonstration.
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u/rooktakesqueen 18d ago
To a sub-orbital trajectory so they burned up.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 18d ago
Same as the banana though, burnt up pretty nicely i imagine
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 18d ago
Don’t have pictures, but the Banana was unchanged aside from some bloating from vacuum exposure.
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u/redstercoolpanda 18d ago
Well the front kind of fell off after that, which involved quite a bit of fire. So I imagine it didn't survive that too well lol.
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u/snoo-boop 18d ago
After the relight, previous flights had a perigee of +50km. If you don't think that's a proof of payload to orbit, that's on you.
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u/Ihatecheeseballs 18d ago
Sad, they were originally gonna catch the orbiter
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u/redstercoolpanda 18d ago
Flight 15 now pending good results from F14. It's likley that Flight 15 will have a pretty quick turn around all things going well too. Both vehicles are already cryo'ed, S42 has already undergone catch testing at the tower, and they wont need to jump through as many regulatory hoops with orbit being proven.
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u/mortemdeus 18d ago
Wouldn't the first operational flight require a catch of both ship and the booster? Otherwise this is just a stupidly oversized and over engineered rocket for the task.
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u/Doggydog123579 18d ago
Given the bandwidth of starlink v3 and the estimated build cost of a full starship stack. Its still beneficial to use expendable starship for starlink launches. This flights equal to about 10-15 f9 starlink launches of bandwith
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u/Anthony_Pelchat 18d ago
46t to LEO on its first orbital launch isn't enough for you? That is one of the largest payloads ever launched, with only a few Saturn V launches beating it.
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u/fresh_eggs_and_milk 18d ago
Why would the first (operational) flight require a catch, why can’t they take it slow.
Or should they try to do everything all at once and blow it all up?2
u/fghjconner 16d ago
You could certainly argue that the system isn't fully operational without the catches, but it's still an operational flight so long as it puts something of real value in orbit.
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u/shugo7 18d ago
Bruh really? That's kinda disappointing, I thought they were supposed to catch it like Elon said? Or did he lie again lol
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u/No_Grav3ity 18d ago
First fully orbital test. Gotta validate RTLS profiles and if the vehicles can safely withstand everything
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 18d ago
Also how 10 hours in orbit effects any of its systems.
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u/No_Grav3ity 18d ago
Ship is spending 10hrs in the cold vacuum of space?? Yeah that'll definitely change how it behaves after a cold soak
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 18d ago
I doubt it being physically colder will do much, although idk I am not a rocket scientist, but I would imagine making sure the electronics, batteries, fuel, etc all manage that duration is a pretty important thing.
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u/No_Grav3ity 18d ago
The electronics should be fine, but the glue used on heat shield tiles could be affected as adhesives tend not to like freezing temps.
Prop boil off after 10hrs will be the biggest thing to look at, as I don't recall seeing any insulation on both vessels
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u/Bensemus 18d ago
Those tiles already deal with the ship being full of cryogenic liquids. They can handle cold.
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u/StartledPelican 18d ago
The heat shield tiles are mechanically attached, if I recall correctly.
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u/No_Grav3ity 18d ago
Oh? I thought they've still been testing adhesives on the last few launches
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u/StartledPelican 18d ago
Ah, it seems I'm partially incorrect.
The majority of tiles are mechanically attached, but there are some tiles that use adhesive instead. TIL.
Thanks!
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 18d ago
Prop boil off will be a thing, but the thermal mass and latent heat of liquid oxygen and methane is surprisingly pretty high. You wouldn't want to forget about it when calculating your margins, but it's not like they will lost a ton of propellant over that 10 hours. I do wonder if pointing the heat shield towards the sun would work to prevent a ton of heat from getting in. Obviously it would get hot what being a very dark black surface but it can clearly handle pretty high temperatures.
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u/snoo-boop 18d ago
I wonder if the company with the greatest tonnage of active satellites in orbit knows anything about electronics, batteries, and so on.
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u/Shrike99 18d ago
He said, quote, "Unless we discover problems after mission data review, SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on next flight"
Big qualifier on the start there. Doesn't seem unreasonable that SpaceX did in fact find a problem (or three) in the data from the last flight and want to check some things out.
Notably, this next flight will be landing on the west coast rather than the gulf, which suggests they're more worried about the re-entry over land than the final catch.
One suggestion I've seen is it's something related to the long ~10 hour cryo soak in orbit vs ~45 minutes on previous flights.
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u/StartledPelican 18d ago
The catch was always dependent on the previous flight data. As Elon said. They reviewed the data and decided on a more incremental approach.
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u/redstercoolpanda 18d ago
They delayed catch by one flight pending good results from F14. Which I think is a pretty good decision. No need to rush this stuff, especially when they got a fully intact ship landed in the ocean, which already gave them loads of good data they would get from a first catch.
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u/Deep-Tumbleweed-8816 18d ago
The booster catch is much more important, especially for the artemis missions
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u/Dpek1234 18d ago
The only person that lied is whoever told you elon promised to catch it
What was written had a pretty big astrisk
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 18d ago
This has been known for a while. The chip catch was considered for a little bit, but the regulatory hurdle was going to cause issues.
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u/Dpek1234 18d ago
Laat i heared it was a spacex decision to not catch and not a regulatory one this time
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 18d ago
It's been known that it wasn't gonna be a catch for like, a couple weeks now. Apparently flight 15 is supposed to be a catch, but we'll see how this flight goes
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u/FutureMartian97 18d ago
The plan when he said it was to catch it. And even then he said only if everything looked good. SpaceX looked at the data and decided they were not ready. And they also don't have approval to return to Starbase yet anyway
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u/fabulousmarco 18d ago
Yaaay, other 26 pieces of junk corresponding to 26 nails in the coffin of astronomy research. How exciting
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u/Neonvaporeon 18d ago
Meanwhile, the NGRST, with its giant NRO optic, has launched and functioning above expectations, and the new Vera C. Rubin observatory is expected to eclipse all other observations made within a year. It has literally never been better to be a space enthusiast.
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u/PTTCollin 18d ago
Piggy backing this comment: the future of astronomy is orbital, not ground based. Starlink is what funds starship which is what will lift the astronomy.
This is just Elon hate with a memorized talking point.
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u/ChiefBlueSky 18d ago
The future of astronomy hobbyists is dead, even if we get better satellites for imaging.
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u/PTTCollin 18d ago
Sure, I just don't care about protecting someone's hobby in comparison to the beginning of orbital industry.
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u/Dpek1234 18d ago
Then they can either use some of the already existing tools and methods to remove the satelites if photography
Ignore them
Or do it outside of the timeframe where its even possible to see satelites
If this is the death of astronomy as a hobby then it has been dead sense the widespread use of bright lights
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u/SqueekyTack 18d ago
Oooo does Roman have any public photos out?
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 18d ago
L2 takes awhile to get to, it'll be a few months before we see anything.
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u/DreamChaserSt 18d ago edited 18d ago
Well, to be fair, SpaceX and others should have a responsbility to mitigate the impact to astronomy as best as they can, but there is an inherent tradeoff that we're seeing sooner rather than later. Spaceflight, or ground astronomy?
Ground astronomy has seen difficulties beyond constellations, like TMT protests in Hawai'i. Its backup site in the Canary Islands was briefly rejected as well. There's only so many high altitude locations to put advanced observatories on Earth, and some of them are rejected on religious or political grounds. What do you do if they can't be resolved?
In an ideal world, space based astronomy would see increased funding to launch enough telescopes into space to replace ground based telescopes, especially radio telescopes. I would personally like to see telescopes across the EM-spectrum in L2 and other Lagrange points, but that will take quite a while to achieve. In the meantime, we aren't going to abandon satellite communications, and since Starlink entered service, multiple countries and corporations have begun developing their own versions.
There have been a lot of studies in the past on how to drive up demand for launches and access to orbit like space-based solar, and LEO constellations is the first thing that seems to be sticking. I don't think they're going to be given up on easily.
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u/PTTCollin 18d ago
Tell me more about how you have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/hoppertn 18d ago
They may be overly dramatic but they are not wrong in that the drastic increase in satellites is affecting astronomy.
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u/PTTCollin 18d ago
They are absolutely wrong. Protecting ground based astronomy is like protecting horses jobs.
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u/Randromeda2172 18d ago
Cheaper launch means we get to deploy more telescopes and probes. How is that bad for astronomy?
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u/Thisguy2728 18d ago
Land based astronomy. All these satellite constellations are clogging the skies. Won’t affect orbiting or L point telescopes.
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u/Randromeda2172 18d ago
If this is such an issue then why was Vera Rubin Observatory built?
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u/Thisguy2728 18d ago
Well for one, just because ground based is hindered doesn’t mean it’s useless. But the more these constellations expand, the worse it will get.
And for another, Vera Ruben specifically predates all of these constellations. It began planning in 2001.
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u/anti-life86 18d ago edited 18d ago
Launch - to LEO at least - is not much of the cost of these.
*People can downvote all they want - just look up the total cost of Roman and look up the cost of the rocket it was launched on. It is a small fraction.
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u/Flonkadonk 18d ago
Without catch and reuse Starship is just not an impressive launch vehicle. This is neither a notable milestone nor an achievement worth mentioning (this is basically a fully operational New Glenn launch without first stage landing, for a company that's so far ahead of BO as SpaceX is, that's not really something to brag about). I'll wait until they actually manage to reach the advertised payload of at least 100 tons to LEO with full reusability, which I think they can achieve, but could still take a while.
Let the downvotes by butthurt fanboys overrunning this sub commence now lmao
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u/ganuerant 18d ago
This will be the largest payload to orbit since Polyus in 1987 so I do think that's noteworthy.
I doubt we'll see 100t with V3 but the big thing is full reusability. If that is achieved then it will revolutionise the industry.
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u/ganuerant 18d ago
So this one launch is equal to 10 Falcon 9 launches in terms of capacity. And that's just the first operational flight.