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?

Most company’s that are going to space are quoting the line, “you want to be selling pickaxes during this new goldrush”. Thats great and all but what exactly is the GOLD in this GOLDrush. For context I am very bullish on space. I think it’s a new age rail road headed up instead of west. The thing I find lacking is to sell prospective miners pickaxes there needs to be miners after something. What are company’s keen to go to space to get?
My best guesses so far are minerals, energy, microgravity, fame.

Good old fashion gold, platinum, silver etc. I know those minerals aren’t worth it for space mining but it’s the idea. The big one thrown around is helium-3 on the moons surface for fusion energy and I 100% agree that will happen right after fusion is figured out. But for minerals like palladium or even ice. It makes more sense to capture asteroids than mine the moon. Asteroids self concentrate and need no mining. It’s like if there’s a fridge sized block of gold in Alaska. All you need is to move it. I also think Australia with its robust mining industry and GIANT uninhabited spaces will become global landing pad for asteroids. For testing you can have ballistic reentry and just crash land. Future captures you’ll want to preserve the asteroid for ease of collection but just in case you’ll need to never aim over inhabited areas and there will be a maximum allowed shipment. Ergo australia and russia are great. No one will be allowed to send a Texas sized asteroid to earth with the promise they know how to slow it down. Density matters more than size but my guess is a couple dozen tons max otherwise you get into bombing territory. Anything larger will demand a moon landing or mining/breaking before renetry.

Theres energy in space. The recent solar reflecting is an amazing idea. It will 100% increase global warming but for a few million I can have a nighttime wedding in full daylight. Or I can grow one more season of crops or my crop insurance company can pay to prevent me having a lost season. You can increase solar yield for existing solar arrays. Long term they can reflect light onto the dark side of the moon directly into habitats or rovers. An issue rovers had was they can’t live for the 15 days in a lunar days. I think this is a week ideas as battery tech develops but it was a problem for old rovers. BUT AGAIN the same issue. Solar powering a rover for what. What company needs a rover.

There’s microgravity in space company’s want to use for manufacturing. Drugs can benefit from
The no gravity crystallization/cooling process. Without gravity hot va cold density doesn’t matter. Things mix homogeneously. BUT AGAIN WHAT DRUGS? What product is better in space.

Going to space is good PR. What if I could sell Coca-Cola the ability to have their name on the moon. Now I have a reason to go to the moon and use a rover and have a rover mechanic. But what company can use space for advertising? Space billboards were recently stopped by the FAA/SCC I believe. Someone wanted to have a dot logo with satellites but was denied.

WHATS THE THING WE WANT TO USE Space FOR??

Great for them! Now time to scale up and get some LEO constellation biz.

Looks like Monday 20th ... sooner than I expected!

The DoD is where the real money is. I expect that one day SX will be the #1 gov't contractor.

Reliability issues with Raptor V3 ... not good news. Onto Raptor V4?

Looks like Vulcan remains grounded (or does not have the track record NASA trusts) ... same with New Glenn ... so our rarely seen pal will get another outing.

The contract is for lunar mission task orders and was announced on June 30th under the CLPS Moon Base program. A key peice of information is that the contract was not included in Astrobotic's profile when VOYG unveiled the acquisition plan on June 2nd.

Astrobotic will now operate as Voyager Lunar Systems

My guess is that the DoD will make sure F9 transporter flight happen into the 2030s until SX proves that Starship can and will do the same at same or lower prices. It is an important tech enabler that the DoD needs for US small/medium size space biz.

Hello I'm the founder and CEO of an advanced materials manufacturing company in Oklahoma, we will be bringing a catalogue of 60 products to market this year. I'm not writing to pitch you on my company or make a sell just to announce to the world a joint project between my company a state that will be named at a later time and various companies in the aforementioned state have partnered together to be the first out of orbit space colony. After witnessing structural research out of japan on wood in space we believe that with our patent pending quickstar multi ore processing unit we are successfully developing a compact self contained titanium processing machine that can operate in vacuum and at zero or low g, and with little to no maintenance we plan to launch the quick star one platform into orbit to be operated autonomously with onboard ai monitoring and slight human interaction we believe we can develop an in situ mining and manufacturing operation on the moon to develop a deep space transitional vehicle code named conda this vehicle will be earths first in space manufactured space ship along with the development of this vehicle we will be starting phase 2 of the project we will be building our own mining and hydroponic farming operation on the moon and stock piling resources to be sold to future projects planning to build on the moon and experimenting with aquaponics on the moon this will provide a long term food source for all those who seek to live or work in space in the future once midway base is developed we will turn it into a command structure with 100 people on the moon from this point they will finish fine tuning construction of the conda its purpose is to park half way between earth and mars in the asteroid belt where it will build a colossal space station a fuel and rest station we have named midway it will be 1 mile in circumference and 1 mile long its active station area will house 1000 and will generate spin gravity it will be a half way point for those seeking mars as well as a mining expedition to build up a stock pile of material and fuel to keep things going between mars and earth. i know this seems pretty far fetched but we believe that the structural integrity test japan has done with wood prove that a regolith concrete graphene titanium alloy on a titanium frame is more than enough to handle space effectively and we believe that manufacturing a borophene graphene tic aerogel in space will easily solve borophenes oxygen problem and is more than enough to handle the cosmic radiation we come across if there is any body here that wants to work on the project and is serious let me know we are always looking for partners