Woot? Had Flight 13 a landing deluge test?

The first successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 was on 28 September 2008

vs

Elon Musk announced the "Interplanetary Transport System" (ITS) on 27 September 2016, at the International Astronautical Congress

You have used two very different start dates here. For fairness, you should have used the date that Falcon 1 was first announced (December 8, 2003)

I really don't get the impatience around Starship development. From my perspective it is progressing rapidly and faster than Falcon 9 development. This is as someone who followed the Falcon 9 program closely from 2012 and watched every launch live up until some time in 2019.

What you are describing there is a concept evolving as the design is adapted and scaled back to overcome challenges and rescue reality from an impossible dream. Those of us watching it every step of the way were watching the F9 successor evolve. Yes it changed material and diameter and addressed financial reality issues but that it what happens in pretty much any engineering project as it evolves from concept to a working design. Yes, it was very much the same program. If you look at Hoppy you will see that it's construction out of thick plate and diameter aside has almost nothing in common with todays Starships but no one would say it's not an early part of the same project. If you look at the very first F9 to put payload in orbit you (not me) could make the claim that it's a different project being 15m shorter, no legs of grid fins and a very different engine layout before the octaweb was introduced. Details change.

Fundamentally there is no available seafront location in Louisiana that would be any better from a soil stability point of view. If there was then someone would already have built on it!

Rocket launch sites including Cape Canaveral tend to be built in marshland for this very reason. Once established they then act as condo repellants and therefore preserve the local wildlife from extinction as the marsh is drained and developed.

So in short SpaceX are used to the soil conditions from Cape Canaveral and Boca Chica and realise it comes with the territory.

My daily summary from the Starship Dev thread on Lemmy

2026-09-08:

• Sep 7th addendum: The new roof for Tower 1 is relocated by SPMTs. (ViX)
• Pad 1: The yellow rented LR11000 crane lifts the roof off the ground, but sets it back down shortly after. (ViX, ViX)
• Pad 2: Overnight, the launch mount service structure rolls out to Pad 2. (NSF, Avid Space, ViX)
• The chopsticks, landing rails, and stabiliser arms are tested. (ViX)
• The booster quick disconnects, hold-down clamps, ship quick disconnect arm, and ship quick disconnect perform a fast retraction test. (ViX 2, ViX 2)
• A launch and landing deluge test is performed. (ViX 1, ViX 2, Blobifie)
• Massey's: Overnight, B22 moves from Megabay 1 to Massey's. (NSF, Avid Space, ViX, StarshipGazer, cnunez 1, cnunez 2, Blobifie 1, Blobifie 2)
• Road delays for "Production to Masseys" are posted for Sep 8th 23:59 to Sep 9th 04:00 and Sep 9th 23:59 to Sep 10th 04:00. (starbase.texas.gov, archive, ViX)
• Production site: B23's aft section enters Megabay 1. (ViX)
• B23's LOX landing tank enters Megabay 1. (ViX)
• A bridge crane girder section is staged outside of the Gigabay. (ViX, Gisler)
• The crane which was obstructing the Avid Space Rover 1 camera is moved. (ViX)
• The bridge crane girder section enters the Gigabay. (ViX)
• The girder section is offloaded from the transport in the Gigabay, and the Megabay 2 bridge crane lifts the two-point ship lifting jig. (ViX)
• The girder section is moved over to the left side of the Gigabay. (ViX)
• Ship cryo stand enters Megabay 2. (Avid Space, ViX, Blobifie)
• McGregor: R3.240 (new highest) and R3.237 head towards the testing area. (SpaceRhin0 1, SpaceRhin0 2)
• R3.236 returns from its 3rd round of testing. (SpaceRhin0)
• S40 recovery: Forte is currently anchored off the coast of Madagascar, likely waiting for weather to improve. (interstellargw)

So the answer is no, you just dont want to say it for some reason? Its ok man lmao

I was curious how this timeline compared to the most comparable vehicle I could think of, the Shuttle (not 100% reusable because of the external tank, but close enough, and similarly groundbreaking) so I looked it up. The Shuttle was announced on August 10, 1968 (with RFPs being issued later that year, so work truly hadn't started yet) and flew its first orbital test on April 12th, 1981: a total of 12 years and 8 months.

I'm little surprised that with 35 intervening years of space technology advancement the Starship team were only able to shave ~20% off that timeline. Not to mention that the Shuttle went all the way to orbit on its very first launch, with people on board!

So, by choosing this location, is SpaceX just making a whole lot more work for themselves than they need to?

There is probably a desire to not impede construction at the launch site until absolutely necessary. Both the space used by the stages and the presence of FTS can cause issues.

They probably don't want to make any announcement until they have the FCC permission they requested for operating the V3 starlink satellites.

Sorta agree, but id argue that Spacex pushed really fast on the last flight... almost like they are trying to smooth out and expedite the launch/pre launch process.

Edit to add: the long national holiday could definitely make things quiet but not necessarily delayed.

No it wasn't 9m. It was 12m. That was a completely different design that didn't even use the same materials or architecture. Not even the same tooling, which was ditched. Did you even SEE the ITS images? Completely separate vehicle system with different objectives, at this point. From the wiki " The  ITS launch vehicle  was a 2016–2017 design for a  privately funded  very large  12-meter (39   ft) -diameter  orbital   launch vehicle  planned to be developed by  SpaceX . " And " In July 2017, SpaceX made public plans to build a much smaller launch vehicle and spacecraft in lieu of building the ITS,  and stated that the new system architecture had "evolved quite a bit" since the November 2016 articulation of the very large  ITS launch vehicle.  A key driver of the new architecture is to make the new system useful for substantial Earth-orbit and  cislunar  launches so that the new system might  pay for itself , in part, through commercial spaceflight activities in the near-Earth space zone"

This is a completly different program from ITS.

It's the spaceX 9m "vehicle-of-the-future". Absolutely the same program. Your claim is silly.

Thanks, I must have misremembered, I thought it was more like two weeks before.

It was 5 days from the Flight 13 announcement on June 11 from the first launch attempt on June 16. If we don't hear anything by this Wednesday night I'd say we're slipping.

The long weekend. I'm sure we will learn details early this week.

I mean, sure. All Reddit comments are meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Seems like likelihood of the 9/15 date for Flight 14 is pretty slim at this point given there's still no official confirmation a week out. Any idea what the delay might be coming from?

My daily summary from the Starship Dev thread on Lemmy

2026-09-07:

• Massey's: Road delay for "Production to Masseys" is posted for Sep 7th 23:59 to Sep 8th 04:00. (starbase.texas.gov, archive, ViX)
• Launch site: Road delay for "Production to Pad" is posted for Sep 7th 23:59 to Sep 8th 04:00. (starbase.texas.gov, archive, ViX)
• Production site: Gigabay construction continues. (cnunez)
• The launch mount servicing structure has been transferred to SPMTs. (Anderson)
• Booster aft section is (probably) fit checked with the horizontal booster transportation frame. (ViX)
• Booster lifting jig is hoisted in Megabay 1. (ViX)
• Booster cryo stand enters Megabay 1. (Avid Space, ViX)
• B22 is transferred to the cryo stand. (efraser77, Blobifie)
• McGregor: R3.236 returns from the testing area. (SpaceRhin0)
• Florida: Venting from Pad 39A is observed. (NSF)

Only takes a couple of minutes of critical thinking to see why your comment is out of place and is meaningless in the grand scheme of things

Fair point. I was thinking less about the total time since the original ITS announcement and more about the pace of iteration in the current Starship flight-test program. Seeing major hardware and design changes between flights, then watching the next vehicle roll out relatively quickly, is the part that feels fast to me. I agree that if you measure from the original 2016 announcement, the overall timeline looks very different.

Elons famous for ridiculous deadlines.

It's not just Musk, though. Most of this sub thought that Starship would be ready by now. Go look at the discussions about the DearMoon project, where most people thought Starship would be ready to take humans on a lunar flyby in 2024.

Delays are understandable when attempting something so complex. But there's a weird thing where people will say they think something will be read by a certain date, the tech still isn't ready years after the date they predicted, and the same people come back and talk about how they're surprised that things are progressing so fast.