Next Starship Will Deliver Operational V3 Starlinks to Orbit, Maybe Catch Ship

During its first earnings call since going public, SpaceX officials said today the next Starship test flight, IFT-14, will put operational Starlink Version 3 satellites into orbit. If they get regulatory approval, they also will try to catch the Starship upper stage back at the launch site for the first time.

CEO/CTO Elon Musk, President/COO Gwynne Shotwell, and CFO Bret Johnsen painted a highly positive outlook for SpaceX across all three of its segments — space (launch), connectivity (Starlink), and AI (Grok and orbital data centers).

Discussions about the space segment focused on Starship, though Shotwell noted they’ve had 78 Falcon launches in the first half of this year. Those were mostly for their own Starlink satellites, but she said Falcon also has a lot of commercial and government demand. “We’re currently launching at our highest Falcon cadence and are on the precipice of operationalizing Starship,” she said.

Starship’s next flight, Integrated Flight Test-14 or IFT-14, is planned for the end of this month. Musk praised the success of last month’s IFT-13 saying it “demonstrated the core capabilities necessary to achieve an orbital mission and return to Starbase for catch.”

IFT-14 will attempt both. IFT-13 carried and deployed 20 Starlink Version 3 (V3) satellites, but since Starship was on a suborbital trajectory they reentered just like Starship rather than going into orbit.  IFT-14 will be Starship’s first attempt to deploy that new generation of satellites into orbit and then return to Starbase, TX for a “catch” back at the launch site.

Starship’s first stage is called Super Heavy or “Booster.” The second stage is Starship or “Ship”, although the word Starship is often used for the combined system. Both Booster and Ship are designed to be reusable. The Super Heavy Booster has been caught back at the launch site three times already.

Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/6R5YatSVJX

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 13, 2024

This would be a first for Ship, however. Ship’s destination since IFT-3 has been the Indian Ocean and despite notable failures along the way, it’s succeeded since IFT-10 including IFT-12 and IFT-13, the first flights of Starship’s new Version 3.

Ship is expected to make a soft splashdown in the ocean, tipping over when it reaches the water and exploding due to residual propellant. IFT-13 surprised everyone by remaining intact, allowing SpaceX time to study the heat shield post-reentry in detail. It’s still floating in the Indian Ocean today. Musk said they will retrieve it, but from what they know now he’s confident the heatshield poses no obstables to “full and rapid reusability.”

“Look, I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I think we consider the heat shield problem solved at this point. Now we want to take a close look at the ship that is currently floating in the ocean, but all indications from data and visual inspection suggest that we have solved the heat shield problem…. That doesn’t mean we won’t make improvements to the heat shield. Of course, we’ll continue to make improvements to the heat shield. But I would say that we do not see any technical obstacles at this point to achieving full and rapid reusability.” — Elon Musk

Starship is key to SpaceX’s future not only for its connectivity and AI segments, but for expanding humanity to the Moon and Mars. Musk is renowned for his aspiration to make humanity a multi-planet species. His focus has been Mars, but he’s recently embraced the Moon as a site for mass-drivers that can propel orbital data centers into deep space.

More immediately, SpaceX won a contract from NASA in 2021 to provide a Human Landing System (HLS) version of Starship to put NASA astronauts back on the lunar surface before Chinese taikonauts arrive. The target date of 2024 has slipped year by year due to delays at NASA and SpaceX.  NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has set 2028 as the newest date for either SpaceX or its competitor Blue Origin to do it.

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin won a second NASA HLS contract in 2023, two years after SpaceX, with a plan to be ready by the end of the decade, but NASA is trying to accelerate Blue Origin’s schedule to ensure at least one landing by either company in 2028 before President Trump’s term ends. The explosion of a Blue Origin rocket in May is a setback, but NASA is proceeding with plans to launch a SpaceX Starship and a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark2 to dock in earth orbit with an Orion crew spacecraft on the Artemis III mission next summer as a test flight. Docking in earth orbit doesn’t require in-space propellant transfer, which both companies plan to use for missions to the Moon, but is a step in demonstrating integrated operations between Orion and the landers.

Questions at today’s earnings call about the Q2 results were more about the connectivity and AI segments than space, but in response to a question about HLS, Musk said they need a very high launch rate to achieve a level of saftey needed for human spaceflight, but that will be “probably by the end of next year.” Shotwell added a bit more detail.

“As far as the milestones go, propellant transfer in orbit is critical to both our internal SpaceX as well as our HLS ambitions. Artemis III mission is next year. That’s where we will dock with with the Orion spacecraft. We will follow that up with a direct to lunar cargo mission, uncrewed, and then we want to put boots on the ground, boots on the moon in 2028.” – Gwynne Shotwell