SpaceX’s Starbase is coming alive again after a lull in Starship testing

The next Starship flight is a key precursor for more ambitious missions to come.

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[KjellRS]

Yeah he never did. It was just a way to get thousands of SpaceX employees who believed him to pour their life energy into the company. (...) They did it because they genuinely believed they were going to make mankind a multiplanetary species. That someday the name of the first person to land on another planet would be alongside Neil Armstrong and they could say "I DID THAT. I was part of it. I made it happen" (...) Now after a decade of "Occupy Mars" it is just kidding not Mars we are going to build a city on the moon.

Do you seriously believe he did not want to say "I DID THAT. I lead it, I funded it. I made it happen"? That his ego would be satisfied by being a cost cutter that launched satellites cheaper than Delta/Atlas and crew cheaper than the Shuttle? If there's anyone who'd want to rub shoulders with Neil Armstrong it's Elon Musk.

I think it's Elon time catching up to Elon, he founded SpaceX back in 2002 when he was 30. Today he's 54 and the average American male (yes, I know he's from South Africa) has 26 years left to live. With launch windows to Mars every 26 months that's 12 launch windows left and it looks like they'll miss Q4 2026 entirely and in 2028/2029 they'll probably be busy launching HLS.

Even he can't make those numbers work, as we can see from the Starship tests rocket science is still hard and waiting years between iterations is time Musk does not have. So he's flipped the pitch to the Moon, because even though the plans for a self-sustaining city is still bonkers at least you can launch to the Moon practically any time so handwave colony on the Moon.

 

[KjellRS]

6 refueling flights is pure and utter copium for HLS. Even 10 would be a stretch. It would have to outperform in every metric. This is for a mission which is suppose to happen in 2028, hell the uncrewed test mission was suppose to happen last year. However 10 flights plus one for tanker/depot and one for HLS is 12 flights total for a single disposable mission. That is a ton.

Sure you can brute force your way through it as a one off every couple years for NASA at a cost of $3B to $4B each (...)

It sounds like you're budgeting for everything to be sent to the scrap yard afterwards. The F9 booster lifespan leader is currently at 32 launches, I doubt they're targeting less for the SH booster. Sure, for cadence reasons they'll need more than one but for lifetime cost one HLS would consume 1/3rd of the lifespan of one booster.

The second stage is the cost joker, but seeing as they've managed to soft land now a number of times I image they'll do better than nothing. Once they start launching Starlink satellites on Starship they'll be working towards that every launch in between the deep space missions. They had 165 F9 launches in 2025, each Starship carries more but I assume they're targeting 25+/year.

The depot, is it actually disposable or can it just hang out in space for a year like ISS until the next HLS mission? Once it's in place it's just a jerry can in space, it might just be that I'm a layman but I don't see anything that makes it a one off. Even if it has needs surely it can be maintained for significantly less than a new one. The only truly disposable part is the HLS itself.

In any case, none of this is specific for the Moon, it all applies for Mars too. So if you don't believe in SpaceX going beyond LEO, just say that. But that's a different tune than we've heard from most here before they pivoted to the Moon.

 

[KjellRS]

(...) Almost half the milestones are design related and thus SpaceX got paid before anything was flying (exploding or otherwise). (...) Most people would assume given the weak process towards a 2028 deadline after 5 years SpaceX wouldn't have gotten 91% of the contract award already.

Starship was the only one who'd work on their design without winning the NASA contract, Dynetix and Blue Origin are the ones who really needed the money early. And Boeing's experience with Starliner shows that you're still stuck taking huge losses if you can't deliver. In case of SpaceX they also got a $1.15B contract for Artemis IV, which they can't deliver on unless HLS works. So I don't really see the problem, there's still plenty of incentive to deliver and certainly no money in stalling. What's paid is paid but they'll not get paid more to do penalty laps.