A recent article about the next intended launch
mentioned a booster crumpling while testing last November. I don’t remember hearing anything about that.
Musk thinks he can send up to 5 unmanned starships to Mars before the end of the year. Which would require something like 40 or 50 launches to fuel them.
“Musk thinks” doesn’t really mean anything though, right?
Absolutely! They would have to step up the launch cadence dramatically beyond the last couple of years to do that.
Large grain of salt…
They keep upping the Starship version– we’re on 3 with 4 on the drawing board, when we still haven’t seen a recovery of an orbiter yet. This looks worrisomely less like “bigger and better!” and more like “we discovered that the previous version just wasn’t going to work”. At this point the new versions are starting to look like having to start over again, the way the initial upper stage flights revealed the deficiencies of the block one Raptor engines.
We’re coming up on three years since the first Superheavy test; we should have seen an orbiter recovery by 2025 and it didn’t happen. Frankly I think 2026 is going to be make-or-break for the program. Yes, iteratively moving fast and breaking things is a valid approach but it would be nice to see all of that institutional knowledge gained to produce something.
And we still haven’t even had one of them do a single orbit yet. Just getting up to “space height” isn’t the same thing.
Starship hasn’t just reached “space height” (like the Blue Origin space tourist hopper, etc), but has reached orbital velocity. If you’re at orbital velocity but your orbit is intentionally eccentric enough that the perigee is inside the atmosphere, that’s the same thing as getting into a proper, stable LEO aside from the specifics of the thrust vectoring of the second stage burn.
Now, it is true that if you’re re-entering halfway through your first orbit, you haven’t demonstrated that your engines will relight after several complete orbits, and that sort of thing.
More importantly, no orbiter has yet returned to Earth in undamaged reusable condition. I know that there have been things like deliberately omitted tiles to test the robustness of the underlying structure but an orbiter that can be reflown is proof that the concept is going to fundamentally work.