I wonder how having shareholders will affect funding for Starship development? If the program doesn’t show promising results soon shareholders may not approve continuing to sink a billion a year into it.
Lotta tech IPOs are structured so the founders keep effective voting control even though the public owns most of the shares.
As a separate matter, shareholders have been real patient with Uber, Amazon, and in the early days, Google as they spent like mad not yet making profits for years. How profitable is Tesla (I genuinely don’t know) and how does the share price track with profits? My bet is not very closely.
A SpaceX IPO involves Musk being able to spend somebody else’s money to continue the project. At least for awhile.
A lot of those companies make the deliberate decision to sink all of what would be profits into further growth. Sure, if you bought Amazon stock back in the 90s, you wouldn’t have gotten any dividends from it, but it’d be worth many, many times your initial investment by now.
Probably the bigger issue for Musk is the transparency that public ownership would require. His businesses do so much business with each other that it’s difficult to see which parts, if any, are actually making money. Like, is Starlink subsidizing SpaceX, or the other way around?
That’s an interesting point. I’m a bit puzzled about why he is contemplating a spacex IPO anyway.
Do they NEED the money? And how much control is he willing to give up?
He seems to have spread himself rather thin. I wonder how much he really cares about starship nowadays anyway?
SpaceX announced May 12 that it is planning a launch of the first Starship version 3 vehicle as soon as May 19 from its Starbase facility in South Texas. Liftoff is planned for 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
Can they actually announce a launch that soon? I’d think that the regulatory agencies would need more than a sextnight of notice.
Of course if it ever gets to a routine launch cadence like a airline, the regulations would have to change,
The progress of the whole project seems to be disappointing. No recovery of upper stage, only a couple of the booster.
I suspect that it is/was overambitious and, as @Lumpy said, it begins to look as if the basic concept is perhaps not going to work out? Alas…
I don’t see that degree of pessimism is warranted. At least not based on the facts I’m aware of so far. IANA expert on the machinations inside SpaceX.
Do we (the public) have any reliable info on how different a V3 is, beyond this snip from the SpaceNews article cited by @PastTense?
The launch will be the first flight of version 3 of Starship, with upgrades to both stages to improve vehicle performance, such as upgraded Raptor engines. It will also use a new launch pad at Starbase.
The article also mentions the first v3 was damaged in testing, and repairs took awhile. Hence the big pause in launch cadence.
If the next few V3 flights prove to make as little progress towards end-to-end success as the V2s (heh) did, I’ll join the chorus of “This trick will never work”. But not yet. IMO YMMV.
ETA: the article mentions a planned splashdown near Australia; possibly the engine relight test will propel Starship further along its suborbital trajectory than the Indian Ocean splashdowns.
Great site. Thank you. So v3 is a bigger more powerful v2. With no other changes they bothered to mention.
Which suggests they either haven’t solved, or don’t feel the need to solve, the heat management problems they have. Or the other issues that seem to crop up semi-regularly.
What they now call v4 is what used to be planned as v3. They broke it down into two steps.
The biggest change “under the hood” is the debut of the Raptor 3 engines.
But that doesn’t seem to have much bearing on what you have already pointed out is the main stumbling block: re-entry from orbit (and in reusable condition). Without that solved the whole program is essentially toast.
Or at least, they have to fall back to an expendable model, which is far from the original vision.
One wonders also why they aren’t trying to catch the booster: after all, they have done it a couple of times.
I really hoped this would work, but my systems engineering gut is starting to tell me it won’t.
Would love to be proved wrong…
The linked article speculates that the catch is considered a “done deal” (or mostly) and that they don’t want that distraction while focusing on the upper stage. I hope so too; but frankly I think this is make-or-break for the program. If they don’t have a flawless test that sets the stage for further advances, soon, it will look bleak.
The article says that the first v3 launch is being done from a new launch pad / tower facility. It’s possible they’re behind schedule on building it, and it’s now launch-ready but not recovery-ready. Or rather, when they noticed it wasn’t going to be 100% ready in time, they prioritized getting the launch part ready first, thereby delaying the recovery part even more.
I know you’re just restating what the article said, but I think the logic behind this bit is specious: “The linked article speculates that the catch is considered a “done deal” (or mostly) and that they don’t want that distraction while focusing on the upper stage.”
If it was a “done deal”, it would not be a distraction. Any more than e.g. staging or liftoff guidance is a distraction. Equally, if it is a distraction that’s proof it isn’t a “done deal”.
I also doubt they have too many engineers who work on recovery who also work on the upper stage; you can’t be swip-swapping talent between major areas of something that complex on short notice. Which suggests another reason they’re not catching it.
For darn sure, not catching it guarantees every bit of it is not reuseable. All those engines, all that other expensive stuff, all that structure.
And assuming at least some part of the booster’s flight is off-nominal, the loss of whatever might be learned from recovering the off-nominal parts or the parts affected by it. Yes, they have insane amounts of telemetry. But sometimes seeing the malfunctioning hardware with your own eyes is useful. Or seeing how well [whatever] handled the battle damage when [this thing] went oopsies. Choosing to throw all that away is a statistically expensive decision.
Which suggests there’s a darn expensive counter-reason to chose to ditch the booster. Shame we don’t know what it is.
Pure speculation on my part, but maybe the reason they aren’t testing the catch is that this time they are flying all the way to Australia. ie all of the different things being tested in this flight make it not possible to return to the launch site. ie they would rather use the delta V to test things other than catching the boaster.
They’re still landing someplace in the Gulf of Mexico. So far we don’t know where.
If well downrange you may well be right. If sorta just offshore the launch site, not so much. I know I don’t know which it’ll be.
The article described it purely as a risk reduction move vs trashing the shiny new launch facility. Does the author know, or is he extrapolating? I know I don’t know.
Some more info:
Great cite; thank you. Lots to see there. Which suggests some real maturity in the data supporting the redesigned items.