Flight 11 speculation …

Any chance they put some real Starlink satellites on board (and go all the way to orbit in order to deploy them)?

Any chance they try to land Stage 2 on land, on its skirt? So that they can properly inspect the heat shield (etc.)

• Perhaps the Aussie outback, if a suborbital flight? If so, they’d presumably need to target a bare patch with no foliage that might catch fire. (The first thought that crossed my mind was, “what about that massive rock?”, but I think that might be a little disrespectful …)
• Perhaps US territory (desert / salt flats / military range / LZ-4), if an orbital flight?

Any chance they go orbital regardless? I can’t think of much reason why they would. I’m assuming they’re already very confident that Starship is capable of getting to orbit, but perhaps actually doing it would let them test a full deorbit burn?

Space X Starship Flight 10 Caribbean Flyover

BBC coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzsgRbrafdE

0:50: “… when a part of the rocket appeared to explode, and a burnt flap swung back and forth”. This suggests to me that they believe the movement of the flap was unintended. I doubt that’s correct.

1:35: You can tell they really wanted to include the alleged Nazi salute, but resigned themselves to just including a clip of him waving his arms around earlier on, at the same event 😁

a decision to prioritize the transition of Starlink launches away from Falcon 9

Incidentally, I haven’t heard much talk about this, but it seems very plausible that 2026 (or even 2025) could be the peak year for Falcon 9, followed by a huge drop-off in launches, taking just a couple of years to get down to, say, 1 per month. Does anyone have any estimates/guesses along those lines?

Musk has recently claimed SpaceX will send its first uncrewed Starships to Mars next year, too.

I thought his most recent claim (maybe a month ago on Twitter?) was much more circumspect? Something like “if everything happens to go very well we can do that”.

And even on an occasion before that (a presentation he did in Starbase earlier this year), he might have remembered to include caveat words like “aspirational” at least some of the time?

I think if they really had to launch towards Mars in Dec 2026, they could, because they’ve shown they can get to orbit with a second stage that they can ‘mass produce’. So they could choose to focus on orbital refilling rather than reusability, for the next 16 months. And there’s an argument that they should do this, because Mars transfer opportunities are somewhat rare, and Mars EDL is a potential ‘criticial path’ item for their long term goals.

But I guess even for SpaceX, there comes a point at which you just have to accept that certain things have a natural sequence that determines the timeline.

They’ve got an ‘overhang’ of outstanding design changes, which are coming in Block 3, and this will just take a certain amount of time to implement. And once they’ve started testing Block 3, perhaps they’ll even decide there’s another set of ‘obvious’ design changes they’ll want to make; perhaps they’ll decide they need to move to a ‘Block 4’ before aggressively pushing on all the other goals. And the next big goal would probably be vehicle recovery, because that makes everything else more efficient in multiple ways. And maybe only then do they start testing orbital refilling. And maybe only once there’s sufficient progress on that can they start confidently working to finalize the design for the 1st Mars ship.

And maybe in amongst all this, there’s also a decision to prioritize the transition of Starlink launches away from Falcon 9, because even SpaceX doesn’t have infinite money, and it’s too much of a waste not to combine Starship testing with Starship doing useful work (launching an in-house payload).

So basically, I’m now at 15% on them being able to launch towards Mars during the next transfer opportunity. (And that’s not taking into account political considerations, NASA saying no due to planetary protection, things like that.)

Starship’s “lost year” also has serious implications for …

Even if you accept this framing, it turned out just to be a lost 7 months! (Although there may well turn out to be an extra “lost 5 months” while we’re waiting for Block 3.)

First Dragon launch without RTLS for quite a while? Presumably due to the extra mass of the boost kit?

And the same clip is at 7:53 on the You Tube stream.

So, is everyone excited for tomorrow’s SpaceX launch of the latest experimental version of their vehicle? Since its last flight they’ve made lots of changes involving propellant tanks, engines, etc…

Oh, you thought I meant Ship 37? That’s nothing! On CRS-33, Dragon will have essentially a whole extra propulsion system added to what was designed to be a cargo carrying area, which will be tested in space for the first time next month while attached to a $150 billion space station with 7 people on board! 😓

Dragon has boosted the ISS once before, during CRS-31, I believe. But that was just with its existing propulsion system. The new Frankenstein trunk has been tested on the ground, and that’s considered sufficient, apparently!

On the pre-launch teleconference, Sarah Walker said that we should see some imagery of the boost kit during the CRS-33 launch webcast.

Launch is in 8.5 hours.

Seems that this will be, in a sense, the 1st time a FH centre core has ever been recovered! (Back to dry land in one piece.)

Going by this, the stats for actual FH launches are:

• 11 launches total
• 2 with failed centre core barge landings
• 1 with successful barge landing of a centre core, which then fell over due to heavy seas
• 6 with expendable centre core (but with side booster RTLS)
• 2 fully expendable

If Musk was as committed to comedy and “fate loves irony” as he says, he should have proceeded with the launch the previous day, instead of postponing it “due to unfavorable recovery weather conditions”, and let nature take its course!

That said, maybe nature will yet find a way to intervene! Best keep an eye on Port Canaveral to see if B1091 does actually make it back to dry land!

also reducing risk as it will be flight proven

I’m slightly surprised they don’t always use Starlink sats as the payload on a booster’s 1st flight, these days.

And I’m slightly more surprised they didn’t do so in this case, as they were trying something new (using a FH centre core in a single-stick config).

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 Return to Ellington Field

“Video was recorded on August 9, 2025” (despite saying August 11 in the title)

And yes, it really is the whole of Crew-10. (I’ve got a feeling the Cosmonauts are normally already on their way to Russia by this point. Perhaps this is a new procedure, now that splashdown has moved to the West Coast.)

If you posted something and it seems to be stuck in some sort of purgatory

No. Every post I’ve ever made ‘to Lemmy’ has seemingly been ‘published’(?) quickly, but I couldn’t rule out that this was happening via fast manual approval.

I was mostly just asking out of interest. Perhaps out of a feeling that if there was moderation then I didn’t need to think quite so hard about whether a given post was worthy of submitting.

Personally, I think the examples you provided would be perfectly worthy of their own posts! :)

Thanks, it’s good to get a ‘steer’ on this. But are you including my “F9 barge landing perspective that I don’t remember seeing before” example in that? And if so, is that just because you hadn’t seen it before either?

What if it had been something else, that already was widely known about? Maybe just let people down-vote the post? Or merely not up-vote it? Maybe we should only post if we’d guess a 60% probability that 60% of community members haven’t already seen the post contents?

Another = A deal with the Italian space agency

Love the view of the ISS from Dragon at 1:33:34 (and 1:34:30, 1:35:31, etc.)

U-k_LyA1DQQ @27:54 = Cardman playing with her own deck of cards, man!

206O9S9GLbg @3:38:38 = Zena emerging from the Zena’ith Port.

Another example of something that, to me, doesn’t warrant its own post: Interview with Jim Cantrell

Indeed.

I assumed the comment was satirising one common form of misguided critique of SpaceX’s “hardware-rich” approach to this development programme. But yes, now I’m not so sure.

Until now I’ve been too lazy to look into what rules/guidelines exist for this community. Am I now right in thinking there aren’t any? (If so, I’m not complaining!) Or am I just not finding them (as an inexperienced Lemmy user)?

The thing I was going to look into was any posting guidelines. How significant should something be to warrant its own post? For example, this tweet includes a video with an F9 barge landing perspective that I don’t remember seeing before.

FWIW, my own feeling is that I’d like a quarterly “General Discussion Thread” (as with the equivalent Subreddit), to gather up all the minor stuff.

Are posts automatically ‘published’ or do they go through moderation first? (If this is something I should be able to determine myself, if I knew more about Lemmy, LMK and I’ll go & do some reading!)

P.S. My thanks to you and all the team for all your efforts.

If it’s true he deleted a video he’s obviously not going to reUpload.

You could at least find out what his response might be. If he outright lies, someone might come forward and ‘testify’ to that fact.

You made a claim, the burden of proof is on you

No, I asked a question.

I’m increasingly confident that Thunderfoot is indeed the guy about whom I’ve heard that allegation, but since I don’t have proof, it has to remain as a question