A Glimpse at SpaceX From the Inside

Thanks to a heads up from Teslarati, we can go look at a two minute slide show of a presentation Elon Musk did at an "All Hands" employees meeting recently.  It's two minutes of a "State of the Company" presentation.  The version on Twitter has no sound, just images (moving and still) with onscreen text making the points.  

I recommend watching the Twitter slideshow.  One of the highlights is the Starlink dispenser currently in design and test, to be mounted in a Starship.  This is the system referred to as the Pez dispenser, although the resemblance to one of those is pretty minimal.  The animation shows the dispenser pushing out pair after pair of satellites, and a view through the hull of the Starship so the feed can be seen.  Teslarati shows a recent picture from NASA Spaceflight.com of Starship 24, currently on a test stand at Boca Chica, on which the Pez dispenser can easily be seen. 

I added the red line pointing to the cover of the dispenser. Image credit to Boca Chica Mary at NASA Spaceflight.com.    

Note that:

Based on the renders, SpaceX appears to have more or less upscaled its existing rectangular Starlink V1.x satellite design by a factor of two, producing a spacecraft that will measure about 7 x 3 meters (23 x 10 ft). Curiously, the Starlink dispenser and tiny payload ‘slot’ shown only appear to allow Starship to carry around 60 satellites, suggesting that the company will need to develop a different deployment method to achieve its ultimate goal of launching 110-120 satellites at once.  

An interesting fact from the site Statista might add some perspective.  Within the next few months, fully half of all the operational satellites in the world will be owned by SpaceX.  The constellation currently has almost 2400 satellites in orbit and while there are no Starlink missions firmly on the calendar for June (so far), there will be one Starlink mission this month.  There will be at least one launch this week, Wednesday, a communications satellite for Egyptian provider Nilesat, and five total Falcon 9 launches scheduled for June.  One of the remaining four June launches is another batch of Starlinks, the others are for paying customers.  

The Falcon 9 has continued its blistering launch cadence of one per week.  The Cargo Dragon mission to the ISS, CRS25, originally scheduled for launch this Friday has some sort of delay going on.  When I looked last week, it said Friday but now says TBD.  

On June 1, NASA announced they've awarded SpaceX five additional Crew Dragon (manned) missions to the ISS before 2030.  That second link shows and links to a document from NASA declaring intent to issue a Sole Source contract modification to SpaceX.  After the apparently successful Starliner mission last month, I'm a bit surprised, but another way of looking at it is that NASA simply made some comparisons between its two Commercial Crew providers and moved to secure its astronauts’ access to the Space Station for the rest of this decade.  There are clearly more unknowns with Boeing than with SpaceX simply based on the number of successful missions they've had so far.  Boeing isn't yet certified for manned missions to the space station.  NASA made the decision based on the best available data they had.