SpaceX had an epically good week. We're rather used to that, and it's good to see again.
A couple of us exchanged comments on the Starship's orange color to the FT-10 entry yesterday, but Eric Berger at Ars Technica did some deep diving on the subject today.
This color—so different from the silvery skin and black tiles that cover Starship's upper stage—led to all sorts of speculation. Had heating damaged the stainless steel skin? Had the vehicle's tiles been shucked off, leaving behind some sort of orange adhesive material? Was this actually NASA's Space Launch System in disguise?
This is rather important because of the nature of the heat shield testing SpaceX had targeted doing on this flight. We got some answers on Thursday from SpaceX on X. You see, when the Starship landed within a few feet of the "target" where a buoy was prepared to photograph the landing, there was also a drone flying in the area and some great pictures came from that.
A (stunning) view of SpaceX's Starship rocket shortly before splashing into the Indian Ocean this week. Credit: SpaceX
This is where the discussion we had here in the comments came from; in particular a link to Elon Musk on X saying:
Worth noting that the heat shield tiles almost entirely stayed attached, so the latest upgrades are looking good!
The red color is from some metallic test tiles that oxidized and the white is from insulation of areas where we deliberately removed tiles.
There is no "official" explanation that I'm aware of that covers the apparent explosion in the engine bay that clearly damaged things in there. It just doesn't appear to have affected the landing approach or the landing itself.
Damage to the engine bay and one of the vehicle's flaps can be seen clearly in the new photographs. This did not appear to impact what was a soft and precise landing in the Indian Ocean, but obviously it was not nominal.
So, with this new information, what does it mean for SpaceX's plans to test future Starship vehicles? What follows is a mixture of informed guesswork and reporting. It is also very notional because SpaceX is known to change its plans rapidly in response to new data. So take this information with a pinch of salt.
Berger goes on to list what he expects to happen for Flight Tests (FT) - 11 through 20. Eric's expecting FT-11 to be No Earlier Than October, and for it to be the last flight of a version 2 Starship. He expects FT-12 to be the first flight of a version 3 Starship and to occur after the first of the year. Musk said recently somewhere in the range of flight 13 to 15, the first flight to attempt to catch the Starship would likely take place.
Somewhere between FT-15 to -20, we will probably see the first attempts at orbital refueling. Probably in the second half of '26.
As Berger says about taking this with a pinch of salt, expect changes.
I can't ignore my lead-in reference to the 30th flight of B1067, because it leads into a side story that resonates with me. Remember when we thought 10 flights would be amazing? And then they went past 10 and got to 20 so we started wondering out loud how long they could keep a booster going? Now that good old B1067 has flown 30 times, what now? Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, said on X, "40 is the current goal." Until 1067 does her 40th flight and then it becomes 50.
A pet observation someone gave me once was, "when you do things no one has ever done before, you learn things no one has ever known before." No one has ever made an orbital class rocket that has flown 30 times. How can we know if they can make 50? Just keep inspecting after launches and keep track of everything.
I started getting interested in SpaceX when I learned about some of the bold ambitions and goals that Musk was talking about. Yesterday, Eric Berger did a different piece on Ars Technica talking about what the industry was originally calling SpaceX's "dumb approach" to reuse. I find it hard to believe a bunch of intelligent engineers wouldn't recognize that his "dumb" approach just flew the same booster 30 times and nobody else has gotten remotely close to that.
The company first made a controlled entry of the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage in September 2013, during the first flight of version 1.1 of the vehicle. This was over two years before their first successful landing on one of the concrete "Landing Zones" on Cape Canaveral. If nothing else, that landing validates their approach to design. I remember the launch, the landing and posting that I watched it.
In the United States, the main competitor to SpaceX has historically been United Launch Alliance. Their reaction to SpaceX's plan to reuse first stages a decade ago was dismissive. The company's engineers wrote papers (pdf warning) and performed studies that argued SpaceX's plans were impractical.
Almost one decade ago, to the date, United Launch Alliance began sharing a graphic that demonstrated its approach—to separate only the engine section of the Vulcan rocket—was superior. The company dubbed this approach SMART, an acronym for Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology. The implication in this name, of course, is that SpaceX's booster flyback approach was dumb.
According to the United Launch Alliance analysis in 2015, the SMART plan would result in cost savings as soon as the second launch of a booster. SpaceX's approach, by contrast, would require 10 flights for there to be any cost savings.
One imagines that those engineers never dreamed that, a decade later, SpaceX would fly the same rocket 30 times and reach an annual launch cadence that approaches the total number of rockets United Launch Alliance has flown during its 20-year existence. As for SMART, it remains a theoretical concept.
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