SpaceX now an “infrastructure company” - says VP of launch

If you're a regular reader here, you'll have seen the name Kiko Dontchev, Vice President of launch for SpaceX. While they are obviously still in the process of development on Starship, the rest of their fleet was pretty much designed by the time the first Falcon Heavy launched in 2018. I'd be surprised if they haven't tweaked the designs of either the Heavy or the 9, usually referred to informally as "rev-ing" or revising, the design. While it's true that the vehicles themselves are probably touched less often than the infrastructure supporting their launch operations, I'm sure things like the Starship launch pads and Mechazilla arms get touched far more often than a Falcon 9 or Heavy. 

At last week’s UP.Summit conference in Florida, the vice president of launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company’s changing focus, how it is embracing AI, and why the Falcon 9 rocket—which has dominated global launch for a decade and remains the world’s preeminent launch vehicle—is firmly on the road to retirement.

“In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point,” Dontchev said. “We’re building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars.”

Earlier in the year, SpaceX acquired another of Elon Musk's companies, xAI, and while SpaceX engineers had been using AI to help them get more done, there's always a learning curve with such things. Dontchev says that it has really been starting to speed up accomplishments.

“What’s happened at SpaceX is we’ve really gone through a huge acceleration of adoption,” Dontchev said. “Even just a year ago, we weren’t adopting it that quickly, but really starting this year, we started to adopt it extremely rapidly. And the acceleration we have seen in our ability to do engineering is unlike anything I’ve ever seen at the company in my 16 years.” 

He goes on to say that tasks which would take would take hours to days now take seconds to minutes. Perhaps more surprisingly, it's also helping difficult "assembly and test" operations.

“We’ve automated being able to detect FOD,” he said. “We’ll have an inspector go in and borescope a tube, and we find that humans are about 94 percent perfect (at) finding a piece of it. Grok analyzing the same video is 99.9 percent perfect.” 

Seeing this, they've expanded the use of AI into inspection of Starlink customer terminals and other operations. Dontchev says the same improvements are following everywhere. And he says it will enhance efforts to get settlements going on Mars. 

Dontchev started at SpaceX before they flew the first Falcon 9 but has always been aiming for something better. You see, the second stage of every Falcon 9 that launches gets thrown away just like every other rocket family until Falcon started flying. Yes there have been boosters that have flown over 30 times;  B1067 flew its 36th flight back on July 9 but with the long term goal of being totally, rapidly reusable, not being able to get the second stage re-flying seems to have eaten at him.   

“Falcon 9, I love that rocket to heart,” he said. “I’ve launched many of them, all of them, in fact. But it’s still not fully reusable. We still throw that second stage away every single flight. Starship—we’re going to catch both the first stage and the second stage.”

When you think of their long term goals in the thousands of Starship launches per year, maybe 10,000 in a year, reusing everything certainly seems like what they've got to do. At some point, the cost and time associated with building second stages wipes out some of their desired launches. 

It is also significant that Dontchev spoke less about Starship’s payload capacity and more about its productivity per launch. The first orbital Starship launch, in late September, carried larger Starlink V3 satellites. And in the aggregate, this single mission carried 10 times the bandwidth of the Starlink payload launched by a Falcon 9.

Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9. 

My favorite part of the interview was when he said, “We’re going to transport boosters and ships over barge here to the Cape. We’re hoping to actually do the first transports this year in December, and then maybe even fly by the end of the year.” 

Starship Flight Test 14 Monday morning, Sept. 28 from Starbase, Texas, looking north along the gulf coast. I want to see this from the backyard - even though it will be a smaller image. Image Credit: SpaceX