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Was Starship Launch 13 A Success?
It’s complicated. Or is it?
It has been over a decade since Elon announced Starship and three years since its first test launch, but this colossal rocket has yet to show any evidence that it can actually work as a space launch vehicle, let alone revolutionise this tiny niche industry. So, was 13 SpaceX’s lucky number? Did their 13th test flight actually move the needle forward on this quagmire of a project? From one very narrow perspective, yes, it did. But in real terms, this flight hasn’t got SpaceX any closer to the mythical fully reusable, cheap-to-launch, 100-ton-to-LEO (Low Earth Orbit) rocket Musk promised us a decade ago. It’s almost like this guy has proven himself to be a narcissistic pathological liar, and we should know better than to trust anything that falls out of his gaping maw.
The Good
However, I want to separate the authoritarian oligarch from the work, because the actual engineers at SpaceX, the ones tasked with making Musk’s idiotic ideas a reality, pulled off a miracle here, and they deserve praise. So, what went well?
Well, this flight successfully deployed 20 functional Starlink V3 satellites, which marks the first time its payload wasn’t just a dummy mass. That factor matters because V3 is critical to Starlink’s future, and Starlink is by far SpaceX’s biggest…
