Elon Says SpaceX Will Make Five Full Stack Super Heavy Starships in 2023

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Elon Musk has tweeted that he expects SpaceX to make five full Stack Super Heavy Starships in 2023.

If there is a successful orbital Stack Super Heavy Starships launch in February, 2023 then Super Heavy Starships could start flying weekly by Q4 2023.

16 thoughts on “Elon Says SpaceX Will Make Five Full Stack Super Heavy Starships in 2023”

  1. Boca Chica launch license is currently for 6 launches a year, so one full stack going through WDR now built already adds up to 6, so no land/relaunch this year?

    • There have been no launches of anything from Boca Chica yet in 2023, so how can one full stack booster+starship use up all the allowed number of launches for 2023?

      Did you just use confusing wording and mean something different than what you seem to have written?

  2. Corporations and futurists are always making projections and claims. I wish there was a way for NBF readers to vote on how confident they are in those projections.

    • Instead of United Launch Alliance, there were targeting 2017 for the first launch of SLS in 2011. After the same group of companies failed to develop an Apollo like rocket from Shuttle parts with $10 billion Constellation program. Five times the cost and 11 years instead of six years.

      • I wish SpaceX all the best. I want them to succeed in mass manufacturing 100-1000 Starships per year or even better, instead of Starships, build next gen ship which will be 10-20x larger. Similar in design to Star Trek ships. Not that advanced, but simply much, much bigger than Starship and able to take off and land in more fluid, safer way, using other tech than rocket propulsion.

        I am writing this(first post) because I am a bit disappointed that we’re moving much slower than planned years ago. I was always hyper optimistic and in the past believed those timelines and claims.

        We need to accelerate tech development. We need to invest more $ and human resources.

        • Classical Elon’s time.

          I’ve earned to just let it be and take everything time-related from him with a grain of salt. Musk is a salesman and tends to be overoptimistic in time projections.

          But he eventually delivers.

          • A lot of the delay was regulatory, (The change of administrations really altered the regulatory environment for Musk, and not favorably.) but not all of it. They actually did run into problems they didn’t anticipate. And even made one or two tyro mistakes.

            But if the first launch makes orbit, even if reentry is a bust, they’ll probably meet THIS schedule, because Starship would be cheaper than Falcon on Kg to orbit even with the second stage being expendable, so they’ll save money by using it to launch Starlink, while working out the kinks in landing. And the real bottleneck for building them is engine manufacture, which I suspect they’re getting good at by now.

  5. Let’s send a lens to L2 ,to reduce the energy the sun imparts to our atmosphere, just a small scale test at first, but let’s try it.

    • I saw an article or video (don’t recall which or where) in which someone did the rough estimate of what we would have to put at L1 to meaningfully reduce the incoming solar energy. Unless he made some error in the estimate, it would take an impractically large amount of material to do any useful reduction. I believe he was assuming Starship would be available to lift the material, and it was impractical even assuming that. So I think you have to abandon that idea.

      • A sun shade at L1 would have to be about twice the width of the Earth to totally eclipse the Sun. At any size smaller it would intercept a fraction of the sunlight hitting the Earth.

        Earth is estimated to be out of thermal balance by 0.6W out of 340W of incoming solar radiation, so you’d have to block about 0.18% of incoming sunlight. This would require a sun shade of, roughly, 1,200 km diameter.

        But L1 wouldn’t be a practical location, because it’s in actual gravitational balance, meaning the thrust of sunlight on that shade would drive it towards Earth. You’d actually have to be closer to the Sun, so that the light pressure would balance the excess solar gravity, and thus be bigger than 1,200 km.

        It would be far more economical to just put a bunch of SPS in geostationary orbit, and let them intercept light while converting some of it to useable power. They wouldn’t be in position to shadow the Earth as much of the time, but the required area would still be smaller, and the range for power beaming would be more practical.

        • If it weren’t for Democrats in Ca and NY the world could have been powered by clean nuclear energy, and we would not be in this fix.
          Flat Earth Republicans never stopped Carbon free nuclear.

          • I think you’ll find that there is a whole lot of anti-nuclear pressure from places in Europe too. You can’t blame everything on Ca and NY.

  6. Don’t tease us!! But this is so exciting, let’s just get the first one up and down.
    How exciting to go down to Texas to watch this bad boy go up in flames, and I mean all the way up ,around and safely down. Brian,you got to have contests ,or travel packages to go see it.
    I’m counting down!!

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