SpaceX Starship 10 Good Launch, Dummy Satellites Deployed. Transforming SpaceX to 5 Times Lower Cost Launches by Yearend

10 thoughts on “SpaceX Starship 10 Good Launch, Dummy Satellites Deployed. Transforming SpaceX to 5 Times Lower Cost Launches by Yearend”

1. Having 33 engines makes for a lot of redundancy, which is pretty awesome. Any idea on how many engines they can lose on the booster before they have to scrub the mission?

   • they can lose two engines and still reach orbit in most cases but they will have different payloads for different missions. There are times when they are flying a lighter load that they might still complete missions without a third engine or missions where they are pushing the margin and could only lose one engine and complete some mission.

2. It looks like Starship finally adopted a wider booster, something several people, including me and more importantly, Elon Musk himself, had advocated months ago. This is the way to go to control vibration and make control, landing, and fire-suppression easier. Still need to catch both booster and Starship upper stage for true reuseability.

   • ???

     The ship and booster have always been 9m in diameter dude.

     • I stand corrected; the lower fins and outgasses deceived me.
       However, Grok says:
       “Yes, @elonmusk has tweeted about future versions of Starship being wider. On November 3, 2019, he posted: “Starship Mk2 being built in Florida will be 18m diameter vs 9m for Mk1. Same height, but twice the volume & payload.” This indicates a plan for a wider Starship, doubling the diameter from 9 meters to 18 meters, though this was an early concept and specific plans may have evolved since then.More recently, on August 26, 2025, Musk tweeted about Starship V4, stating it will be “significantly longer” and have 42 engines, but he didn’t explicitly mention width in that post. However, the November 2019 tweet directly confirms his mention of a wider Starship design.”
       But when I asked Grok to “think deeper” it did confirm mention of a possibly wider Starship in a 10-year timeframe. Note the first and second bulletpoints:
       “No, Elon Musk has not recently tweeted about plans to increase Starship’s width instead of further increasing its height after Version 3. Recent tweets indicate ongoing plans to extend the vehicle’s height (or length) for Versions 3 and 4 in the near term, with potential width increases mentioned only as a longer-term possibility (e.g., in about 10 years), after additional height extensions. For context: On January 12, 2025, Musk tweeted:
       – “There will probably be another 10m added to the Starship stack before we increase diameter.”
       – On October 24, 2024, he tweeted: “Starship will lengthen in the next few years. 10 years from now, there will probably be a much wider diameter Starship too.”
       – On August 27, 2025 (yesterday), he shared details on Starship V4 aiming for around 150m height (up from ~121m currently) and 7,500 tons.
       – On August 26, 2025, he noted: “Starship V4 will have 42 engines when 3 more Raptors are added to a significantly longer ship. That will fly in 2027.”
       These posts emphasize height increases as the priority after V3, with width expansions sequenced afterward, not as a replacement.”

       So, future Starships will be significantly different – both long and wider – and it’s unclear how much testing of today’s version will carry over to future versions. That and the 10-year timeframe, by which point Musk will be 64, make speculation about a Mars-worthy crewed Starship difficult at best.
       I still believe nuclear powered rockets, or perhaps nuclear powered augmentation to Starship-type rockets post-orbit, will be how the first humans are eventually transported to Mars, both to save time and payload, as well as resolve the immense logistical challenges of multiple refuelings in space.

       • The problem with the nuclear rockets is mostly regulatory, but that’s still a real problem. Humans are going to be transported to Mars first by chemical rocket simply because the bureaucrats won’t permit it to happen any other way.

         Maybe China could do it, but no Western nation could. We’re too mummified in red tape.

         Sure, eventually something other than chemical will be doing the work, but if we wait for that, Musk won’t be 64 when it happens, he’ll be 84.

         Bottom line, we can do the engineering to accomplish it chemically faster than we can do the bureaucracy to accomplish it by nuclear. That makes me want to tear my hair out, but it’s still true.

         • Because of the low thrust characteristics, it’s likely the nuclear part won’t be enabled until orbit, with chemical rockets either part of a two system rocket, or a a new shuttle system to transfer to an orbiting nuclear rocket already in semi-permanent orbit – maybe docked to a new space station too.
           I agree, China has a better chance of pulling this off. They are simply more serious about everything that requires engineering and long-term commitment.

       • Ideally, you want the booster to have about the same proportions as two cans of beans stacked on each other. Roughly the diameter should be half the height. Where the height is dictated by the thrust per square meter of rocket cross section available from the engines; You have to be able to fit enough engines under the rocket to lift everything above them.

         That’s roughly because it’s not taking into account the different densities and proportions of fuel and oxidizer, and the curve on the top and bottom of the tanks, which can’t be simple square cylinders. Realistically, maybe the diameter can be 1/3 of the height, tops.

         So the rocket gets taller as the engines get more powerful for the same size, but you can’t expect the booster to get a lot taller than it is now, 71m. So, eventually the diameter probably tops out at 24 meters or so, compared to the present 9 meters.

         I would expect for logistics reasons to see two sizes of Starship, a payload version not too much larger than the current version, and a dedicated fuel tender that maxes out diameter, in order that the fuel tender can arrive in orbit with enough fuel to completely top off the smaller payload version.

         But, honestly, I expect Starship’s radical reduction in cost to orbit to result in enough traffic to make non-rocketry approaches such as mass drivers or dynamic structures cost effective. So, maybe there won’t be any third generation of the Starship.

         • It’s interesting that Starship, or any SpaceX rocket is stuck on 2 stages while Apollo used three. I understand the cost savings and ability to carry more fuel per rocket unit of size, but there’s good reasons NASA used three stages instead of two, at least to get to the Moon. Maybe that’s an insurmountable obstacle if you don’t want to repeatedly refuel in space.

           • The refueling loads are the extra stages.

             Refueling is used on earth to extend the range of cars, trucks and for military planes.

             The Eagle Saturn third stage was about 2 tons.

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