SpaceX a $102 million five-year US Air Force contract to demonstrate delivering cargo anywhere on earth (point to point) in an hour. The under one hour delivery is not specified in the contract but using the the SpaceX Starship would enable delivery of up to 220 tons in under one hour. There was a previous …
Elon Musk has shared SpaceX simulations of the catching of the SpaceX Starship and booster. Being able to make the Mechazilla SpaceX catch system will enable SpaceX to a launch, land and relaunch three times a day. A normal landing, maintenance, craning the booster and starship onto crawlers and moving 1 mph via crawler would …
SpaceX notified the FCC SpaceX that Starship could be ready to launch Starlink Gen2 System satellites as early as March, 2022. The FCC notification is that SpaceX will focus on the configuration of 12000 generation 1 satellites that will work best with 30,000 generation 2 satellite. Previously, SpaceX was hedging its bets and had a …
Elon Musk says that future Starships – or at least certain Starship variants – are being upgraded with 50% more Raptor engines and stretched propellant tanks. This will increase engines from 6 to 9. SpaceX will also increase fuel to about 300 tons. This will enable a larger Starship and Superheavy to launch 220 tons …
Elon Musk had a 2.5 hour interview with Lex Friedman where he talked SpaceX Starship, Mars, Tesla FSD and Teslabot. Elon Musk is back to being confident that the Raptor 2 mass production problems will be overcome. There are a lot of unique materials in the Raptor. They created new alloys. It is also a …
Some researchers in NASA have written a paper that finally is pushing for NASA to take advantage of the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. An appreciation of Starship’s capabilities is important for understanding how and why this vehicle can provide unprecedented opportunities for the planetary science community to fly payloads to the Moon and Mars, thus …
Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an interview with WSJ’s Joanna Stern at the CEO Council Summit. The main highlights: Elon Musk does not know about anything special happening on December 9, 2021 The Cybertruck will be Tesla’s best product ever. It will have many new technological advances. It will be in volume production in 2023. …
SpaceX had another successful launch which is their 27th launch of 2021. The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission previously launched GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, and five Starlink missions. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9’s first stage on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship, which will be stationed in the …
Elon Musk immediately rallies all employees to get all hands on deck to fix potential Raptor engine production delays. Boeing and Grumman have a decade of SLS delays to get to a first launch and they just ask for another $2 billion per year for decades from the US Government and NASA. If SLS slips …
Elon Musk emailed SpaceX employees that there is a crisis in Starship Raptor engine production. SpaceX could face a ‘genuine risk of bankruptcy’ if they cannot achieve Starship flight rate of once every two weeks in 2022. Elon emailed: Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago. …
Elon Musk is being interviewed by the Space Studies Board. Talks first about the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. He expects the first orbital flight will be January 2022. This will be the largest rocket ever made. The first launch may not be fully successful but they have made factories to make many of the rockets. …
