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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

I think an orbital launch attempt for Starship is pretty likely in 2023. They seemed to have planned to try deploying Starlink with it from the start but have changed those plans and seemingly don't plan to do so for the next 2-3 Starship prototypes (they sealed off the "PEZ" style dispensers).

Personally I don't think they'll be able to get more than 3-4 launches of it in, in part due to regulatory considerations. In which case maybe we'll see 1 or 2 Starlink launches on Starship depending on how well the first flight goes.

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Idk man, I totally expected them to launch in 2022. They don't seem to have much confidence, or they would have done so. Especially since the "regulatory considerations" you mentioned include limits per year. Their production seems good enough that just disposing of them by test flight would be a win. So why no launch attempt, yet? Is risk not acceptable anymore since Artemis? Yeah, no bets from me for now, but will be interesting to see what happens.

My personal opinion is that somewhere along the line this year they had to sharply recalibrate their risk tolerance. I think they might have expected to be able to more easily extend their launch approval out of Starbase as needed (ie "regulatory considerations"). Alternatively maybe they're expecting a much sharper drop in investor capital in the next year or two.

As such they may have had to change their success criteria for the first launch such that while previously they would've considered simply not damaging launch infrastructure to be a success, now they might need to at least be able to make orbit.

An alternative explanation is simply that most of their work this year has been on "stage zero" - the launch infrastructure. It isn't as open to the sort of rapid iteration seen with the vehicles themselves but it needs to be sorted out so they can start building the various additional pads they want in Florida. So perhaps that's what's preventing them from launching for now.

Speaking of stage zero, I have difficulty wrapping my head around how they will test landing. The risk of damaging it seems like it would be quite high the first 20 times or so they try. Interrupting launches to repair damage seems like too large of a penalty.

Their plan appeared to be to test the flight profile at sea. So they would specify some precise GPS coordinates to perform a soft touchdown at off the coast of Hawaii and once they're confident with that they can test on the real thing.

Additionally, part of the reason for building so many pads up front (IIRC they have two in various stages of construction at Cape Canaveral) is probably so that one failure doesn't stop everything.

Besides that, the booster flies a trajectory such that it'll just crash into the water nearby if it isn't able to initiate its catch burn. On top of that, unlike F9, the Superheavy booster is meant to be able to hover meaning it has a few seconds to make any corrections that may be necessary. Catching the ships themselves will certainly be much trickier, although at least they have the somewhat uncanny looking velocity when skydiving at low altitudes.

I heard about how the first launch was planned to be expended near Hawaii, perhaps they'll attempt to hover before doing that. But even if they do that with the first few at some point they'll have to attempt a first catch, that will be quite a nail biter. It will be interesting to know how many they are willing to expend to get confident enough they won't destroy the launchpad.

But recall earlier this year one of the droneships was damaged by a landing of a returning F9. That was after over 100 landings.

Another part of this is how many successful landings are they going to do before people are allowed to be on board. How many would you want before you would feel comfortable? 5? 20? 100?

To achieve all this tolerances for Starship are going to have to be so much tighter than Falcon.

This seems generally right for a positive scenario.

One thing which they will need to complete before launching Starlinks V2 from Starship is launch a few from Falcon 9. They'll need some prototypes in orbit before they go into the kind of mass production they would want for Starship.

Wasn't this last batch of Starlinks the first V2 launch?

I've heard contradictory reports. The language they used was very imprecise.

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