Michelle Rose

SpaceX just announced that they will be deploying V3 Starlink satellites for the first time during their 13th Starship test flight next week! Six of the satellites have been modified with a suite of cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery. Summary of every major upgrade and modification @SpaceX says it's made for the upcoming test flight: • More robust stage separation flip sequence to prevent the booster from rotating off course. • Hardware upgrades to improve Super Heavy Raptor re-light reliability during the boostback burn. • Updated engine alarms and abort logic for multi-engine flight conditions. • Starship propulsion system hardware and operational changes to address the Flight 12 engine-out issue. • First deployment of 20 Starlink V3 satellites with laser links, deployable solar arrays, and antennas. • Six Starlink V3 satellites equipped with cameras to inspect Starship's heat shield after reentry. • White-painted heat shield tiles added as simulated missing tiles and imaging targets. • New heat shield tile designs and attachment mechanisms, including tests on the aft flaps and aft skirt. • Load-sensing heat shield tiles to measure stresses during flight. • Higher dynamic pressure ascent profile to stress-test the heat shield and increase payload capability. • Planned in-space Raptor engine relight test. SpaceX: "For the first time, Starship will carry V3 Starlink satellites to space, which aim to greatly expand the network's capacity and user speeds. As part of this initial test, Starship is planned to deploy 20 satellites which will extend solar arrays and antennas and will attempt to connect with ground stations in South Africa and the larger Starlink constellation via high-capacity lasers. Six of the satellites have been modified with a suite of cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to continue testing methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test."

Starship’s thirteenth flight test is preparing to launch as early as Thursday, July 16 → spacex.com/launches/stars…

See how every model compares: cursor.com/evals

🔊 @elonmusk did a live phone interview earlier today with a guest host of the Sean Hannity radio program, discussing his latest SpaceX timelines. I only caught about the last 5 minutes of it: “The best way to expand compute is really in space. There’s a lot of room in space and if you look at the size of Earth relative to the sun or relative to the solar system, you realize just how tiny Earth is. We’re very, very tiny. We only receive about half a billionth of The Sun’s energy. So if you really think of Earth as being like a tiny dust mote in a vast darkness. So the way to expand compute— without, ya know, using up all the land on Earth— is to do so in space. And then you can do it without using up space for power & water on Earth. You can just do it in space, so… I think we will probably be launching our first AI satellites next year and then we will probably be able to do that, I think, at large scale in about two years. Yeah, well, I’ve always had the philosophy that everyone at the company should receive stock in the company so that they can participate in the upside of the company and it’s great for aligning incentives as well, so as the company prospers, then the people at the company— the employees — also prosper, so that’s just been, ya know, my philosophy from Day 1 is just to make sure everyone gets stock in the company, so there are, I think, several thousand people who’ve been – it’s not just one welder – it’s several thousand people who were, you know, working on the production line and started at the company relatively early… then probably their stock is worth over $1 million at this point “Yeah, so, Mars is much harder to get to than the moon and you can only travel to Mars roughly every two years. So Earth and Mars align such that you can travel to Mars only once every 26 months. So that makes it a lot harder than the moon where you can go to the moon pretty much anytime and it only takes a few days to get to the moon whereas it takes about six months to get to Mars. So that’s why we can do the moon faster than we can do Mars. But I think, probably, if things go well, we can probably send the first people to Mars in about five years, and then rapidly increase the cadence of sending people to Mars thereafter, so every two years we could dramatically increase the number of ships going to Mars and, ya know, hopefully in a 10 or 12 year timeframe we’ve sent thousands of people to Mars.”