this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
22 points (95.8% liked)

Spaceflight

643 readers
87 users here now

Your one-stop shop for spaceflight news and discussion.

All serious posts related to spaceflight are welcome! JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, Roscosmos, ULA, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, Blue Origin, etc. (Arca and Pythom, if you must).

Other related space communities:

Related meme community:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 4 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

The live stream from the ship flipping was insane

[–] ZhaoYadang -4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

And still not a customer in sight for this useless POS.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

They've started signing a handful of customers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Future_launches

NASA just bought another one to deliver the JAXA pressurized rover:

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-plans-to-assign-missions-for-two-future-artemis-cargo-landers/

And some companies are starting to design with Starship in mind, like K2, Vast, and Gravitics:

https://www.k2space.com/blog/introducing-k2-space-building-satellites-for-a-post-starship-future

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

And still not a customer in sight for this useless POS.

Their primary customer is Starlink, and a big chunk of ship development is being paid for by Starlink revenue.

The internal video of the payload bay shows part of the mechanism that will be used for them. Probably a few more launches and splashdowns and then it will be carrying Starlink sats as test payloads.

To maintain the full Starlink constellation they need to launch about a thousand satellites a year. There's your customer for "this useless POS" right there, and they didn't even have to look outside their own organisation.