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FAA Holds Starship Flight 14, China's 6 Launches in 45 Hours & Ariane 6 Crisis
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship Flight 14 sits pad-ready with 26 Starlink V3 satellites aboard — but the FAA's orbital license is the only thing standing between SpaceX and its first revenue mission. Plus: China's unprecedented 6-launch blitz from 3 sites, and Ariane 6's turbopump crisis slashing Europe's 2024 manifest.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Super Heavy booster B21 is now sitting on the launch pad at Starbase, and the clock on Starship's next orbital attempt is running. The hardware rolled out September twentieth.
Flight Fourteen isn't just a test. If it launches, it carries twenty-six Starlink V3 satellites into a two-hundred-and-seventy-five kilometer orbit.
The broader Starlink picture reinforces how much pressure that puts on the timeline. The constellation passed eleven thousand one hundred and thirty-nine operational satellites this week after the Group fifteen dash twenty-seven mission added another twenty-seven.
While SpaceX waits on the FAA, China completed something worth paying attention to. Between September fifteenth and seventeenth, Chinese launch teams put six rockets into orbit from three different sites in forty-five hours.
The contrast with Europe is sharp. Ariane 6 is dealing with a turbopump anomaly detected after an August launch, and the impact on the schedule has been severe.
Two things to track from here. The FAA decision on Starship Flight Fourteen is the immediate one.
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