Now Playing
Upper Stage Caught From Orbit: Starship Flight 15 & the ISS Gap
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX made history by catching Starship's orbital upper stage — a first that rewrites the economics of space access. Plus: Voyager 1 hits one light-day, the Louisiana spaceport lawsuit, and NASA's narrowing crew gap.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX caught an orbital rocket's upper stage for the first time in history on Saturday, and the implications stretch well beyond the landing pad. Flight 15 of the Starship program ended with the massive upper stage returning from orbit and being grabbed by the mechanical arms at Starbase, Texas.
The mission ran for twenty-two hours. Starship deployed twenty-six next-generation Starlink V3 satellites and completed fourteen full Earth orbits before returning.
The SpaceX and NASA relationship is getting more complicated in parallel with this progress. SpaceX plans to wind down Falcon 9 and Dragon by twenty twenty-eight as Starship ramps up.
On the expansion side, SpaceX's proposed Louisiana spaceport near Vermilion Parish, a facility with a projected value around one hundred billion dollars, has been approved. Construction is targeted to begin before the end of twenty twenty-five.
One more number worth sitting with. On November fourteenth, Voyager 1 crossed a distance of sixteen billion miles from Earth, making it the first human-made object to travel one light-day from the Sun.
The near-term watchpoints are clear. How quickly SpaceX can inspect and re-fly the recovered Starship upper stage is the first real test of the reusability claim.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.