SpaceX could be a month away from full reusability

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching a replay of Starship’s 13th flight since we now know that it might have been the last suborbital flight of the program. Indeed, after having achieved what looked like a good enough reentry as well as a standard flip, Starship 40 lit three sea level engines to slow down to a halt right before splashdown. As you probably already saw everywhere on social media, Starship did not explode after tipping over, something that was considered to be impossible by many considering that the upper stage is 50 m tall.

A few days later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said two important things on social media:

• Starship will (maybe) attempt a catch on its next flight (which implies the start of truly orbital flights)
• Starship 40 (the prototype that is currently swimming in the Indian Ocean) will be brought back to land.

SpaceX could go from never having brought back a single Starship to having two flown upper stages back at Starbase in the span of a few weeks. (admittedly, one Starship will be a lot wetter than the other one) SpaceX has already shown since version 3’s debut in late May that they were capable of ramping up the production cadence for both ships and boosters. If you add on top of that the soon-to-be operational pad 39A in Florida, the TWO Gigabays, and ships being reused, Starship’s cadence could unexpectedly balloon before the end of the year.

After flight 13, some were worried about the booster side of things. The booster did manage an impressive 33-engine boostback burn right after having flipped 180 degrees, but it did not light all 13 center engines for landing; splashing down a little harder than intended into the Gulf. I believe that this isn’t as bad as it seems for a couple of reasons.

First: SpaceX already proved that they can catch AND reuse the booster. Sure the V3 booster is vastly different but the concept remains the same. It’s not a question of “is it feasible?” anymore. For the milestones, they do not need to rush booster catches.

Second: I feel like SpaceX could (and maybe should?) try for a booster catch on flight 14. (Although it would make a ship catch either harder or straight-up impossible because of timing) Stay with me here; the booster on flight 13 failed to relight 5 engines during the landing burn. This means 8 engines DID relight in those conditions. This could mean that SpaceX can easily understand why those 5 engines did not relight since they got 8 perfect examples of how they could’ve lit.

Let’s also not forget that if this were a catch attempt, the booster would have simply crashed into the dunes, not the tower, since the booster aims for a point next to the tower on final approach. Would having a booster explode right next to your cameras be bad for PR? Yes, terrible even. But you might as well give it a shot because if it goes well, you got yourself a shiny booster you can reuse for a better cadence.

This is just my opinion of course, and seeing how SpaceX has taken a much more “cautious” approach to version 3, it’s still unlikely that they’ll try for a booster catch next flight. The ship catch, however, might really happen, and I believe it will go perfectly. They’ve demonstrated that Starship could flip reliably and could mostly achieve precise landings. (flight 10’s landing looked iffy) Along with the new and improved chopsticks actuators that pad 2 has, I don’t see an obvious reason that would turn flight 14 into a catastrophe.

SpaceX may just be weeks away from being the first ever to achieve theoretical full reusability of their rocket. Once that’s done, that is a whole can of worms you just opened and the world of aerospace will never look back.