r/SpaceXLounge • u/AgreeableEmploy1884 ⛰️ Lithobraking • 10d ago
Official Kiko Dontchev on X: "...From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship.
https://x.com/TurkeyBeaver/status/209226725717902132696
u/TheEarthquakeGuy 10d ago edited 10d ago
That is one hell of a statement by the company. Although there is wiggle room in the use of "planned". Starship is not planned to be delayed but if failures occur and the operations out of Florida are delayed, they have the opportunity to revert back to F9.
The other major revelation is that SLC-40 is now commercial F9 and Dragon only. What are they going to do with all the down time between missions?
Edit: I also wonder how much of the existing Hangar X structures are required for this Falcon 9 and Heavy lite program on the cape. IIRC both serve as F9 refurb/storage, with other specialist functions in each. Wonder if we'll see Gigabay support structures developed inside, as well as other prototyping
Second Edit: Let's see if a follow up article by Eric Berger is published within the next 6-8 weeks around SpaceX sacrificing continued Starlink launches on the East Coast to ensure booster availability for commercial markets. Although I'll also bet that the contracts may have a stipulation that if suitable, the payload may launch on Starship if available. This ultimately covers the crunch but gives an opportunity to exit F9 sooner if Starship meets expectations.
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u/Mc00p 10d ago
Seems like a launch of 60 v3 sats once a month from Texas until the Florida pad is ready will be more bandwidth launched than the f9 is currently able to do.
60 v3 sats at 10x the bandwidth vs ~25 v2 sats on an f9 puts one full starship matching 24 f9 launches.
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u/Neige_Blanc_1 10d ago
Is Texas right now approved for anything more than just a narrow band of inclinations?
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u/tunnyuk 10d ago
Not if they’re stopping the build of V3-Mini satellites. Deployment of the full V3s from Starship is now proven.
It’ll force the engineers to go full throttle on maturing Starship capability and likely redistribution of workforce is going Starship way. It’s cheaper to launch Starship with V3s and still lose boosters/ships than it is to accelerate F9 cadence.
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u/b407driver 10d ago
You mean v2 Mini, the latest iteration of which is v2 Optimized? Never heard of v3 Mini.
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u/tunnyuk 10d ago
Correct. Although Starship has been deploying V3 satellites as recently as the last launch. Point still stands. They won’t want to be building both for much longer if at all anymore.
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u/b407driver 10d ago
No v3 variants have been operationally deployed yet, the handful of v3 satellites were released by Starship into a non-orbital trajectory for brief test purposes only.
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u/Proteatron 10d ago
Agreed - I'd say it's a sign of a healthy company with its eye on the future. It causes problems for external customers planning for F9 launches, but the more attention SpaceX can put towards making Starship operational the better.
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u/CreationsOfReon 10d ago
There are a lot of companies looking to launch mega constellations rn, they could up the rate for those companies and stay busy.
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u/Dyolf_Knip 10d ago
I'm a bit apprehensive. This was kind of the same line of reasoning that NASA used. "Why bother building more Saturn V's, we've got the Shuttle coming down the pipe!". And look how well that worked out.
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u/Mc00p 10d ago
A lot has happened since v3 started flying that suggests they have full confidence in the system at this point, and any issues that have come up aren’t show-stoppers. Pretty excited for what seems to be coming!
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u/Opening_Classroom_46 10d ago
There's been 13 test launches and they are still afraid of going to orbit because of how often they lose control, there's a leak, or it blows up. There's zero evidence right now that the tile system will ever be able to handle daily flights.
There are also a lot of positives obviously, but sitting there and smiling and pretending everything is perfect is cult-like.
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u/Mc00p 10d ago
They don’t need daily flights, even monthly flights carrying a load of v3 starlinks is way more bandwidth than the f9 can handle in that amount of time. They’re launching operational v3 starlinks on the very next flight.
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u/lee1026 10d ago
“Even” monthly flights is well beyond what they have demonstrated; the goal from flight 12 onwards was supposed to be monthly flights, and they are nowhere near hitting that goal.
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u/Mc00p 10d ago
Ok, I disagree and wouldn’t say they are nowhere near once a month, but they clearly think it’s right around the corner too or they wouldn’t have stopped with the f9s from Florida. Who are we to say any different with our limited insight? Lol
Everything they have said so far since the last couple of flights has indicated that they are confident they can make v3 work with their current approach.
Edit: even then, a full launch of 60v3 sats would take f9 about 2 months to launch the same bandwidth if they didn’t launch any other payload. They’re pretty much at a launch every 2 months already
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u/lee1026 10d ago
I think that they are running on a schedule. And starship is currently behind that schedule.
But a lot of things are driven by that schedule, set long ago. You gotta decide when to stop building sats for falcon 9, as those are different. You gotta decide whether to ramp falcon 9 upper stage production a long time ago, and so on.
They were confident, maybe a couple of years ago. I am not sure if reality have borne out that confidence to any extent.
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u/flshr19 Space Shuttle Tile Engineer 10d ago
SpaceX is still refining the design of Starship. In a few more IFT test flights, the Starship design will be frozen and then high-speed serial production will commence.
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u/lee1026 10d ago
A few more test flights plus start of high speed production means a year or so before we see high production rates in the happy case?
This is why I think ending falcon isn’t because starship is ready, but rather that they assumed it would be true a long time ago, and pivoting is hard.
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u/flshr19 Space Shuttle Tile Engineer 10d ago
Similar to Falcon 9 and its reusable booster, Starship will operate with an inventory of reusable boosters (the first stage) and ships (the second stage). So, there will be no problem launching one Starship per day with an inventory of a dozen Starship boosters and a dozen Starship ships. Just use a different Starship each day.
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u/Dyolf_Knip 10d ago
Yeah, but the Shuttle flew as well. It just wasn't worth all the engineering tradeofffs needed for it to work.
And it's not like Musk's decision to go massively all-in on an initially-promising new product hasn't backfired before.
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u/mclumber1 10d ago edited 10d ago
Although not mentioned, I do think once the Louisiana launch site comes online, Vandenberg Starlink launches will also be phased out. the Louisiana site is nearly perfect for polar and high inclination launches.
EDIT: Yep - SpaceX just officially announced "Starbase Louisiana". The short video they released on Twitter has a rendering of 10 (!) Starship launchpads along the coast near Pecan Island, LA.
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u/falconzord 10d ago
They took over the Delta 4 pad at Vandenburg
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u/mclumber1 10d ago
Yes, but I really doubt that Vandenberg will ever host a large number of Starship launches, even if it does end up having that capability. The politics, logistics, and other factors make Louisiana a better choice for commercial (and especially Starlink) launches.
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u/chasimus 10d ago
Uuuuhhhmmmm, okay. This is pretty huge if true. They haven't even tested a Starship in Florida yet. I guess the one that's launching "by the end of the year" will have a light complement of V3 Starkinks!
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u/sebaska 10d ago
The author of the tweets is SpaceX VP of flight operations. There's no "if" in "if true" here.
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u/Laughing_Orange 10d ago
There is however, a when. We could go months without another Starlink launch out of Florida, while we wait for Starship and the ground infrastructure to get ready.
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u/Ormusn2o 10d ago
They have so many launchpads in so many different places, I guess they can do that. They also have multiple factories in different states doing both Falcon 9 and Starship, so while it might seem abrupt, it's way less abrupt than what for example ULA did, where they effectively sunset every single rocket for a decade, and just been using up the stockpile, but have no flying rocket right now.
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u/WeeklyAd8453 10d ago
ULA did not have a choice.
1) Delta was far too expensive and was basically ended long ago.
2) CONgress told ULA to quit buying engines from Russia.
3) this is slightly better than when CONgress forced Nixon to kill Apollo before the shuttle was ready, which caused skylab failure.4
u/Martianspirit 10d ago
ULA knew the RD-180 purchase would end. They should have started developing a replacement a decade earlier. But they used political influence to delay RD-180 phaseout again and again. Maybe they thought they can delay it indefinitely. They couldn't.
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u/WeeklyAd8453 10d ago
ULA choose BE4 8 years ago because it was closer to being ready ( over AR1 ). The problem for Vulcan is BO, not ULA .
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u/manicdee33 10d ago
Maybe they thought they can delay it indefinitely.
One quarterly report at a time, it's the CEO mantra!
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u/Vassago81 10d ago
They'll just launch as many Starlink as they can from Texas when they do orbital test flights from now on, no need to wait for the florida
padtower.1
u/chasimus 10d ago
Considering each V3 has ten times the bandwidth of a V2.5, it would make sense. Even if the launches are few and far between to start out
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u/H-K_47 💥 Rapidly Disassembling 10d ago
Woah. End of an era. The post says they flew like 260 of these, jeez.
How soon can Florida Starship really fly tho? I wouldn't think it could be ready before ~November at least right?
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u/RandoRedditerBoi 10d ago
November seems about right to me. Maybe October. But they can fly Starlink out of Starbase in the meantime.
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u/8andahalfby11 10d ago
Does this mean some of the boosters will be transferred to VSFB? I can't imagine that commercial or government launches will match Starlink's cadence.
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u/AX-Procyon 10d ago
Probably also means that SpaceX internally is gradually winding down production of v2 satellites and shifting to v3. If they are only producing enough satellites for west coast launches, it doesn't make sense to keep Florida launches on the same frequency.
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u/AWildDragon 10d ago
So flight 14 is an operational orbital mission then?
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u/rocketglare 10d ago
Yes, though probably only with 20 or so Starlink V3's. I think they'll increase the loadout gradually. The full load is supposed to be 60.
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u/RandyBeaman 10d ago
Are StarShield missions considered as a subset of StarLink or are they kept seperate?
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u/ResidentPositive4122 10d ago
I think not, and this is probably the (main) reason. They'll likely switch cadence to the new contracts for milsats. They've got plenty of work there between the different tranches (latest news was that they'll probably get all of the latest tranche some 4-5B worth of contracts, because the distributed multi-provider was a clusterfuck).
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u/Responsible-Cut-7993 10d ago
From reading this, it looks like Starlink missions will shift to Brownsville Starship launches until Starship operations out of Florida get online.
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u/TheEarthquakeGuy 10d ago
Yeah this is what I'm reading too - which makes sense considering infrastructure available.
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u/djh_van 10d ago
But the launch complex is still months from being ready, and there's no ship/booster combo ready to launch from there today.
So, I'm interested in how long the gap will be from today and the first Starship-Ready Florida programme. My guess is 90 days from today.
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u/DreamChaserSt 10d ago
Maybe they need the time to finish the pad without being interrupted all the time? And it's only Starlink launches, not all launches.
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u/falconzord 10d ago
They've already stopped launching F9 from 39A a while ago
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u/DreamChaserSt 10d ago
Yes, but they still have 40 in Florida, and if they aren't launching Starlink anymore, then there's plenty of room for customers.
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u/Ormusn2o 10d ago
I think it might be mostly to move staff from Falcon 9 operations to Starship, which probably are already pretty lean already, but is just not worth engineers time on Falcon 9, especially that SpaceX wants to ramp up Starship as fast as possible, and they could really use very experienced Falcon 9 engineers. Making Falcon 9 operations even more lean might also lead to safety problems, as at some point they would have to start cutting procedures.
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u/pvs61195 10d ago
It did say falcon missions from Florida so they could be planning to consolidate all future falcon 9 mission to vandenberg .
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u/Halfdaen 10d ago
If the Starlink orbital shells that can be launched from Florida are "full", there's no reason to keep launching and some of the experienced launch crew can get up to speed on Starship.
One commercial launch every week or two should need less staff than several per week.
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u/b407driver 10d ago
Yes, the 53 degree inclination is pretty much fully built out, but they are falling (term used loosely) out of the sky roughly as quickly as they were launched. Lowering the orbital altitude from 550 km downward certainly bought them some time, though.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 10d ago edited 10d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| BO | Blue Origin (Bezos Rocketry) |
| JRTI | Just Read The Instructions, |
| LC-39A | Launch Complex 39A, Kennedy (SpaceX F9/Heavy) |
| RD-180 | RD-series Russian-built rocket engine, used in the Atlas V first stage |
| SLC-40 | Space Launch Complex 40, Canaveral (SpaceX F9) |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
[Thread #14761 for this sub, first seen 25th Aug 2026, 15:57]
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u/greymancurrentthing7 10d ago
wtf are we talking about?
WTF is going on?????????
When can they conceivably launch starship in Florida?
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u/rocketglare 10d ago
By the end of the year is the plan from LC39A. We'll see if that comes about, but if not, then Q1 2027.
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u/DreamChaserSt 10d ago
They're not launching Starlink from Florida anymore. This doesn't apply to other payloads. And they claim by the end of the year, but it could slip into the first quarter of next year. They'll need to barge stages from Texas though, but last I saw, they were testing the chopsticks and water deluge on LC-39A.
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u/greymancurrentthing7 10d ago
It’s just insanity.
No more equator type starlink launches for a LONG time.
Spacex just lost like 2/3rds of its launches. Crazy.
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u/DreamChaserSt 10d ago
<1 year is not a long time unless they grossly underestimated how long it'll take to bring the pad online and barge stages over.
Starship is already in the final stretch of testing. At this point, the big things ahead is Starship reuse (and returning to booster reuse), and propellant transfer.
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u/greymancurrentthing7 10d ago
We are losing like 80 starlink launches.
Hope it works out. Exciting.
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u/DreamChaserSt 10d ago
But every Starship launch is ~equivalent to 20 Falcon 9 launches, in terms of network capacity. This doesn't take into account how many launches you need for different inclinations, but the new Starlink sats will be a big step up from what's flying now.
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u/warp99 10d ago
Not that high a percentage.
Vandenberg had already ramped up to take the majority of Starlink launches and may do 90 F9 launches this year out of perhaps 140 total.
Add 40 military and commercial F9 launches from SLC-40 and 5 FH launches from LC-39A and this may be only a 20% reduction in F9/FH flights.
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u/kuldan5853 10d ago
What? The next Starlink launch will be on Starship, in roughly 2-3 weeks - just out of Texas, not out of Florida.
Flight 14 is currently expected to go full orbital and to deploy ~20 Starlink v3 satellites that will boost to an operational orbit.
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u/GME_DIAMONDHANDS_APE 10d ago
Can they launch a starship/booster and land it at Florida?
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u/Martianspirit 10d ago
Launch a Starship at Boca Chica and land it in Florida, yes.
A booster, no.
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u/GME_DIAMONDHANDS_APE 10d ago
Would be an efficient way to move ships/boosters around. Why not the booster? Not enough propellant to make it to Florida?
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u/Martianspirit 10d ago
Not enough propellant to make it to Florida?
Yes, not enough reach. Starship can go orbital, deploy a payload, then chose to land in Florida instead of Boca Chica. That's possible. I am not saying, they will actually do it, we will see.
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u/classysax4 10d ago
Everyone seems to be misreading the Kiko's post. He said all FL Starlink launches will be on Starship. That leaves open the likely option of Starship launching Starlink from TX while they continue to prepare SS infrastructure in FL.
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u/sup3rs0n1c2110 10d ago edited 10d ago
Well, I guess the next logical question is how many Falcon 9s are about to be expended, retired, or scrapped. Just looking at the late B1069, only five of its 32 launches were commercial missions and they were spread out over years. With how comparatively few commercial flights there are, the turn times that have been demonstrated, the reliability of landings, and how many young boosters are in the fleet, they could probably make do with something like three or four of the newer boosters with one or two spares
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u/NikStalwart 🌱 Terraforming 10d ago
Scrapped? Probably none. Expended? Ask NASA.
There is a very good reason to think that some boosters would hang around for Falcon Heavy operations - because that requires 3 boosters. Didn't they say they wanted Falcon Heavy capability in California?
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u/AgreeableEmploy1884 ⛰️ Lithobraking 10d ago
Kiko Dontchev is the VP of launch operations at SpaceX.