alt Hacker NewsLaunching only 26 Starlink v3 satellites is a disappointingly small number. That's about ~52t or half the block 3 advertised payload capacity of 100t. Elon said on the Q3 earnings call that flight 14 carrying 26 V3 Starlinks was only about half loaded, so apparently the ship can launch twice as many.
I'm curious why they don't fully load it, I can speculate:
0) starship is still in testing, they don't want to change too many variables from flight 14 and add 50t of payload.
1) lower payload gives them more options in engine-out situations. On flight 14, both booster and ship had engines fail.
2) derisking for ship failure, each Starlink sat costs ~$1.2m, and losing $30m of satellites hits less hard than $60m if orbital insertion fails.
3) the dispenser installed on ship 42 only fits 26 sats, and increasing this would require a hardware modification and possible delays.
4) Starlink v3 manufacturing is delayed and they don't have enough units, which I find doubtful given Starship is years late and they should have a backlog of v3s waiting to launch.
5) block 3 has worse performance than expected and can't reliably deliver 100t to orbit. Recent comments that raptor 3 can only reliably deliver 230t of thrust instead of 280t support this. I speculate SpaceX is running raptor 3 >230t on booster ascent, which is why we keep seeing engines failing. This should be resolved by block 4 or 5 with raptor 4.
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I think it's likely to be 0-2: just de-risking in a program still characterized as testing; or at least I understand it to still be thought of as a test program.
I can absolutely see not wanting to change too many variables while they're working out the full, targeted flight profile. I can also see, with sufficient confidence, that they'd make the line between test/production a bit fuzzy with carrying production payloads rather than mass simulators. Trade-offs... not much else to say.
For Starlink v3, I could absolutely see them delaying production starts until the capability to actually deliver them was closer to reality without regard to backlogs and schedule delays: why tie up capital in satellites sitting in a warehouse? Especially if you're also improving designs, adjusting those designs for new realities/tech/etc. getting ahead of that game would (my gut feeling) have more costs than benefits.
The derisking argument seems unlikely. They're either putting $30M of extra satellites at risk, or guaranteeing the loss of ~$10-15M worth of launch capacity by letting it go unused. If the satellites are that cheap, that would suggest a very low confidence in their rockets that isn't really warranted. (Granted, the value of that launch capacity is probably less once they get Starship actually operational).
I'll pick 0, 1, 5, and
6) Starlink v3 is itself new and nearly untested. Launching a lot of v3.00 models, then discovering that they really need to be upgraded to v3.01 to fix various hardware issues, is not a win.
>Launching only 26 Starlink v3 satellites is a disappointingly small number. That's about ~52t
Which makes it the third heaviest orbital payload in all of history.
Funny thing to be disappointed about.
If you assume Starship is a clusterfuck, it all makes sense. They will be able to meet their promised payload capacity after maybe the fifth full redesign of their engines.
dude, it was literally the first orbit launch
be glad it wasn't mass simulators
IIRC they mentioned recently Raptor 3 while being cleaner and lighter can't run at higher thrust than Raptor 2 safely. And hopefully Raptor 4 should be able to do that.
Until then all the system level performance estimates that expected the higher thrust per engine need to be revised back.