July 13, 2026 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Note: X now requires log in to view videos. You can get around this by clicking on the three dots at the top right to get the embed code. Ask for the code for an “embedded video.” The video will then be available for watching.
- A tour of Varda’s factory
Reader Cotour already linked to this in an earlier comment. I want to make sure all my readers see it. It is excellent.
- Second launch attempt of China’s Zuque-3 rocket planned in August
The first launch succeeded in putting its payload in orbit, but the 1st stage crashed in hitting its landing zone.
- China reveals it is developing an upgrade of its Long March 10B that just recovered its first stage
Dubbed Long March 10C, its first and second stages would be methane-fueled. My guess is that the Chinese government is essentially expropriating the methane development done by its pseudo-company LandSpace in developing its Zuque-3 rocket.
- An image of India’s Gaganyaan Crew Module Simulator
Jay correctly notes: “No copy of Soyuz’s instrumentation. A mix of physical buttons and touch screens, just like Dragon.”
- On this day in 1963, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched the first GAMBIT-1 photoreconnaissance satellite
The canister holding its exposed film was released in a capsule and then, after parachute deployment to slow its descent, was snatched out of the air by an airplane. This wasn’t the first such reconnaissance satellite, but its camera had a better resolution.
- On July 13, 1969 the Soviet Union launched Luna-15 on a desperate attempt to bring back lunar samples before Apollo 11
The mission was a failure: After reaching lunar orbit the spacecraft did several maneuvers and crashed.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
https://selenianboondocks.com/2026/07/the-cost-of-skipping-bases/
I think Starship development suffered from too many new things attempted at once. Most disagree.
And I’m one of them. What follows is the comment I just posted over at Selenian Boondocks:
Is one to assume the notional Falcon Raptor would, like F9, have a disposable upper stage? Such a vehicle would probably be capable of at least modestly better launch economics than F9 and haul more mass per mission, but it would not enable the kinds of launch cadences and aggregate lifted mass numbers SpaceX would need to deploy Starlink, Starlink Mobile and Starmind on the kind of schedule currently intended. And the lunar and Martian projects would still be entirely out of reach.
Such a vehicle would also still be expensive to develop, every dollar of which expense would be one less that could be devoted to Starship-as-we-have-come-to-know-it which would still be necessary to serve SpaceX’s larger plans.
If the notional Falcon Raptor was, instead, to be the completely reusable vehicle Starship is intended to be, just smaller, then there is no obvious reason to expect it to have been developable on any faster a schedule than Starship itself has been while still being sufficiently less capable that the number of launches to accomplish any given purpose would be a rough factor of five times that of full-size Starship.
Things have, indeed, not gone as quickly as I initially expected. At least two solid years of said delay was due to a succession of unforced errors anent ground support equipment – maybe more. If SpaceX can be faulted for anything it would be for not appreciating the difficulty of the Starship GSE project – and civil engineering chores in general – and not moving much earlier toward on-site propellant production.
But, had SpaceX followed the path you describe, I think it would be materially further away from accomplishing any of its Brobdingnagian ambitions than it is right now.
You would have to show me why it would be so expensive to develop. Also, if Starship is going to be so cheap to operate why that this one would only be slightly better than Falcon9. Also why it would be an interference with Starship development when it was running hundreds of revenue flights annually.
I did say we disagree. I don’t expect to change hard core opinions. I do want to put my thoughts out there in a place that’s not buried under a landslide of opposition (here, transterrestrial, NSF) or the sites suffering from MDS. (ars, most mainstream.)
Your notional Falcon Raptor would be expensive to develop and put into production because, just like the actual Starship, a separate factory would be needed to produce it. The Hawthorne mothership is balls-to-the-wall making Falcon 9 upper stages and that would have to continue until a gradual hand-off of function could be made from Falcon 9 to Falcon Raptor. If Falcon Raptor also had a disposable upper stage, a very sizable plant would be required to crank out hundreds of such stages to support your notional hundreds-per-year launch cadence. Said factory would have to be at least as big as the actual Starfactory at Starbase and likely rather larger.
If, on the other hand, the notional Falcon Raptor was to be fully-reusable like Starship, just smaller, all of the same development problems Starship is having and has had would also be visited upon Falcon Raptor as well. So it wouldn’t yet be in service, never mind launching hundreds of times per year.
More to the point, even a fully-reusable Falcon Raptor would be too small to support the sort of Mars – and, now, lunar and Earth-orbital mega-constellation – efforts SpaceX is committed to. It’s going to take thousands of launches of full-size Starships to give Earth its artificial ring of Starmind/Starlink/Starlink Mobile birds, industrialize the Moon and do the same at Mars. A vehicle with a fifth the throw weight of Starship would require five times as many launches to put the same mass into orbit or into deep space.
It is simply, and obviously, a better choice to do what SpaceX has, in fact, done and spend all of that development money on the giant rocket, not an incremental rocket.
I thoroughly endorse your attitude toward posting in places where the commentariat is mostly non-woke and capable of rational argument. For me, that’s Rand Simberg’s Transterrestrial Musings and here. If you know of other such places, please share.
The Falcon9 reportedly cost well under a billion to develop. It’s hard to see why a Raptor powered vehicle would exceed a billion to develop using the well-known Falcon flight, construction, and operational characteristics. If this machine were cheaper to operate than Falcon9 while delivering twice the payload, a reasonable business decision would have been to ramp up the better vehicle.
If one believes the Raptor engine costs of half a million, which I do, then an expendable upper stage should cost in the very low millions. The lower stage should be really cheap to operate if the advantages of methalox would come to pass, and if those advantages didn’t come to pass, then Starship itself is in real trouble.
This notional vehicle would clearly launch the expanded Starlink constellation. Just the Raptors dropped into the Gulf and the Indian ocean during Starship tests to date would have supplied upper stage engine to place 8,000-10,000 heavyweight Starlink birds in orbit. The whole 40,000 could be placed for about the $15B spent to date on Starship development.
Just as Falcon9 cannot be faulted with slowing down Starship development, neither would a Raptor based vehicle.
The mega constellation is the first market that can actually justify Starship development. A million sats will take an enormous vehicle with a high flight rate. Realistically though, Starship has already been the most profitable launch vehicle in history. It was the linchpin for the mega constellation that turbocharged the record IPO. No launch vehicle that I know of has ever shown high double-digit Billions in revenue.
However, I posted this over at Selenian Boondocks for a reason. That is a low volume site now where one can go back and find old discussion fairly easily. If you try that on high volume sites like this one, you need to have really good idea of how and where to search. So that post can easily be found a year or three from now to see how it held up. If I am wrong, it can be shown on the record. If I am right the same.
My current expectation is that Starship will reliably reuse upper stages in the early 2028 timeframe. Rapid reusability a couple of years after that. We don’t have to argue the points, just wait and see. One thing I would strongly prefer on all sites is a backing off of making ersatz factual statements about things that haven’t happened yet. Starship can deliver for $10.00kg or that Starship is a failure are both wrong and dishonest at this time.
The original Falcon 9 cost well under a half-billion to develop, but of course that version was not reusable and far less burly than the current Block 5s. Getting from version 1.0 to Block 5 took significant additional funds and the total likely well exceeded a billion dollars. Falcon Heavy cost another billion and it was much less a challenge, with Falcon 9 already in-hand, than a notional Falcon Raptor would have been.
And the cost of the production facility needed for hundreds of Falcon Raptor second stages annually would have been the same or greater than the several billion SpaceX has expended on Starship production infrastructure. You’re correct about the relatively low cost of notional Falcon Raptor upper stages – the same economics apply to the Falcon 9 upper stage. But that low unit cost would be a product of large up-front production infrastructure expense.
I have no serious quibbles with your notions about Starship’s likely progress toward rapid reusability of the Starship upper stages not being likely to reach effective fruition until 2030-ish. I would quibble only in that I think SpaceX will do whatever refurb is required to start reusing recovered Starships perhaps as soon as later this year. Ship 41 will likely be the first refurb/reuse guinea pig following its notional catch as part of Flight 14 next month. I figure the process of ruggedizing Starships to enable rapid reuse will be a typical 80/20 deal – the first 80% of the job will take 20% of the time and the last 20% of the job wil take 80% of the time. That means post-flight Starship refurb will go from non-trivial to quite modest by the middle of next year, but getting from quite modest to effectively zip will take two or three years beyond that. That will be quite adequate for SpaceX’s needs in the interim.
John hare,
“I think Starship development suffered from too many new things attempted at once. Most disagree.”
I’m one of those who disagrees. Solving a multitude of problems simultaneously is faster and less expensive than solving them sequentially. There is no need to be a serial solver. Several problems have been solved already and are undergoing optimization, and much progress has been made on the long-pole problems. SpaceX now has a much better idea of what they need for their factories and ground support equipment so that everything works together. It is a holistic approach.
It is beginning to look like Starship will go from an initial Power Point announcement to flight operations (although maybe not yet reusable) in just over ten years, which is comparable with modern launch vehicles and very impressive for the revolutionary improvements that come with Starship.
In these ten years, SpaceX has questioned and tested several assumptions and rules of thumb that the rocket industry has operated under. We have already seen other companies emulate some of Starship’s features.
Falcon 9 was a revolutionary disruption to the launch industry, and Starship is an even larger disruption. Ten years ago, there was plenty of skepticism that SpaceX could do what it said its Power Point rocket could do, but we have seen it go further than had been announced back then. That it is taking a little longer to leap all the multitude of hurdles is hardly surprising. They are doing so much more in a similar amount of time than other rocket development programs have done. I have to admit to being surprised that so few people realize what is happening with Starship and its overwhelming advancements to the state of the art. Capitalism in space works so much better than even Robert realized, a decade ago.
We could always compare this private effort to the efforts of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin with their fairly simple suborbital attempts, but let’s not make that comparison and save several inches of comment space. We could compare Starship development with the development of government rockets, but our host and others have already made this comparison.
The strategy that SpaceX used may not be the right strategy for all companies, because SpaceX was able to develop and deploy Starlink in order to help fund Starship. Not all companies can find such a cash cow to help in the development of additional projects. I would say that SpaceX is lucky in this way, but it was the talent to recognize the opportunity and the skill to take advantage of it.
Edward wrote, “Capitalism in space works so much better than even Robert realized, a decade ago.”
Sorry but this is incorrect. Capitalism is functioning exactly as I expected. In fact, I am frustrated in that I believe the government is still holding it back. Without Biden and a lot of environmental red tape, it could have done far more in the past ten years.
Freedom works. Nothing else works better.
If we all agreed on everything, discussing it would be a waste of time. Plus innovation would about stop. My position on Starship is that it will succeed for two main reasons. That Elon/SpaceX has deep enough pockets to weather the storm, and that the brilliance and drive of the organization is currently unmatched. (No competition)
Ditto.
Robert,
Ah, yes. Ten years ago, we expected that by 2020 Bigelow space stations would be served by Dragons and Starliners. Your Capitalism In Space paper paints a future with Dragons and other hardware that was in development or already in existence. Neither of us expected that in only ten years any commercial space company would develop such critical skills, advanced capabilities, new materials, and new technologies as seen on Starship. We expected progress at a pace much faster than happened under the leadership of the world’s governments (a low bar to hurdle), but we are getting advancement of the state of the art in ways no one could have imagined, including the engineers who are now making it happen.
What I meant in my comment is that you hadn’t predicted a rocket so amazing as Starship. Even its 2016 announcement didn’t really give us just how amazing it would be or how much advanced research would go into it. How could it? Even Elon Musk didn’t know at that time. We saw a large-sized ordinary rocket with the innovation of reusable booster and upper stages and an ability to reach Mars with a crew of a hundred. Even that much seemed to be too much. Today, most people see little more than just that in the Starship design. No wonder they think it is taking too long to develop. Ten years ago, it was unimaginable that Starship would be winning the battle with the rocket equation or have an engine so lightweight that experts thought it was incomplete.
We have seen that people cannot imagine a reusable launch vehicle that is also as capable as the Saturn V with a turnaround time so short that the Super Heavy booster can relaunch daily, at the least. That is SpaceX’s goal. SpaceX attempted many advancements in this one development project, and it has already achieved many of them.
The turnaround time for Starship may depend upon the time it takes to reload it with payload. For a Tanker version, that could conceivably be accomplished atop a Super Heavy booster, allowing for Tanker Starships to also re-fly daily, or more.
We currently look at Starship and think “of course it can do that,” but ten years ago, much of its current capabilities were not just impossible but unimaginable. Up to that point, our experience with rocket development showed us that it was difficult and took a long time or a huge amount of resources. SpaceX is showing us that it is possible to violate accepted rocketry principles in order to do the impossible.
Even now, some people are critical of what they have seen happen. Solving multiple problems simultaneously has resulted in the rapid development of impossible technologies and techniques — but apparently not fast enough for these people. They would rather see an interim rocket, even if it slows down the eventual operations of Starship. Going directly for the Mars rocket did not require the resources of an entire nation to accomplish, as SLS did in order to regress technologies and techniques to those we used six decades ago.
Success is not due to deep pockets but due to brilliance of planning and forethought to generate the funding needed and to limit that needed funding. Success is not due to being unmatched but due to advancing in the right direction. Starship is not the right solution for all our exploration needs, but it has enough leftover capabilities that it can still succeed, for a while, in some areas in which it is suboptimal. Eventually, more optimal equipment and methods will prevail, but for now we seem to already have the solar system at our finger tips. In only ten years of capitalism in space.
We didn’t see that coming this fast. Instead, ten years ago, shortly before the announcement of Starship (under a different name), we predicted Bigelow space stations and Starliner transports, both of which were then hampered by Congress’s slow-walk of the funding for the manned transports — and Bigelow could not last long enough for these delayed transports to become operational. You did predict, however, that capitalist funding and control would result in more productivity than government has done, and you were right, as demonstrated by SpaceX in all its independently-funded areas. This one company produces so much more so much faster than expected that even other capitalist companies are having a difficult time catching up. Varda is increasing its orbital manufacturing business, and worldwide other companies are trying to catch up. Despite our long-held desire for a spinning space station, such as Vast is developing, the concept is technically difficult enough that other companies have yet to dare try the same.
Not every concept has worked out, but so many are now being tried by so many companies that plenty have worked well enough to advance us much farther in a brief decade than we had thought possible. Capitalism in space is young, but it is progressing so fast that it is difficult to predict where we will be another decade from now.
Elon’s reliance on automation is what bugs me.
I am convinced that winged manned SuperHeavy craft could have flown back even with engine problems.
Similar
https://up-ship.com/blog/?p=12948
Look at this ecoverable Saturn IB
https://up-ship.com/blog/?p=5527
I could see that as an upper stage but with a wide fairing/heat shield like a shuttlecock.
Once subsonic, it does a flip then lands with braking rockets.
I think the now routine hover-slam Falcon 9 landings would be very, very risky for human pilots. Notice how SpaceX has never (as far as I can tell) even tried to control those landings remotely.
The Super Heavy chopstick landings might be slightly easier as the booster can actually hover (Falcon 9 can’t), but the catch has to happen so quickly and precisely that I doubt it is humanly possible to do that routinely and safely.
Wings and a crew cabin would probably double the dry mass of the booster for no good reason. As Tom D notes, automation has served Falcon 9 quite well and in a flight regime with far less margin than a catch of a Super Heavy allows. And with no crew aboard, losing a booster is merely a misfortune, not a tragedy.
You continue to spitball cures for non-existent diseases that introduce new real diseases that are worse.