Most of the people who hate Musk and wish him gone do so because they are self-involved lefties with defective mental processes high on baseless anger, envy and resentment. Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to actually think about much of anything – it hurts their widdle noggins.

Jeff Wright,

The replacement of Viasat by Starlink on United’s 1000-plus-plane fleet will be a process rather than an event, but, yes, the process has now started. That was a big win for SpaceX. I suspect more will be coming, and mostly at Viasat’s expense.

Peter Francis,

Your surmise is correct, it’s a matter of payload mass and/or orbital destination. The Starlink missions go to low orbits, but they’re also packing absolutely maximum load-outs so they need the drone ships to catch the boosters and the 2nd stages need the full-sized MVac engine bell. Missions with much lighter loads also need drone ship booster landings if they are going to sufficiently high orbits or are bound for deep space. A few fairly rare such missions even require a completely expendable Falcon 9 launch. Lighter payloads going to relatively low orbits can be launched with enough propellant in reserve to allow a return-to-launch-site (RTLS) landing on one of the LZs. Some such missions can even use the “shorty” Mvac engine bell which gives up a bit of performance in return for requiring only about 1/3 as much expensive alloy to fabricate.

The Viasat Vampire has been staked.