SpaceX's Plan To Make Starship Reenter On Flight 14!

[00:00:00]This week, three things happened that almost no one is talking about. SpaceX just got $86 billion dollar to spend.

[00:00:07]And Elon Musk has now told the world how he plans to spend it. A new spacecraft, the first ship catch on Flight 14 now officially filed, and the kind of production cadence nobody in this industry has ever attempted. Meanwhile, a 21-year-old NASA telescope is falling out of orbit, and a startup is about to send a robot to catch it.

[00:00:32]My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It? Let's dive right in. Starship updates. Let's start with a graphic that Apple Structura published this week because it tells the story better than I can. It shows SpaceX's commulative project expenses on one side and the capital raised by the IPO on the other.

[00:00:52]The numbers are striking. Starling to get to where it is today cost SpaceX roughly $20 billion. The entire Starship program from initial concept through flight 12 costs about $15 billion.

[00:01:05]Falcon and Dragon together roughly $4 billion. Add it all up and you get the cumulative cost of basically everything SpaceX has built. Now look at the other side of the graphic. The IPO last week raised $85.7 billion. Musk reposted Appostura's graphic with one comment. The scale of what is to come has no precedent. That hit me because it's true. SpaceX now has more capital to spend than the entire current company is worth in committed project costs. They built Starlink, Starship, Falcon, and Dragon. all of it for less than half of what they just raised. So, what are they actually going to spend it on? Let me show you what's actually on the SpaceX project board right now. First, HLS, the human landing system for NASA's Aremis program. We covered this in detail last week and many times before, the Artemis 3 Pathfinder is now based on a version 3 Starship with a docking adapter. That development continues. Second, the SpaceX Luna base. SpaceX has been openly talking about its own permanent presence on the moon independent of NASA. Ships landing, ships taking off, ships building infrastructure on the lunar surface. That requires fleets of vehicles. Third, the million satellite AI compute constellation. SpaceX wants to put 1 million satellites in orbit dedicated to AI training and interference workloads. Compute in space powered by solar. No cooling problems, no electrical grid bottlenecks. That is a project on a scale that requires Starship to fly constantly for years.

[00:02:45]Fourth, Starlink V3 expanding to as many as 30,000 satellites. The current constellation will be dwarfed by what's coming. And here's the strategic accelerator most people aren't tracking.

[00:02:58]SpaceX acquired XAI back in February 2026. That means all of SpaceX's AI development is now in-house. The compute constellation isn't just a customerf facing product anymore. It's also feeding SpaceX's own AI workloads. The Luna base, the satellite constellation, the AI infrastructure, all of these are vertically integrated. Now, why started as a channel about SpaceX's spaceflight developments, and that will always be the core.

[00:03:27]>> But isn't that what we all love about Elon's companies? What they do can hardly be called the usual way.

[00:03:34]>> But at this point, it's hard to ignore that SpaceX is becoming much more than a launch provider. They are becoming an infrastructure layer for the next decade of technology. AI is slowly changing the world and it does make a lot of things much easier. Speaking of things that keep getting pushed back, you know how launches get scrubbed then scrubbed again until a launch date feels purely theoretical. That is how I treated my own doctor's appointments.

[00:04:01]Yeah, the booking sat on my to-do list and somehow I always found reasons not to pick up the phone. Zark, today's video sponsor, is the service that finally cleared the hold for me. In my case, it was a simple dentist checkup, but I kept pushing it forward because I could not confidently choose a new dentist. Zuck helped me find the right professional. It helped me to take that allimportant step and book an appointment. ZTO is a free app and website where you can search and compare in network doctors near you. There are more than 150,000 providers across over 200 specialists in all 50 states. You can read real patient reviews, browse detailed profiles, see actual open appointment slots, and book instantly.

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[00:05:00]So, SpaceX has massively grown and as a telltale sign, a new SpaceX vehicle was unveiled this week. Or more accurately, FAA documents revealed enough about it that we can now talk about this project.

[00:05:14]It's called Project Starfall, and it's a brand new design. Starfall is an uncrrewed discshaped re-entry capsule.

[00:05:21]Picture a flying disc or a hockey park 3.1 m in diameter, less than a meter tall with an empty mass of about 2,100 kg and a payload capacity of up to 1,000 kg. The top plate carries cold gas maneuvering thrusters. The bottom is a jettisonable heat shield. Parachutes handle the actual landing with a controlled Pacific Ocean splashdown.

[00:05:45]This is obviously not a Dragon replacement. Dragon is crew capable, complex, expensive, and optimized for longduration missions and astronaut return. Starfall is the opposite.

[00:05:57]Simple, mass-roduced, optimized for cargo return at high volume. So, what's it actually for? Two main purposes.

[00:06:05]First, inspace manufacturing. Companies want to produce high value items in microgravity, things like pharmaceutical compounds, protein crystals, semiconductors, and advanced materials.

[00:06:18]then return them to Earth for sale. And right now, that market is bottlenecked by return capacity. Starfall fills that gap. Second, point-to-point rapid cargo delivery, including potentially military applications. There's been growing interest in rocket-based cargo delivery for timeritical supplies. Starfall can act as the re-entry vehicle in that architecture. Launch is flexible.

[00:06:43]Starfall can fly as a payload on Falcon 9 or on Starship. And the first demonstration mission called Starfall Demo has an actual flight plan we can talk about. Per the FAA operations plan advisory, the demo is targeted for no earlier than June 21st from Slick 40 at Cape Canaveral. That's like tomorrow.

[00:07:03]It's not entirely tomorrow. It's 2 days.

[00:07:06]The Falcon 9 will fly southeast from the Cape over the Bahamas. The upper stage will insert the Starfall payload into a parking orbit around 180 by 600 kilometers inclined at 56.1° about 8 minutes into flight. Then the upper stage and the payload coast in this orbit for about 2 1/2 hours or roughly 1.5 orbits. The upper stage then performs a de-orbit burn, lowering the perigee into the atmosphere. The Starfall payload jettisonens and the re-entry phase begins about three hours into the flight over the northeast Pacific Ocean. The capsule splashes down approximately 600 m west of Vandenberg, California. So in one mission, SpaceX is demonstrating launch, orbit insertion, extended coast, de-orbit, controlled re-entry, parachute descent, and ocean recovery for an entirely new vehicle class. That is a lot of new capability in a single test flight. The FAA approved environmental assessments and test flights back in May 2026. SpaceX hasn't been heavily publicizing this.

[00:08:13]Most of what we know comes from FAA documents and reporting that initially started back in 2025, but this is real.

[00:08:20]It is coming and it adds another active vehicle to the SpaceX fleet. Who would have thought? A new vehicle. How about the other milestones? Back to Starbase.

[00:08:30]Pad 2 has not been quiet. On Monday, June 15th, SpaceX activated the trench delute system at pad 2. Full duration.

[00:08:38]Everything appears to have gone well.

[00:08:40]And here's the detail worth noting. This was the first time the deluge system had been tested since the launch of flight 12. So, this is not just a routine check. This is SpaceX validating that the pad infrastructure that survived flight 12 is still in good working order for flight 13. The pad is being constantly exercised with the delute system, the SQD arm, the BQDs, the hold down clamps, all of it being put through its paces ahead of flight 13. Pu is essentially in flight readiness mode.

[00:09:11]The boxes get checked one by one, and that is not going to change for the rest of the year if it goes after SpaceX.

[00:09:17]These aerial images are essential for my reporting. If you're down at Starbase, make sure to pay our official partner, SPI Helicopters, a visit and book a flight. The same views our photographers get. It is unforgettable and worth every penny. Click the card or the link in the description. Help Y and return. Check it out today. Booster 20 has made the trip back from Massy's to the production site. It completed its standard pressure test plus two cryogenic proof tests.

[00:09:45]That is two fewer cryos than booster 19 ran. But if you remember from the block 2 boosters, two cryos is typically the standard. So this is normal. The next steps for booster 20 and meabay 1 are post cryo checkouts followed by grid fin installation and engine installation.

[00:10:01]Then it heads back to pad 2 for static fire and stacking. Ship 40 is the more interesting story. It completed cryo testing back in early May. Then it sat in Meabay 2 doing largely nothing visible from the outside. My read is that SpaceX was deliberately waiting for flight 12 data before committing to any final changes on ship 4. Once the flight 12 results came in, they made their calls and now ship 40 has its three sea level Raptor 3 engines and three vacuum Raptor 3 engines installed. While ship 40 and booster 20 are preparing to fly, the production line behind them is moving forward at full speed. Early this week, ship 42's nose cone was stacked on top of the payload bay inside Staractory. That's typically the final stacking step before a nose cone gets rolled out of Star Factory and over to Mega Bay 2 to be integrated with the rest of the ship. So, ship 42 is about to make its journey out of Star Factory and into the production bay. Take a moment to picture what this means. Right now, three ships are in active production stages. Ship 40, ready to roll for static fire. Ship 41 fully stacked and progressing and ship 42 with its nose cone just completed. And let's not forget about the boosters. There are two. Booster 20 preparing for its final pre-flight gates and booster 21 being built behind it. Three ships, two boosters, all moving forward in parallel. That's the production cadence Shotwell was talking about when she said monthly flights after flight 13. And here's the headline data point of the week. We have an FCC filing for a Starship orbital return demonstration on flight 14. This is exactly what Shotwell said at the IPO. Flight 13 is another suborbital test. Flight 14 is the orbital injection mission and includes the first ship catch attempt. The FCC filing confirms it operationally. SpaceX is filing communications authorizations for a ship returning to Starbase. This is where ship 41 will shine. Ship 41 has already received both aft flaps and is getting ready for its own cryo testing at Masses. The vehicle that's going to become the first Starship ever caught at the tower is right there. We can watch it being prepared in real time. So if Shotwell's prediction holds, here's the timeline. Flight 13 sometimes in early July, booster 20 and ship 40. Another suborbital profile validating the changes SpaceX is making to Raptor 3 and to the version 3 architecture in general. Flight 14 beginning of August.

[00:12:33]Booster 21 and ship 41. Orbital injection and the first ever ship catch attempt at the tower. This is the flight that proves Starship can come home.

[00:12:42]Flight 15 beginning of September. Likely ship 42 with whatever booster is ready by then. Another full mission profile with the program now genuinely operational. This is what running a launch program at scale looks like. Not just hardware moving through bays, but a complete operational tempo where the production line, the test campaign, the pad, and the mission planning are all running in lock step. We came back from a 221-day gap between flights 11 and 12.

[00:13:11]The next gaps are likely to be measured in weeks, not in months. Star is speeding up again. Let's go. Two questions. First, does ship 41 actually land cleanly on the chopsticks on its first catch attempt? Or do we see an almost but not quite first time and a cleaner result on flight 15? And second, what do you make of project Starfall?

[00:13:32]Useful new capability or a project nobody asked for. Drop both answers below. I'll be reading every single one.

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[00:14:14]NASA is about to attempt a very special rescue mission. Picture a 21-year-old telescope slowly falling out of the sky.

[00:14:22]The telescope is the Swift Observatory.

[00:14:25]It launched all the way back in 2004, and it has a fascinating job description. Be the 911 dispatcher for gamma ray bursts. These are the most violent explosions in the cosmos, and they could actually be dangerous for Earth as well. Whenever Swift catches one going off, it sounds the alarm. In response, a wide array of telescopes all over the world swing toward the right patch of sky to investigate. It has been doing this job for two decades. But now it is in trouble. The situation is like this. Swift sits in low Earth orbit.

[00:14:59]While this is already officially in space, such an orbit isn't truly empty.

[00:15:04]There is still a faint amount of atmosphere up there. And even though it is very thin, it still creates drag.

[00:15:11]Under normal circumstances, this is a very slow process. But when the sun's having periods of heightened solar activity, that drag is increasing. This is what happened to Swift. It has started sinking faster than anyone expected or planned for. The sinking is now serious enough that if Swift was left alone, it would re-enter and burn up later this year. NASA had a tough choice to make. One was to accept the fact and let it go. After all, that is the way most missions come to an end.

[00:15:39]But there was a second option. Try something new, something nobody's actually pulled off before. NASA chose that second option. So, the assignment is genuinely wild. Build a custom robot, fly it up into orbit, and have it rendevous with Swift. Once there, grab a satellite that was never designed to be grabbed. It has no handles, no docking port, nothing. But the mission requires it to be secured and then hauled back into a higher orbit, all without damaging the telescope. Not that long ago, last September, NASA handed a contract to a startup from Flagstaff, Arizona, Catalyst Space Technologies.

[00:16:18]The company designed a robot called Link. All while being under enormous timeline pressure. The mission called for a ridiculously fast development from contract to launch in about 8 months.

[00:16:29]This timeline, I mean, 8 months is the part that made many eyes in the space industry go wild. But NASA and Catalyst had no choice. This clock is set by Swift's descent, not by anybody's comfort level. Let's have a look at how they pulled it off. Catalyst ran Link through vibration and thermal testing at NASA GDARD this spring. After these tests, it was shipped to Wallops to meet its launch vehicle for integration. In this day and age, the launch vehicle question would have had a good chance to be answered by a Falcon, either 9 or heavy. But in this case, NASA and Catalyst chose a rocket that is easy to have missed. An exotic, almost forgotten concept. So, what exactly are they strapping this satellite rescue robot to? The Pegasus XL. And it's one of the strangest, coolest rides in the whole launch business. Because it doesn't take a pad, it takes off from a plane.

[00:17:23]Pegasus is not a new idea. It first flew all the way back in 1990. It was designed by orbital sciences which is now a part of Northrop Grommit. There is one accomplishment that can never be taken away from it. It was the first air launched rocket to successfully reach orbit. The first to prove that giving a rocket a head start by launching it from an airplane works. Behind this concept is the idea that by launching horizontally from an airplane at altitude, you could save on a lot of propellant. During a regular ground toorbit rocket launch, the vehicle has to go from a vertical standstill to a circular orbit. This is a lot closer to horizontal than vertical orientation.

[00:18:05]Also, the air is the thickest at ground level, causing the biggest air resistance or drag. The early moments of a launch are when the rocket has to work hardest and in the process requires an incredible amount of thrust to even get off the ground. This thrust obviously has to come from its engines burning through massive amounts of propellant.

[00:18:25]An airplane has a completely different design philosophy. It benefits from its large wings which provide lift. In its natural habitat, an airplane can operate much more efficiently than a rocket. But this area of operation is restricted by the atmospheric density. Once the air gets too thin for the wings to provide enough lift, the airplane cannot climb any further. This leads to the idea of taking the best of both worlds and combining them into an air launched rocket system. An airplane carries the rocket to around 12 kilometers, or since it is an airplane, 40,000 ft. That plane's got a name that will put a smile on Star Trek fans, Stargazer. The first ship Jeanluke Peicard commanded. This stargazer is a modified Locky Tristar.

[00:19:11]It hauls the rocket up tucked under its belly. It releases it in mid-flight and for about 5 seconds, the Pegasus is simply falling. Then the first stage lights. A little delta wing on its back bites into the air for lift and steering and the thing pitches up and heads for space. There is no launch tower, no countdown clock ticking on a pad, just a rocket dropping out of the sky and deciding to go up instead of down.

[00:19:37]Pegasus XL is a stretched and beefed up version of the original design. It is just short of 18 m long and has three solid fuel stages with an option for a fourth stage when needed. This liquid propellantpowered stage can be used to fine-tune the final orbit. It shares a trait with all the other solidfueled rockets. Once it is lit, it burns. There is no throttling at back and no easy shut off. And there is another drawback with Pegasus XL. Besides the extra-large name extension, it is actually rather small. The payload capacity to LEO is about 443 kg. By modern standards, this is tiny. Still, it can be ideal for delivering a single midsized satellite.

[00:20:21]There is a catch with Pegasus on top of the smalish capacity. Unfortunately, a big one. This rocket is expensive.

[00:20:30]NASA's Icon mission used Pegasus in 2019. It came in at $56 million for a single flight of a rocket that lifts under half a ton. Yikes. This comes down to a brutal price tag per kilogram.

[00:20:44]$126,411.

[00:20:48]Yeah. Which is precisely why it nearly went extinct. Its last flight was a military mission back in 2021, the first mission after Icon. Ever since then, it has basically been parked in its hanger, awaiting an uncertain future. So, the Swift Boost is a real comeback. After roughly five quiet years, one of the last Pegasus XL's still in the inventory gets pulled out of storage for exactly the kind of job it was always best at.

[00:21:16]flying one precious payload to one specific orbit on a tight schedule dropped from a plane over the Pacific.

[00:21:24]An old almost abandoned rocket resurrected for one more moment of glory. But why even bother? In this very specific mission, the Pegasus launch system has a huge advantage over regular rockets. The Stargazer aircraft can fly out over the Pacific and drop the rocket from a position chosen to match Swift's specific lowincation orbit. A conventional rocket is locked to whatever flight path its fixed ground pad allows. This superior flexibility allows Link to reach the right orbital plane much more efficiently, saving propellant otherwise wasted in maneuvers needed to catch up with Swift. The remaining Pegasus inventory was already in an advanced state of integration, which fits a mission where the clock, not cost, is calling the shots. NASA's own framing was simply that Catalyst picked it based on the mission's orbital and programmatic needs as the best way to reach Swift in time for the boost.

[00:22:20]The whole campaign is staged out of Quoine atal out in the Marshall Islands.

[00:22:24]It's set to launch later this month.

[00:22:26]Here's the sequence. After the Pegasus XL drops it into an orbit close to Swifts, Link separates and uses its own propulsion system to make its way to Swift. This process takes about a month.

[00:22:38]During this cruise, it runs on xenon ion thrusters. The same xenon ion thrusters Link will use for the critical moments of the mission. The spacecraft approaches Swift until LA guided robotic grippers can do their job. Remember the missing docking hardware? Catalyst built a workaround. It relies on a custombuilt robotic capture mechanism that attaches to a feature on the satellite's main structure without damaging sensitive instruments. Mechanically, Link uses its three arms to clamp onto Swift. The vehicle itself is just about 1 and a half meters tall and weighs in at roughly 350 kg. Once clamped on, Link takes about another several months to boost Swift to an ideal altitude before it lets go. The reason it's months, not minutes, is the propulsion type. Ion thrusters are extremely fuel efficient, but very low thrust. So Link essentially nudges the combined stack upward continuously over a long arc rather than firing a powerful burn. One of the oldest assumptions in this business is that a satellite is disposable. That when it runs low or drifts down, you shrug, write it off, and build a new one. NASA and Catalyst are betting against that. Betting that you can just go up there, grab the thing, and give it a second life on a deadline with a robot. All developed in under a year.

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