Building a Future for Space 🇺🇸
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JETLAB-X retweeted
Let's go Flight 14! It's time to bring the thunder! Volume up 👆
SpaceX
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JETLAB-X retweeted
JUST IN: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and Boeing will provide a major update Monday on Starliner’s development and plans for regular astronaut flights to the International Space Station.
The Sept. 28 briefing will include NASA’s low-Earth-orbit leadership, astronaut Woody Hoburg and Boeing Commercial Crew chief John Mulholland.
Starliner has yet to begin regular crew-rotation missions following its troubled Crew Flight Test, making Monday’s update one of the clearest signals yet on how NASA and Boeing plan to move the program forward.
The briefing begins at 3 p.m. ET and will stream live on NASA, watch here: go.nasa.gov/4AA9Ii5
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JETLAB-X retweeted
Flight 14 is not another test.
It is the first time the vehicle that will carry us to Mars attempts to stay in orbit.
Stainless steel. 33 engines. 26 Starlinks. Six passes around Earth.
If this works, the bottleneck is no longer physics. It is how fast we can build.
Lacey
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Starship Flight 14 is targeted for Monday, September 28, 2026, from Pad 2 at Starbase in South Texas. It is planned as the first orbital flight of Starship and the first with an operational payload. The attempt is still pending regulatory approval (FAA, and earlier reports also mentioned FCC).
A wet dress rehearsal was completed on Thursday, September 24, and the stack (Booster 21 + Ship 41) has been on the pad since Wednesday night. SpaceX is treating Monday as the earliest realistic window.
Launch window
• 75-minute window opening 7:15 a.m. CDT (8:15 a.m. EDT / 12:15 UTC)
• Closes about 8:30 a.m. CDT
Planned sequence
Ascent and booster (first ~7 minutes)
Liftoff on Super Heavy’s 33 Raptors. Max Q around T+58 seconds. Most booster engines cut off around T+2:20, followed immediately by hot-staging: Ship 41’s engines light and the stages separate. The booster then does a boostback burn, a landing burn, and a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. No tower catch is planned.
Ship to orbit
Ship engines cut off around T+8:11. About 25 minutes after liftoff it is planned to do a short orbital insertion burn, putting it into a ~275 km (171 mile) orbit. If the vehicle is not healthy enough for that burn, SpaceX can keep it on a safer suborbital path toward the Indian Ocean instead.
On orbit (~10-hour mission)
• Target: about six orbits
• 26 Starlink V3 satellites (Starlink Group 31-1) start deploying around T+34 minutes; deployment is planned to finish around T+1 hour 5 minutes
• After several hours on orbit, a single-Raptor deorbit burn around T+8:52
Reentry and ship splashdown
Atmospheric entry around T+9:29. Transonic then subsonic around T+9:47–9:48. Landing burn, flip, engine-out sequence, and splashdown in the Pacific west of Chile around T+9:50. No ship catch this flight.
Why this flight is different
Previous Starship flights were deliberately suborbital. Flight 14 is the first attempt at a closed orbit, the first operational Starlink V3 deployment (each V3 is cited at ~1 Tbps of capacity), and the first planned Pacific splashdown for the ship. Both stages are still targeting ocean landings, not Mechazilla catches. If it goes well, SpaceX has talked about attempting a ship catch on a later flight.
Watch SpaceX’s stream if you want the live count; they have said they intend to keep coverage going through the orbits and splashdown, not just ascent. Weather, range, and the remaining license can still move the day.
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Dima Zeniuk
Dr. Clown, PhD
JETLAB-X retweeted
If Starship had remained on a more conventional material path, SpaceX might never have discovered the same balance between cost, manufacturability, strength, and thermal performance that stainless steel offered for this particular design.✨️
ZaxtR
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JETLAB-X retweeted
Elon Musk on the role of NGOs in increasing homelessness:
The “save the homeless” NGOs are often paid according to how many homeless people are on the streets, thus creating a strong financial incentive for them to maximize the number of homeless people and never actually solve the problem!
The NGOs end up increasing the number of homeless people they manage, because that’s the only way to increase their revenue! Incentives drive outcomes.
“Homeless” is a propaganda word used to describe people on the street who are mentally ill or severely addicted to drugs. The word implies that this is someone who fell a little behind on their mortgage payment and they’re one job offer away from getting back on their feet, which is obviously false if you’ve ever tried talking to a “homeless” person in SF, LA, NY, Austin or anywhere else.
The honest reality is that we need to bring back asylums for extreme mental illness or drug addiction for those who are a serious danger to themselves or others.
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New video just dropped.
People hear that AI and robotics could eventually push the cost of almost everything toward zero, and the first objection is always the same. You still need copper, steel, energy, factories and mines.
Those are the next things the loop automates.
AI designs better machines. Better machines build factories, extract resources, maintain equipment, expand energy production and manufacture more machines. That creates more compute and more productive capacity, which feeds back into better AI.
The copper still has to exist. The electricity still has to be generated. Physics stays exactly where it is.
What changes is everything required to turn a raw resource into something useful.
Finding the deposit, designing the mine, building the infrastructure, extracting and refining the material, transporting it, maintaining the equipment and manufacturing the next machine. More and more of that can eventually happen without paid human labor.
Keep pushing that loop forward and you eventually run into a much bigger question.
What is money actually for when huge parts of production no longer depend on human labor?
I go through the full loop in the new video.
piped.video/10gpWLDmHyo?si=sfso…
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JETLAB-X retweeted
Mars Observer was a robotic space probe launched by NASA on September 25, 1992, to serve as a high-resolution geoscience and climate orbiter for Mars.
Developed and managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( @NASAJPL ), the mission was intended to be the United States' first return to the Red Planet in 17 years. However, the spacecraft failed catastrophically on August 21, 1993, when communication was permanently lost just three days before its scheduled Mars orbit insertion.
Today in 1992, Mars Observer launched from the Cape aboard the fourth and final Commercial Titan III. The mission marked America’s return to Mars after 17 years. Contact was lost just before Mars orbit insertion, but its science lived on in later missions.
@ccspacemuseum
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Built on Earth....designed for a future beyond it
Every Starship flight brings humanity one step closer to becoming a multiplanetary civilization
The most powerful rocket humanity has ever built.....made to carry us beyond Earth
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