Resolves yes if Starship/Superheavy successfully deploys at least one Starlink satellite in a nominal orbit during 2024. The satellites don't need to function as long as they are deployed from Starship.
For a similar market but for commercial payloads, see this one: https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/first-starshipsuperheavy-commercial
Related questions
Elon is the last person to shy away from making bold timeline claims. Even he specifically pushed against the idea of starlink launches this year. I genuinely believe this should be basically at risk-free rate at this point. I just have no mana and all my mana is tied up in positions that I’m the whale lol.
Part of the whole testing is definitely the payload dispensing mechanism; the payload door didn't quite work super well on IFT3, and before you can launch stacks of Starlinks you need to test the door, the pez dispenser, the stacking/racking mechanism, the attitude control during deployment, etc. All that is basically data, but the first time they pop out a Starlink would already count for this market.
That being said, it does seem correct that the percentage for this market is lower now than it was before.
@Mqrius The flight went as I expected. My bets in the other IFT-4 markets were mostly Yes for successful flight attempt. I think most likely outcome for the rest of 2024 is 2 more flights of starship, and it seems that IFT-5 will not be carrying Starlinks. So that leaves IFT-6.
Uh oh
Watson-Morgan said SpaceX is not planning to attempt a Raptor engine restart on the next Starship test flight. Eventually, SpaceX must demonstrate this capability for future Starships to drop out of orbit and return to Earth, or to head to the Moon and take off from the lunar surface.
Achieving an in-orbit engine restart—necessary to guide Starship toward a controlled reentry—is a prerequisite for future launches into a stable higher orbit, where the ship could loiter for hours, days, or weeks to deploy satellites and attempt refueling.
@chrisjbillington Why do you think this is? Because the reason Lisa Watson-Morgan gave doesn't fully make sense to me:
"We’ve got to get the other fundamentals right first. If we can't light all 33 engines on the booster, and if we can't light all six engines on the ship, then we're going to have trouble getting to where we need to go," she said. "So it's basically a building-block approach."
But they've successfully lit all 33 booster engines for two flights in a row now, they've successfully lit all 6 ship engines for two flights in a row, and iirc the only engine failure in the last flight was the booster landing burn which was likely more a result of the booster losing control than the fault of the engines.
Plus they had a simulated deorbit burn on the cards for ift-3 despite the engines being less well proven then, so to now say they're not planning one for ift-4 because they want to make sure the engines are good first doesn't really make sense to me?
But then if not that, is there a different reason?
@Nat it doesn't make a lot of sense unless the reporter is getting confused about which quotes are relevant to what. The above quote seems out of place.
It would make sense to say you don't want to do a simulated deorbit burn or door tests if you want to focus on re-entry - a screwup of the former could make your attempt at the latter a non-starter - we saw this in IFT-3. And it would make sense to talk about not bothering with a Starship landing relight because it's not a priority or whatever (so maybe some of the quote is about a landing relight?)
It might also make sense (I'm guessing) if the mission was simplified in order to get a launch license faster - having not solved the problems with the previous launch that might be held up by a mishap investigation (I am not familiar with how these things work so grain of salt).
These would be my guesses for other reasons, assuming the above quote is just out of place and not relevant.
@chrisjbillington Ah yeah that would potentially explain it, wish either the author or Watson Morgan had a twitter account or something we could tweet at to ask lol. But yeah your other ideas for possible reasons they're not doing a re-entry burn make a lot more sense to me.
Thanks for the detailed and well thought through answer btw!
@NGK I think probably three more launches this year, two of which are likely to be orbital. Be pretty surprised if they do an orbital launch without deploying something, and be pretty surprised if it's not starlinks.
Less confident than before because the cadence between launches isn't speeding up as much as I previously thought it would, given we're now looking at June for IFT-4. There were 7 months between IFT-1 and IFT-2, then 4 months until IFT-3, and looks like 3 months-ish between IFT-3 and IFT-4. Not sure if we can bank on much more acceleration of that cadence this year, so that doesn't leave tonnes of chances to get it right. Nonetheless took your order!
@esusatyo Why would they need 5+ launches before they can carry satellites?
Simple answer is that the tests are reaching the point where we expect attempts at getting to orbit to succeed, and starlink satellites are a "why not deploy a whole bunch of them if you're going to be flying to orbit anway?" kind of thing.
Starlink-deployment hardware is being tested in the upcoming flight, so this is clearly something they're aiming for soon. And starlink satellites are cheap and easy test payloads that nobody will miss much if things go wrong - so it doesn't matter if the primary purpose of a flight is "testing" or not - that's not really a clear distinction when you have ready-to-go payloads that you're wanting to launch thousands of to space anyway.
Getting re-entry and landing working is going to require a whole lot more testing, so they might as well deploy heaps of starlink satellites in the meantime to make those flights pay for themselves at least somewhat, and to get some practice in at deploying satellites rather than that being something brand new that they don't even try until everything else is working.
I think they'd be putting starlinks in IFT-3 if it were going for full orbit, which it only isn't because they haven't proven they can relight and do a de-orbit burn in space, which means going to full orbit is not safe (deorbit would be uncontrolled). In the next flight they plan to demonstrate that they can relight engines in space, meaning we might see full-orbit (and maybe starlinks) on the next flight after.
@chrisjbillington Well until @esusatyo just switched his position I was. 25% conservatively at 2.5:1 odds put it at 65% of balance.
@NGK Fair enough, though I think balance isn't really the right way to think about it - something like net worth minus all your holdings correlated with this bet makes more sense. Otherwise Kelly tells you to never make any bets without building up lots of balance first with loans, which is not really related to what Kelly is about.
