On a forthcoming catch attempt:

The whole team is feeling pretty good about it. The water landing for b11 was very accurate.

https://x.com/_DylanSmall_/status/1807076803753955341

It’s over for you now

This is comically high. I wish I had any balance to bet on this lmao

Can you say more?

Musk said he thinks SpaceX “should” try a catch next flight. (Who knows if the full team will agree/capitulate.)

There are at least three reasons to think the first booster landing is more likely to succeed for Starship than Falcon: (1) They will be doing it on land, not a bobbing ship. (Falcon succeed at it’s first attempt on land, after 2 ocean failed attempts.) (2) The Starship and Falcon boosters are quite similar, although very different scale, so they can leverage the past 5+ years of Falcon booster landing experience and software. (3) The willingness to risk a tower would suggest SpaceX has high confidence.

We should expect at least three more Starship launches this year under a pretty conservative expectation that time between flights drops to 2 months, so (if Musk gets his way) that’s three attempts.

Oh, and they seem to be rapidly building a second tower, which many think will initially be a dedicated catch tower. https://x.com/BocaChicaGal/status/1801404528924717524

I'll just address each of your points:

1. I don't see this being a major selling point since we're talking about a new method that requires way more accuracy than Falcon 9. Even today, whilst super consistent Falcon 9 doesn't have the accuracy that Starship requires. Based on the dimension of Falcon 9 legs (8-9m long) they have an approximate landing circle of 16m-18m diameter (This assumes that SpaceX aim for the middle of the landing zone which I think is a pretty fair assumption). Starship requires 10x greater precision. This is likely possible to achieve long term, but to argue they're going to achieve this on their first flight seems completely unreasonable.

2. Yes I agree

3. They're building a second tower for catching because they likely don't want to risk damaging critical infrastructure. Cost of not launching for 3-8 months due to destruction of critical infrastructure is a lot more than cost of building a second redundant tower.

As an additional note, SpaceX used a 360 degree camera to record the booster water touch down. I think that we can safely say they weren’t that sure where it was going to land and just had a general vicinity in mind

Thanks. We don’t have to think they will hit it on the first try (personally I put that at like 40-50%). They have a ~97% landing success with Flacon 9, and I believe the few failures are from things like engine failures, not exceeding the landing circle.

I think maybe you’ve misunderstood my first point slightly. I wasn’t calling the slight inaccuracy a failure, I’m saying that Falcon 9 consistently lands, but doesn’t have the required precision that would be required of a Starship chopstick landing.

And assume that Starship does fail on first attempt. How long does it take to rebuild a whole catch system?

Fwiw Superheavy can in theory hover. Falcon 9 can't. That's my most important reason to think that higher landing accuracy is not that far off.

Of course they don't want to hover cos it wastes propellant, but still.

Second reason is that the arms move decently fast left and right so they might use that for a few meters of adjustment sideways, though I'm not sure if they're planning to use that. They already have meters of margin towards/away from the tower by having long shock absorbers all along the arm. Altitude and roll are the easiest things for the booster to control so I'm not worried about those. So there are in fact good reasons to think this landing is easier than falcon landings, even early on. Otoh some of the harder things are new, and the consequences for failure are higher.

I think maybe you’ve misunderstood my first point slightly. I wasn’t calling the slight inaccuracy a failure, I’m saying that Falcon 9 consistently lands, but doesn’t have the required precision that would be required of a Starship chopstick landing.

I did understand this, I was just too compact in my reply. What I am arguing is that accuracy is generally given by a distributions that falls off smoothly. If Falcon can land within a 17-meter circle 99% of the time, I expect it is landing within a 5-meter circle 70% of the time. (In principle this could be checked by video.)

Here I was thinking IFT-4 flight success was already factored into the price

@NGK Big limit order up.

@NGK 10000 at 55%

if anyone wants it.

Emotion arbitrage

Elon just said the odds for catching the booster this year are 80 or 90% (https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1776669097490776563 at 11:30)

@dp9000 We know the Musk time dilation factor is about 3.8, do we know the Musk probability inflation factor? Anyone tracking his calibration curve?

I have a fairly hard time believing the odds are that high. It seems to me that SpaceX's "move fast and RUD things" approach has to be taken down a gear for the chopstick catches, because destroying their only launch tower would be an unacceptable setback. They must have high confidence in success before even attempting a catch, which means more simulated catches in the ocean to validate everything first. I think this means we should assume a slower timeline than would otherwise be typical for SpaceX.

I know they're building more launch towers, but they take a long time to build and will still be very valuable, I don't think they'll be wanting to treat any as disposable for tests like the vehicles currently are.

So whilst I believe Musk's "if the virtual catch succeeds, we'll try a real one", I think it'll likely be several more flights before that precondition is satisfied.

They're doing the fourth flight in May, which leaves seven months in the year. I don't think they'll be launching every month, despite their ambitions, I think it'll be closer to every second month. So if they're to attempt a catch this year, that's maybe four or five more launches from now for them to be confident enough in the landing to give it a go and risk destroying the launch tower. Starting from basically scratch - we haven't yet had a successful landing burn relight, and control of the booster during its descent was poor in the last flight.

I don't want to look it up to cite how many landing attempts it took to land Falcon 9, since they have a lot of experience now and the knowledge from Falcon 9 is going to transfer to SuperHeavy - it wouldn't take them as many landing attempts to achieve the same thing with a new vehicle. But landing on chopsticks seems more to require more precision, so neither would you want to use Falcon 9's landing attempt timeline as an upper bound.

Best of luck to them though, I'll be super excited to see it when it happens.

@chrisjbillington Spreadsheet that calculates it to 3.8 also doesn’t account for the fact that there are still many years between now and the completion of some of the timeline predictions he has made in the past. Such as Starship missions to Mars in 2024 etc. That could easily be 8+ years away pushing the dilation factor up.

@NGK Yeah I don't take the 3.8 too seriously. For one, what you said. For two, it's clear that his near-term forecasts are much less bad than his longer-term ones. E.g most do think IFT-4 will launch next month, and if it doesn't it'll probably be the month after, so Musk time is 1× to 2× on these shorter timescales. So it's worse than 3.8 on longer timescales, and better on short timescales.

@NGK 5k if anyone wants to take the other side

@NGK Omnomnom

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@SlipperySloe that argument applies to super heavy too! It also doesn't have legs or plans to add them.

No you can't delete comments, but people usually edit them to "[deleted]" or similar.