LC 36: Flight 14's Real Orbital Shot

MaxOkay, so last time we left you all hanging on a cliff, and I felt bad about it, NGL.

BlakeYou didn't feel that bad. You picked the cliffhanger on purpose.

MaxGuilty. Welcome back to Landing the Moon. I'm Max, that's Blake, and we are still not over SpaceX quietly shelving that ship catch attempt.

BlakeQuietly is generous. They basically hope nobody noticed Booster 21 wasn't grabbing anything this time.

MaxRight. And we ended LC-35 asking, "Okay, is that the smart call or is that a stall?"

BlakeThat question's been sitting with me all week.

MaxSame. But plot twist, we actually have new hardware news to throw at it now.

BlakeWhich changes the math.

MaxIt might. There's a date on the table. Isaacman's own mouth said early September.

BlakeHis own mouth and history, which we should probably remember before we get excited.

MaxFair. So that's question one. Does this thing actually fly when he says it flies?

BlakeAnd question two, the one from last episode, was ditching the catch attempt sober engineering or SpaceX buying itself runway before the Artemis IV numbers get ugly?

MaxTwo questions, one episode, no easy answers yet.

BlakeWait for it.

MaxOkay, so get this. There's actually hardware to talk about now.

BlakeFinally. Tell me what happened.

MaxAll right. Hear me out. Isaacman himself stood up at Kennedy on August 14th and basically killed the late August window.

BlakeKilled it how?

MaxHe's now saying early September for Flight 14. Not August-ish, not end of summer, early September, straight from the NASA Administrator's mouth.

BlakeWhich is the third date this program has given us since June.

MaxFeels like déjà vu, right?

BlakeIt's not déjà vu, Max. It's a pattern. Every time they say static fires are the pacing item, that's code for we don't actually know yet.

MaxSure, but that's literally what he tied it to. Static fire testing is the gate. No clean static fire, no launch date, period.

BlakeWhich is fair if the static fires actually go clean.

MaxOkay, but walk me through why you're this locked in on doubting it. Give me the actual pattern you're seeing.

BlakeIt's simple. Every time this program names a hard date, it's tied to a test that hasn't happened yet. The date isn't a promise, it's a placeholder that moves the second the test doesn't go the way they want it.

MaxSo Todays early September number is really just Todays placeholder.

BlakeTodays placeholder, yeah. Ask me again after the next Static Fire, and it might be a different placeholder entirely.

MaxThats bleak.

BlakeThats just accurate. Im not rooting against them. I just don't update on a date until theres hardware behind it.

MaxLook at you, already hedging before I even tell you what happened.

BlakeIve watched this show before. Remember Flight 13?

MaxOh, don't remind me. That thing aborted at T-0. Like, engines are supposed to be lighting, and instead everybodys just standing there going, "So that didn't happen."

BlakeA scrub at T-0 isnt a footnote. Its the whole reason nobody in this room takes NASA dates at face value anymore.

MaxWhich, fine, thats basically our house rule at this point. SpaceX says a date, we treat it like a rumor until there's actual hardware doing actual things on the pad.

BlakeEvery single time. NASA claims, SpaceX claims, they're both tentative until the vehicle proves it.

MaxEven coming from the administrator's own mouth?

BlakeEspecially then. He's not exactly a neutral party on how this program is going.

MaxHarsh. True, but harsh.

BlakeSo walk me through it. Did anything actually happen or is this just another date on the calendar?

MaxOh, stuff happened. This is where it gets good.

BlakeGo on.

MaxBecause it's not one test we're talking about here, it's two. Two static fires, two completely different vehicles.

BlakeWait, two on the same week?

MaxSame stretch, yeah. And that's the part that actually tells you something real about where this hardware stands. Okay, so vehicle number one, Ship 41. They lit six engines on the ship itself.

BlakeSix out of how many total?

MaxShip's only got six to begin with, so that's a full burn. Tesla Oracle's writeup clocked it at right around 60 seconds.

BlakeA minute's a long static fire for an upper stage.

MaxThat's the point. They're not just checking ignition. They're checking the engines can run long enough to actually get to orbit.

BlakeAnd that happened, then what? They just wheeled it away?

MaxShip stayed put. Booster 21 is the one that rolled out separately for its own pre-launch runs.

BlakeSo two different pieces of hardware, two different test campaigns.

MaxRight. And the booster's test is the bigger number by a mile.

BlakeHow much bigger?

MaxThirty-three engines, all of them on Booster 21 on August 28th.

BlakeThirty-three at once. That's basically the whole first stage lighting up at ground level.

MaxEvery Raptor on that booster, yeah. That's per the reporting out of the Flight 14 slips piece.

BlakeSo six on the ship, 33 on the booster. Somebody's gonna read that as SpaceX contradicting itself.

MaxOh, no, no. That's the exact trap. It's not one test with conflicting numbers. It's two separate vehicles doing two separate jobs.

BlakeThe ship proves it can sustain a burn long enough to matter for orbit. for orbit.

MaxAnd the booster proves every single engine lights together at full thrust, which is the scarier failure mode anyway.

BlakeBecause if you lose engines on ascent, you don't get a second attempt. attempt.

MaxExactly. And both boxes just got checked on different days on different hardware.

BlakeAll right, I'll give you that. That's actually a clean way to read two numbers that look like they're fighting each other.

MaxWait for it, because there's a third thing buried in that same booster report.

BlakeWhat's that?

MaxThey're already talking about a possible tower catch attempt with Ship 41 down the line, even with the ship catch plan we already covered getting shelved for this flight.

BlakeThat's a separate bet for a separate flight, though.

MaxSure, but it tells you the hardware is not the bottleneck anymore. Both vehicles cleared their static fires.

BlakeOkay. Hardware is real. I'll concede that much.

MaxSo what's actually riding on top of it this time?

BlakeThat's my next question. What's it carrying, Max? Because a clean static fire doesn't tell me anything about the payload.

MaxAll right. Check this out. There's an FCC filing floating around naming September 15th as the target for the first operational Starlink V3s riding inside Ship 41.

BlakeRiding inside the ship, not just any old rideshare.

MaxRight. This is the real deal. Production V3s, the ones that are supposed to actually run Starlink's next gen bandwidth.

BlakeAnd Starlink confirmed that themselves?

MaxActually, no. The filing's the only paper trail we've got. Nobody at SpaceX has confirmed September 15th out loud.

BlakeSo we're trusting a regulatory filing over the company that filed it.

MaxPretty much, which given everything else on this show should set off alarms for you specifically.

BlakeIt does.

MaxThere's also a post going around, one of the community trackers guessing flight 14 deploys the first production V3s and throwing out a range of twenty to sixty.

BlakeTwenty to sixty is a shrug with math attached, Max.

MaxEven a shrug tells you something. Nobody's actually confirmed the manifest, not the trackers, not SpaceX.

BlakeWhich is the real problem. We've got a filing with a hard date and a prediction post with a random range, and neither one is SpaceX confirming anything.

MaxCorrect.

BlakeSo is September 15th even realistic given how this program slips?

MaxTechnically, sure. The vehicle's just proven it can fly the propulsion. Whether SpaceX hits an exact calendar date is a different question entirely.

BlakeYou trust the hardware more than the calendar.

MaxEvery time, yeah. This program's missed basically every deployment date it's ever put a number on.

BlakeFine. But if V3 satellites are actually in that payload bay on launch day, that's the first time Starship's carried something that matters commercially instead of just mass simulators.

MaxThat's the part that actually flips the conversation. This stops being a test flight and starts being a business flight.

BlakeWhich raises the stakes if it slips again.

MaxExactly. Now Starlink's roadmap is tangled up with Starship's roadmap whether anybody planned it that way or not.

BlakeAnd where is this all coming from? Just the filing?

MaxThe filing just states the deployment date flat. It's the prediction post connecting the dots, guessing flight 14's the mission, guessing at the satellite count.

BlakeSo one document and one guess. No confirmation.

MaxWhich is exactly why neither number goes in the show notes as fact.

BlakeAgreed. Flag it, watch it, don't quote it as settled.

MaxAnd then get this, the thing everybody actually wanted to watch just got pulled off the board.

BlakeWait, what?

MaxSo the catch didn't just disappear off the schedule. It got pushed out to a few months from now when the original number floating around was late August.

BlakeOne writeup on the delay put it exactly that way. Catch attempt slides from a projected late August window to, quote, "A few months out."

MaxAnd there's at least one other outlet running the same timeline without adding much beyond that.

BlakeRight. No new detail there, just confirmation the date moved.

MaxBut it's not only reporters guessing at this. Musk himself told people SpaceX will try for that first tower catch in a few months.

BlakeWhich from Musk could mean October, could mean next spring.

MaxHistorically, yeah. That phrase has a pretty wide error bar.

BlakeWide enough to drive a Booster through.

MaxBut I actually think slipping it is the right call here, not a dodge. You've got Booster 21 and Ship 41 both fresh off static fires. Neither one has flown a full mission yet. Stacking a tower catch attempt on top of an unproven orbital flight is adding a third way for the day to go badly.

BlakeSure, except SpaceX doesn't usually get cautious just to be cautious. This is the company that tried catching a Super Heavy booster the very first time they went for it.

MaxDifferent booster, different flight profile.

BlakeDifferent how? It's still Starship hardware trying to thread itself into the same tower.

MaxSure, but a booster catch has one clean way to succeed and about a dozen ways to turn into a very expensive fireball at the base of the launch tower. An orbital flight has failure modes too, but none of them take out ground infrastructure you need for the next attempt.

BlakeSo you're saying the downside is asymmetric.

MaxCompletely asymmetric. Lose the booster on ascent, that's bad, but you still have a tower. Lose it in the catch, you might not have a tower for a while.

BlakeIs it though? Or is a few months exactly enough runway to push the number that actually hurts, the Artemis IV math, past whatever this quarter's headlines need to say?

MaxYou think this is stalling.

BlakeI think it's SpaceX buying itself room before anyone has to put a hard figure next to a landing system deadline.

MaxOkay, but walk it forward. Sober engineering call or scheduling maneuver, it lands in the same place. If Flight 14 flies, it's not catching anything. It's an orbital test, full stop.

BlakeAgreed there. That's the real near term target now. Get the stack to orbit clean, worry about the catch on some future flight.

MaxWhich honestly might be the flight that tells us more anyway. Nobody learns what they need to learn from a catch if the vehicle can't even get around the planet first.

BlakeNo argument. Orbit first, showmanship later.

MaxSo strip away the catch entirely, what are we actually left holding?

BlakeWhich brings us to the number that actually matters for Artemis.

MaxPropellant transfer, vehicle to vehicle, cryogenic in orbit. SpaceX hasn't done once.

BlakeNot once? Not even a partial hookup?

MaxNot once. And there's still no uncrewed HLS Starship that's actually landed on the moon.

BlakeThose are the two GAO keeps circling back to.

MaxCSIS put out analysis on exactly this, and it flags both of those as the schedule risks GAO and NASA's own Inspector General have been pointing at for a while now.

BlakeSo an orbital flight 14 doesn't touch either one?

MaxIt doesn't. Different vehicle configuration, different mission profile, zero overlap with what the lander actually needs.

BlakeWalk me through what that demo actually involves though, because propellant transfer sounds simpler than it probably is.

MaxIt's not simple. It means two vehicles in orbit actually moving cryogenic propellant between them, something nobody's ever pulled off at this scale before.

BlakeSo it's not one test. It's basically a whole new capability SpaceX has to prove before anything else on the lander timeline means anything.

MaxThat's exactly why it's the pacing item everyone keeps flagging.

BlakeOkay, but how far off are those two things really?

MaxThere's a report from this year that put a number on it. The lander's slipped at least two years since the original award.

BlakeTwo years from the original award.

MaxFrom the original award. And the pacing item, the test we just talked about, that got pushed to March.

BlakeMarch of next year.

MaxRight. And the design review, the one that has to happen before they can freeze how the whole lander is actually built, that got pushed to August.

BlakeSo the milestones that gate an actual landing are sitting months out minimum before anyone even touches the Moon part.

MaxAssuming none of that slips again, which given everything we've covered tonight-

BlakeFair

MaxSo does an orbital flight fourteen move any of that?

BlakeI'd argue it moves something. You can't do propellant transfer if the vehicle can't reliably get to orbit in the first place. Proving the raw vehicle works is the floor under everything else.

MaxSure, but the floor was never the constraint GAO wrote about. Nobody's worried Starship can't reach orbit eventually. They're worried about the transfer demo and the uncrewed landing, and neither of those needs flight fourteen to succeed or fail. So in Artemis terms, a clean flight fourteen is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

BlakeThat's about where I'd land it. It clears a technical box. It doesn't touch the calendar box.

MaxWhich means even a perfect flight next month doesn't actually shrink that two-year gap you just laid out.

BlakeNot by itself, no. That gap closes in a propellant depot test, or it doesn't close at all.

MaxAll right. On that cheerful note, Blake, time to put our necks on the line. Predictions.

BlakeLet's hear yours first.

MaxAll right, Blake, on the record, does Flight Fourteen fly in the window Isaacman said, or does it slip?

BlakeI'll take the coward's position. It slips, but not by much, maybe ten days.

MaxTen days? That's not a prediction. That's a rounding error.

BlakeIt's a real prediction. Static fires are done. The pad's ready. The only thing left is a weather scrub or a last-minute abort.

MaxOkay, I'm going bigger. I think it flies on time. First try, no scrub.

BlakeNo scrub? You've met this program, right?

MaxI've met it. I'm still saying it. Booster and ship both cleared their tests clean, no anomalies reported. That's different from where they were a few flights back.

BlakeFine. Loser buys the next round of nerdy launch merch.

MaxDeal. Now, the Starlink piece, does that satellite batch actually go up with this flight, or does SpaceX quietly swap it for a dummy payload?

BlakeI think it flies with real hardware on board. Pulling the payload this late would mean redoing mass and balance work nobody wants to redo twice.

MaxAgreed, but I want a separate marker for the tower catch. I don't think that comes back this year at all.

BlakeI'll go further. I don't think we see another catch attempt until there's a booster SpaceX is fully willing to lose if it goes wrong.

MaxWhich, knowing them, might just be the next one anyway.

BlakeMaybe, or the one after. Either way, it's a separate bet from the orbital flight itself.

MaxRight. So three markers on the table: launch timing, the satellite batch, and the catch coming back, all revisitable.

BlakeAnd for anyone who wants to check our math before we do, Wikipedia's already got a page tracking Flight Fourteen as events happen.

MaxAnd Next Spaceflight's got a details page running too if you want the countdown clock version.

BlakeBookmark both. We'll be pulling from them ourselves next episode either way.

MaxEspecially the one where I have to admit that I lost the bet.

BlakeI'm not letting that go regardless of what happens.

MaxFair. Fair. I walked into that one.

BlakeYou did.

MaxAll right. Booster Twenty-One, Ship Forty-One, an early September window, and a payload nobody's fully confirmed. That's the whole board right now.

BlakeNext time we talk about this, it's either flown or it hasn't.

MaxAnd if it hasn't, you know exactly who two of us are getting an earful in the replies.

BlakeAlready bracing for it.

MaxAll right. That's where we leave it for this one. Thanks for sitting through the arguing with us.

BlakeWe'll be back once the countdown clock actually moves.

MaxAll right, so the calls are on the board. Blake, slip, my on time bet, no catch this year.

BlakeMark them down. We'll grade ourselves when the tower's actually rolling again.

MaxLoser owes a public apology minimum.

BlakeWe'll see who's apologizing.

MaxFair.

BlakeEither way, come back next episode, and we hold ourselves to it. That's the whole point of doing this out loud.

MaxNo hiding behind vague hedges later.

BlakeNone.

MaxIf you want in on that accountability, subscribe and send this one to the person in your life who still thinks a static fire means launch tomorrow.

BlakeThat's most people.

MaxShare it. Leave a review. Tell us which prediction you think is dumbest.

BlakeMine probably.

MaxProbably.

BlakeWhat I keep coming back to is we spent this whole episode watching hardware get closer to orbit and the actual lunar problem barely move.

MaxYeah.

BlakeThat gap doesn't close because a rocket looks good on the pad.

MaxIt closes because someone flies the hard part nobody's flown yet.

BlakeRight. So watch for that, not just the countdown clock.

MaxAll right. That's Landing the Moon. We'll see you when Booster Twenty-One either flies or doesn't.

BlakeSee you then, Max.