All eyes on the ship … Starship’s initial return-to-launch-site mission is expected to orbit the Earth at an altitude of about 275 km and complete approximately 14 orbits around the planet over the course of a more than 22-hour flight. Starship’s primary mission will be to deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites to orbit. But really, this mission is all about the landings, first of the booster and then, more dramatically, of the upper stage Starship on Saturday.
SpaceX is now an ‘infrastructure’ company. For a long time, SpaceX has been synonymous with developing newer, larger, and ever-more-reusable rockets, Ars reports. But that began to change over the last decade with the introduction of Starlink, and the change has accelerated during the last 18 months as the company has pivoted to data and artificial intelligence. At last week’s UP.Summit conference in Florida, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company’s changing focus.
From AI to Mars? … “In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point,” Dontchev said. “We’re building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars.” However, Dontchev insisted that human settlement and Mars remain part of the core of SpaceX’s aspirations. “We have come to understand that this tool is critical to us accelerating our pace of innovation,” he said of artificial intelligence. “Without AI, I think we still would have gotten to the Moon. I think we still get to Mars with SI. We’re going to get there so much faster.”
Next three launches
Nov. 13: Vulcan | Amazon Leo LV-01 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:54 UTC
Nov. 13: Starship | Flight 15 | Starbase, Texas | 22:45 UTC
Nov. 14: Soyuz 2.1b | MKA Kinosputnik, others | Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia | 00:50 UTC
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