Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Get back to me when the starship shield is actually physically checked after flight

Is it just me, or did it seem that the latest Musk Starship 3 test flight (number 13) take place without much prior fanfare?   

Watching the videos of the flight after it happened, I noted that the booster still didn't work on the way down as it should, and while there was much excitement over how the Starship itself plonked down gently into the ocean and just floated there without exploding, that gave plenty of time for drones to look at the heat shield which (to this layman's eyes) still looked like a complete mess that would need heaps of refurbishment before it could be re-used.

If I understand it correctly, the whole economic viability of the Starship system is meant to be built on the thing having mere hours of turnaround time.  What stupid and unachievable thing has Musk said about this?   I will let an AI tell me:

Long-term cadence goal
More recently he's put a number on the eventual operational tempo: "In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours," with "24/day" as the peak and "sustained... more like ~10/day." That implies an average turnaround well under an hour per vehicle at peak, across a fleet. Yahoo Financebarchart

Grain of salt worth noting
Musk has a long history of announcing aggressive turnaround targets that then slipped — most famously his 2017–2018 pledge that SpaceX would demonstrate two orbital launches of the same Block 5 vehicle within 24 hours, no later than next year (i.e., 2019), a target Falcon 9 has still never hit outright even years later. So while his stated ambition for Starship is hours-scale (and eventually many flights/day at full cadence), his track record suggests these dates/targets tend to be optimistic rather than realized on schedule — worth treating as an aspiration rather than a firm engineering timeline. Fox News

Maybe finance bros are realising nothing he says sticks?  Or maybe, they just think the drop in price means "get in now!"?:

The Musk-led rocket, connectivity and artificial intelligence company's latest slip extended a dramatic downward run for a company that sold shares to the public in mid-June, saw its stock quickly jump above $225, and then watched as the shares fell to below their IPO price over the course of about a month. Investors now have the company's first quarterly earnings report—and the likelihood of extensive commentary from Musk—to look forward to next week, but for now their enthusiasm seems to have cooled.

Wall Street analysts remain generally bullish, with Visible Alpha calculating an average price target over $293 that is more than double today's close. Morgan Stanley, which calculates the shares' value at $300, in a Monday note said that "at less than $120/share, we believe investors are paying a  reasonable multiple for the core Space + Connectivity business while receiving limited-to no value for the company's AI opportunity, despite multiple monetization paths" to 2028 AI revenues around $100 billion.

"We see the current valuation as an attractive entry point," they wrote.  

 

  

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