#04
How is Starship progressing / what's next for Starship?
Interviews
12
Answers
18
X posts
10
Span
2023 to 2026
First asked Oct 5, 2023, most recently Oct 20, 2026. Excerpts below are from machine transcripts with filler words (um, uh, you know) and stutters removed; … marks a cut. They are not checked word for word, so use the link to hear the exact words, or the transcript link for the raw text. Timestamps: 5 cross-checked against YouTube captions, 10 from the archive transcript only, 2 checked against our transcript of the X replay, 1 unverified (archive time, not checked against the X video). X has no link-to-time option, so X links open at the start.
How the answer evolved · oldest first
Oct 5, 2023 · International Astronautical Congress · asked by Interviewer
Q: And how quickly do those launches have to take place to make this work?
Yeah, we'll have a launch site in Texas as well as in Florida. So we've actually partially built a starship launch Pad at Pad 39A, which is where we launch Falcon Heavy and our crewed with the crew Dragon. So we've partially built, and we'll probably, we'll fully build that out over time and probably have at some point a greenfield location for starship at the Cape. Now in the sort of, you say like four or five year …
Oct 5, 2023 · International Astronautical Congress · asked by Interviewer
Q: How do you see the future point to point using starship?
Yeah. So. The fastest way with known physics to get from one place to another on Earth is with inter intercontinental ballistic missile. This is why ICBMs with nukes are kind of like the ultimate weapon. Now in this case it's sort of leave the nuke at landing, but it's certainly very feasible. Obviously if we can take off and transport and land on Mars or the moon, we can take off and land on Earth too. So it really …
Jan 6, 2024 · Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · asked by Peter Diamandis
Q: How many sensors are going, are onboard that vehicle? Rough order of magnitude, getting back data?
Well, I guess when you count everything up, there's several thousand sensors. And if I were, I mean they're all 33 engines, so they count for the bulk of.
Jun 22, 2024 · First Look Inside SpaceX's Starfactory with Elon Musk · asked by Tim Dodd
Q: Are any of these, what Are any of these going to be the V2 yet?
The stretch version is basically V2. Well, I guess depends on whether we call it V2 or don't call it V2. The slightly stretched version is V2 ugly. So yeah. So you can see what we have here is a starship with, I've seen the heat shield side and the non heat shield side. Yep. It's got the, what we call the PEZ dispenser for tossing out the next generation starLink satellites, the V3 satellites. So those will be very …
Jun 22, 2024 · First Look Inside SpaceX's Starfactory with Elon Musk · asked by Tim Dodd
Q: Like is that maybe a few more down the road to start actually deploying payloads into orbit?
We'll see how this mission goes. I mean this year is not about delivering satellites for starship. It's all about ironing out the design question marks. So the, I mean the major things that remain to be solved for starship, the biggest, the single biggest one is what does it take to get through the high heating of reentry. So you can see the heat shield that we have there. We have some, well, let's say like unsolved …
Jul 13, 2024 · X Takeover 2024 · asked by John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Q: What's top of mind? What does success look like for you?
Well it's probably not from a standpoint of when Starship would be ready. It's probably is about two or three weeks but then depends on when we get the FAA license. So the, that is probably end of August is my guess earliest and it may go to early September. Just depends on how fast the FAA grants our license.
Jul 13, 2024 · X Takeover 2024 · asked by John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Q: What, you know, outside of the heat shields, what were some of the other big findings from the Starship 4 launch that you guys are implementing for and preparing for for this upcoming launch?
Well, this really between each flight there are hundreds of changes on both the ship and the booster. Many of them are very sort of small, but they add up cumulatively to us to significant changes. So like if you add changes to the ship, the booster and to the launch site, you're really talking about thousands of changes between each flight. So you got really talented teams of SpaceX working on the stage zero, which …
Jul 27, 2025 · X Takeover · asked by Interviewer
Q: What's been harder than expected and what's the next milestone we should watch for?
Well, I thought everything would be hard, so it's not like I was. Like it would be easy. Yeah. I mean, Starship is a crazy program on so many levels because if you've got something with two and a half, and future versions will be three times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket, which was previously the largest rocket and largest flying object ever made. So Starship is three times thrust, roughly twice the weight …
Sep 7, 2025 · All-In Summit · asked by Host
Q: How close is it to, you know, being predictable and ready to go in a commercial setting?
I think we will recover the ship next year. We've got one more launch of the Starlink version two stack, but there's only one booster and ship left. That's in the version two design. And then thereafter it's version three, which is a gigantic upgrade because that's got Raptor 3 and pretty much everything changes on the rocket with version three. So version three might have some initial teething pains because it's …
Feb 5, 2026 · Dwarkesh Podcast · asked by Dwarkesh Patel
Q: How many physical starships are needed to do 10,000 launches a year?
I. I don't think we'll need more than, I mean, you could probably do it with as few as like 20 or 30. Like, it really depends on how quickly there's a ship. The ship has to go around the Earth and the ground track before the ship has to come back over the launch pad. So if you can use a ship every, say, 30 hours, you could do it with 30 ships, but we'll make more ships than that. But SpaceX is gearing up to do …
Feb 5, 2026 · Dwarkesh Podcast · asked by Dwarkesh Patel
Q: But do you find these sort of infinitely elastic marginal use cases of your next rocket and your next rocket and next scale up?
You can see how this might seem like a simulation to me. Or am I someone's avatar in a video game or something? Because it's like, what are the odds that all these crazy things should be happening? I mean rockets and chips and robots and space, solar power and I, not to mention the mass driver on the moon. I really want to see that. You can imagine like some mass driver that's just like, just, it's like sending AI, …
Jun 8, 2026 · SpaceX Technical Talk: AI Satellites at Scale · asked by Moderator
Q: Do people even really understand what mass orbit becomes?
Orders magnitude greater than what is the case today. So Even with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. I think somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. And then most of the remaining mass I think is launched by China. And then the rest of the world, including the rest of the US is the remaining, I don't know, 5 to 7%. Now with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere …
Aug 4, 2026 · SpaceX Q2 2026 Earnings Call · asked by Analyst
Q: And then, you know, how do we think about this in the journey to kind of rapid reusability, the heat shields, so on and so forth?
Sure. So the, yeah, actually Flight 13, I was a little worried about that Flight 13 because you think of Apollo 13 like things went wrong on that flight but this actually, this flight actually went incredibly well. The heat shield appears to be very robust. The ship is still floating in the ocean. And we expect to recover the ship and bring it back for analysis. So I would say things look very good. And that's why …
Watch on X at 0:38:59 ↗Transcript ↗Unverified timestamp: from archive transcript, not checked against the X videoSep 29, 2026 · Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and Tom Brown on the AI Revolution · asked by Moderator
Q: What you learned, how you're feeling about the program?
Yeah, I think the starship is going great. We took starship to orbit for the first time and we deployed Starlink. Beats satellites, which are enormous satellites. I mean, these are satellites with a wingspan of 737. So really enormous. In fact, it's the largest payload delivered to orbit since Skylab. So now we expect starship to ultimately next year, I think probably reach a weekly or twice weekly cadence.
Oct 10, 2026 · X Takeover 2026 · asked by Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Q: What was happening behind the scenes in those minutes before the team got called? The go for orbit message?
Well, we're just trying to see why. We're trying to understand what was the reason for the engine failure. Was there, say, a common cause where we could expect to see more engine failures? Or would we? Would there? The biggest question is like, would there be a potential problem with restarting the sea level raptor engines, the three ones with the smaller nozzles in the center for the deorbit burn? Because we don't …
Oct 10, 2026 · X Takeover 2026 · asked by Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Q: Did this flight feel like a turning point in what's possible now for starship?
Well, I guess it is a good milestone because I mean we could have gone to orbit many times before now, but the reason we didn't go to orbit before now is because we wanted to be extremely confident of being able to de orbit safely. So that's why we only went to orbit on this flight. But pretty much all of the prior missions, in fact literally all of the prior missions could have gone to orbit. So at this point …
Oct 20, 2026 · SpaceX Q3 2026 Earnings Call · asked by Opening remarks
Q: Starship update (prepared remarks)
For Flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we're going to attempt to catch both the booster and the ship. This will be, if we succeed, will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered. … I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight.
Watch on X at 0:10:09 ↗Timestamp checked against our transcript of the X replayOct 20, 2026 · SpaceX Q3 2026 Earnings Call · asked by Opening remarks
Q: Starship update (prepared remarks)
We expect Starship to fly weekly at some point in the first half of next year, and then the second half of next year, twice weekly, or maybe even more frequently than that by the end of next year. The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve the rapid and complete reusability.
Watch on X at 0:13:23 ↗Timestamp checked against our transcript of the X replay
In his own posts on X
@elonmusk · May 24, 2026
@aaronburnett Our goal is launching Starship >10k/year, which would be more than once an hour. Probably over 200 tons of useful load to a useful orbit per flight by then.
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Jun 19, 2026
Q1 tonnage to orbit by launch provider. Once Starship is flying hourly, SpaceX’s mass to orbit will be about 100 times more than everyone else combined, even if they triple their current launch rate. https://t.co/IVEnAiFuAi
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Aug 21, 2026
@aaronburnett We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Aug 25, 2026
Starbase Louisiana will ultimately have over a dozen launch towers, enabling more than 30 Starship flights per day and making it the biggest launch site on Earth! SpaceX makes sci-fi real. https://t.co/C7Ht0U12ba
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Aug 25, 2026
@aaronburnett Will enable over 2M tons/year to orbit with Starship 4, a crucial step towards becoming a Kardashev 2 level civilization
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Sep 16, 2026
@SciGuySpace Starship will deliver somewhere between 1M and 10M tons per year to orbit. Even if non-SpaceX tonnage to orbit were to triple, it would still be less than 0.1% of what SpaceX plans to do.
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Sep 21, 2026
In 7 days, the first Starship launch to orbit will be carrying Starlink V3 satellites intended for operational use https://t.co/bx24B1nz9x
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Sep 27, 2026
@herbertong @TeslaLarry Starship is 2 to 3 years away from hourly flights
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Sep 28, 2026
First orbital flight of Starship successful! https://t.co/xVNsnUKTm0
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Oct 3, 2026
Starship deploying Starlink V3 satellites https://t.co/TG7b8iHYkY
View on X ↗
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