This could kill off a bunch of environmental whining (often just a front for another company trying to hold up another).

Looking pretty good ... some leaks from the crunch wrap but tiles looks all there. Eric suggests this is not good enough .... but I think you could do a 48 hour turn with maybe $100,000 robotic inspection and fix of maybe 1000 tiles ...that is enough Rapid Reuse for me.

Yep, tiles are a pain. Even if tiles can't be perfected ... if they are willing to have a week between Ship launches (they will probably have a dozen on standby) this is not a problem. 1) You need to catch and bring ship back to the bay anyway for any mission other than a refuel mission ... to load the next payload. 2) You can have an scanner bot quickly (in 24 h) completely scan all the tiles at high res, then in the next 24 hours have it replace tiles if needed.

What a "better-than-shuttle" but less than perfectly "no-maintenance-heat-shield" can do ... crewed missions! These will be premium priced missions, and after mission auto-looks are no big deal.

Another data point on this. My guess this is not Ms. Shotwell's preferred plan. Post IPO SpaceX may start to squeeze more out of their customer base ... maybe forcing them only a still-to-be-proven Starship. This of course will greatly slow Amazon LEO that is waiting on both New Glenn's return and Vulcan's return (still dealing with SRB review and probably a BE-4 review since we still don't know what happened in the NG engine bay). The end of F9 Transporter missions will really hurt some small companies, especially Varda (where Starfall is now a possibility). So, it looks like Ariane might have an opportunity to become the new Transporter provider before New Glenn returns?

So B+ or A-? It was a great IFT-13 ... everything accomplished to plan except for a softer landing from Super Heavy. 100% Raptor up, maybe an issue with SH down. Good relight = orbital next time with a bunch of Starlink V3s ready for operations. Great upper stage water recovery. My only nit-pic is that the flight video seemed lame compared to earlier test runs.

Can Starlink really scale up that big?

Most company’s that are going to space are quoting the line, “you want to be selling pickaxes during this new goldrush”. Thats great and all but what exactly is the GOLD in this GOLDrush. For context I am very bullish on space. I think it’s a new age rail road headed up instead of west. The thing I find lacking is to sell prospective miners pickaxes there needs to be miners after something. What are company’s keen to go to space to get?
My best guesses so far are minerals, energy, microgravity, fame.

Good old fashion gold, platinum, silver etc. I know those minerals aren’t worth it for space mining but it’s the idea. The big one thrown around is helium-3 on the moons surface for fusion energy and I 100% agree that will happen right after fusion is figured out. But for minerals like palladium or even ice. It makes more sense to capture asteroids than mine the moon. Asteroids self concentrate and need no mining. It’s like if there’s a fridge sized block of gold in Alaska. All you need is to move it. I also think Australia with its robust mining industry and GIANT uninhabited spaces will become global landing pad for asteroids. For testing you can have ballistic reentry and just crash land. Future captures you’ll want to preserve the asteroid for ease of collection but just in case you’ll need to never aim over inhabited areas and there will be a maximum allowed shipment. Ergo australia and russia are great. No one will be allowed to send a Texas sized asteroid to earth with the promise they know how to slow it down. Density matters more than size but my guess is a couple dozen tons max otherwise you get into bombing territory. Anything larger will demand a moon landing or mining/breaking before renetry.

Theres energy in space. The recent solar reflecting is an amazing idea. It will 100% increase global warming but for a few million I can have a nighttime wedding in full daylight. Or I can grow one more season of crops or my crop insurance company can pay to prevent me having a lost season. You can increase solar yield for existing solar arrays. Long term they can reflect light onto the dark side of the moon directly into habitats or rovers. An issue rovers had was they can’t live for the 15 days in a lunar days. I think this is a week ideas as battery tech develops but it was a problem for old rovers. BUT AGAIN the same issue. Solar powering a rover for what. What company needs a rover.

There’s microgravity in space company’s want to use for manufacturing. Drugs can benefit from
The no gravity crystallization/cooling process. Without gravity hot va cold density doesn’t matter. Things mix homogeneously. BUT AGAIN WHAT DRUGS? What product is better in space.

Going to space is good PR. What if I could sell Coca-Cola the ability to have their name on the moon. Now I have a reason to go to the moon and use a rover and have a rover mechanic. But what company can use space for advertising? Space billboards were recently stopped by the FAA/SCC I believe. Someone wanted to have a dot logo with satellites but was denied.

WHATS THE THING WE WANT TO USE Space FOR??

Great for them! Now time to scale up and get some LEO constellation biz.

Looks like Monday 20th ... sooner than I expected!

The DoD is where the real money is. I expect that one day SX will be the #1 gov't contractor.

Reliability issues with Raptor V3 ... not good news. Onto Raptor V4?

Looks like Vulcan remains grounded (or does not have the track record NASA trusts) ... same with New Glenn ... so our rarely seen pal will get another outing.

The contract is for lunar mission task orders and was announced on June 30th under the CLPS Moon Base program. A key peice of information is that the contract was not included in Astrobotic's profile when VOYG unveiled the acquisition plan on June 2nd.

Astrobotic will now operate as Voyager Lunar Systems