Resolves yes if Starship/Superheavy successfully deploys at least one Starlink satellite in a nominal orbit during 2024. The satellites don't need to function as long as they are deployed from Starship.
For a similar market but for commercial payloads, see this one: https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/first-starshipsuperheavy-commercial
Elon Musk, a man known for making extremely optimistic timeline assessments and he explicitly shied away from saying Starlinks will launch from Starship this year in the Everyday Astronaut video
Payload integration facility as far as we know does not exist on Starbase yet. The only thing we do know exists is the PEZ door, not even the ejector mechanism.
6 months left in the year with 2 launches so far. Assume no drastic change in launch cadence for 2nd half of year and we get 2 more launches and we know with high certainty there are no Starlink days on IFT-5. That leaves IFT-6 or the mystical IFT-7 to not only fly this year but also have starlinks.
I’d say fair market price for this now is like maximum 6%
I should’ve 10x downed my bet back when I was saying fair price for the market was 10-15%. Alas I am not a completely rational investor and was somewhat doubting myself when this market reached the 70% mark. Fair price for this market now in my opinion is effectively risk-free.
I would gobble up the remaining 25% if I had the balance but I am a brokie until the end of the year when my inevitable winnings come to me :P
Elon is the last person to shy away from making bold timeline claims. Even he specifically pushed against the idea of starlink launches this year. I genuinely believe this should be basically at risk-free rate at this point. I just have no mana and all my mana is tied up in positions that I’m the whale lol.
Part of the whole testing is definitely the payload dispensing mechanism; the payload door didn't quite work super well on IFT3, and before you can launch stacks of Starlinks you need to test the door, the pez dispenser, the stacking/racking mechanism, the attitude control during deployment, etc. All that is basically data, but the first time they pop out a Starlink would already count for this market.
That being said, it does seem correct that the percentage for this market is lower now than it was before.
@Mqrius The flight went as I expected. My bets in the other IFT-4 markets were mostly Yes for successful flight attempt. I think most likely outcome for the rest of 2024 is 2 more flights of starship, and it seems that IFT-5 will not be carrying Starlinks. So that leaves IFT-6.
Uh oh
Watson-Morgan said SpaceX is not planning to attempt a Raptor engine restart on the next Starship test flight. Eventually, SpaceX must demonstrate this capability for future Starships to drop out of orbit and return to Earth, or to head to the Moon and take off from the lunar surface.
Achieving an in-orbit engine restart—necessary to guide Starship toward a controlled reentry—is a prerequisite for future launches into a stable higher orbit, where the ship could loiter for hours, days, or weeks to deploy satellites and attempt refueling.
@chrisjbillington Why do you think this is? Because the reason Lisa Watson-Morgan gave doesn't fully make sense to me:
"We’ve got to get the other fundamentals right first. If we can't light all 33 engines on the booster, and if we can't light all six engines on the ship, then we're going to have trouble getting to where we need to go," she said. "So it's basically a building-block approach."
But they've successfully lit all 33 booster engines for two flights in a row now, they've successfully lit all 6 ship engines for two flights in a row, and iirc the only engine failure in the last flight was the booster landing burn which was likely more a result of the booster losing control than the fault of the engines.
Plus they had a simulated deorbit burn on the cards for ift-3 despite the engines being less well proven then, so to now say they're not planning one for ift-4 because they want to make sure the engines are good first doesn't really make sense to me?
But then if not that, is there a different reason?
@Nat it doesn't make a lot of sense unless the reporter is getting confused about which quotes are relevant to what. The above quote seems out of place.
It would make sense to say you don't want to do a simulated deorbit burn or door tests if you want to focus on re-entry - a screwup of the former could make your attempt at the latter a non-starter - we saw this in IFT-3. And it would make sense to talk about not bothering with a Starship landing relight because it's not a priority or whatever (so maybe some of the quote is about a landing relight?)
It might also make sense (I'm guessing) if the mission was simplified in order to get a launch license faster - having not solved the problems with the previous launch that might be held up by a mishap investigation (I am not familiar with how these things work so grain of salt).
These would be my guesses for other reasons, assuming the above quote is just out of place and not relevant.
@chrisjbillington Ah yeah that would potentially explain it, wish either the author or Watson Morgan had a twitter account or something we could tweet at to ask lol. But yeah your other ideas for possible reasons they're not doing a re-entry burn make a lot more sense to me.
Thanks for the detailed and well thought through answer btw!
@NGK I think probably three more launches this year, two of which are likely to be orbital. Be pretty surprised if they do an orbital launch without deploying something, and be pretty surprised if it's not starlinks.
Less confident than before because the cadence between launches isn't speeding up as much as I previously thought it would, given we're now looking at June for IFT-4. There were 7 months between IFT-1 and IFT-2, then 4 months until IFT-3, and looks like 3 months-ish between IFT-3 and IFT-4. Not sure if we can bank on much more acceleration of that cadence this year, so that doesn't leave tonnes of chances to get it right. Nonetheless took your order!