Backlash in those catching arms aren’t looking too great.

Yeah I would've thought they could correct for that better. Shorter arms will help but for this catch I guess we'll see.

Shorter arms will definitely help. I would imagine tighter manufacturing tolerances would also help.

Musk said they have another set of catching arms ready to go. This means they can have more than one catch attempt this year even if arms get damaged.

Also counterpoint to accuracy of F9 landings: at least part of it must be the platform moving around in rough seas. Landings on solid ground for Falcon Heavy boosters seem to be very accurate

USSF-67

Looks about 1 Falcon Radius from center so 9-10m.

Demo Flight 1

Conservatively 9-10m out

Arabsat-6A

Left looks bang on and right 7-8m out approx

There has been some speculation that they intentionally target off-center to prevent wear in the center. Haven't seen it confirmed but it would make sense to me

Seems reasonable to me to be honest

On a forthcoming catch attempt:

The whole team is feeling pretty good about it. The water landing for b11 was very accurate.

https://x.com/_DylanSmall_/status/1807076803753955341

It’s over for you now

This is comically high. I wish I had any balance to bet on this lmao

Can you say more?

Musk said he thinks SpaceX “should” try a catch next flight. (Who knows if the full team will agree/capitulate.)

There are at least three reasons to think the first booster landing is more likely to succeed for Starship than Falcon: (1) They will be doing it on land, not a bobbing ship. (Falcon succeed at it’s first attempt on land, after 2 ocean failed attempts.) (2) The Starship and Falcon boosters are quite similar, although very different scale, so they can leverage the past 5+ years of Falcon booster landing experience and software. (3) The willingness to risk a tower would suggest SpaceX has high confidence.

We should expect at least three more Starship launches this year under a pretty conservative expectation that time between flights drops to 2 months, so (if Musk gets his way) that’s three attempts.

Oh, and they seem to be rapidly building a second tower, which many think will initially be a dedicated catch tower. https://x.com/BocaChicaGal/status/1801404528924717524

I'll just address each of your points:

1. I don't see this being a major selling point since we're talking about a new method that requires way more accuracy than Falcon 9. Even today, whilst super consistent Falcon 9 doesn't have the accuracy that Starship requires. Based on the dimension of Falcon 9 legs (8-9m long) they have an approximate landing circle of 16m-18m diameter (This assumes that SpaceX aim for the middle of the landing zone which I think is a pretty fair assumption). Starship requires 10x greater precision. This is likely possible to achieve long term, but to argue they're going to achieve this on their first flight seems completely unreasonable.

2. Yes I agree

3. They're building a second tower for catching because they likely don't want to risk damaging critical infrastructure. Cost of not launching for 3-8 months due to destruction of critical infrastructure is a lot more than cost of building a second redundant tower.

As an additional note, SpaceX used a 360 degree camera to record the booster water touch down. I think that we can safely say they weren’t that sure where it was going to land and just had a general vicinity in mind

Thanks. We don’t have to think they will hit it on the first try (personally I put that at like 40-50%). They have a ~97% landing success with Flacon 9, and I believe the few failures are from things like engine failures, not exceeding the landing circle.

I think maybe you’ve misunderstood my first point slightly. I wasn’t calling the slight inaccuracy a failure, I’m saying that Falcon 9 consistently lands, but doesn’t have the required precision that would be required of a Starship chopstick landing.

And assume that Starship does fail on first attempt. How long does it take to rebuild a whole catch system?

Fwiw Superheavy can in theory hover. Falcon 9 can't. That's my most important reason to think that higher landing accuracy is not that far off.

Of course they don't want to hover cos it wastes propellant, but still.

Second reason is that the arms move decently fast left and right so they might use that for a few meters of adjustment sideways, though I'm not sure if they're planning to use that. They already have meters of margin towards/away from the tower by having long shock absorbers all along the arm. Altitude and roll are the easiest things for the booster to control so I'm not worried about those. So there are in fact good reasons to think this landing is easier than falcon landings, even early on. Otoh some of the harder things are new, and the consequences for failure are higher.

I think maybe you’ve misunderstood my first point slightly. I wasn’t calling the slight inaccuracy a failure, I’m saying that Falcon 9 consistently lands, but doesn’t have the required precision that would be required of a Starship chopstick landing.

I did understand this, I was just too compact in my reply. What I am arguing is that accuracy is generally given by a distributions that falls off smoothly. If Falcon can land within a 17-meter circle 99% of the time, I expect it is landing within a 5-meter circle 70% of the time. (In principle this could be checked by video.)

Here I was thinking IFT-4 flight success was already factored into the price

@NGK Big limit order up.

@NGK 10000 at 55%

if anyone wants it.

Emotion arbitrage