Starship's new launch date revealed! Ship 26 Firing and SpaceX's domination in space...

There's still hope for another Starship orbital flight for this year. Spoilers, it obviously won't be this month, but this is according to Mariner Hazard Warnings. The notice shows SpaceX is targeting to launch Starship from Boca Chica, home to SpaceX's Starbase facility, on the east coast of Texas, located near the beaches of South Padre Island on November 1st of 2023 between 5.25am and 11.15am. Backup launch dates and times include each day following the 1st of November in 2023 between 5.25am and 11.15am until conditions permit the launch. Mariners operating offshore in waters east of Brownsville, Texas are advised of the scheduled rocket launching activities and associated hazardous areas that may impact navigation interests. External hazards from rocket launching activity may include free-falling debris and or descending vehicles or vehicle components under various means of control. Mariners should avoid all waters within the rocket flight trajectories originating from launch sites in the vicinity of Boca Chica and Brownsville, Texas. The USGS Mariner Warnings went out after SpaceX slammed regulatory headwinds for holding up Starship. Although not an absolute confirmation of a launch date for Ship 25 and Booster 9, this serves as a clear indicator of SpaceX's determination to achieve yet another Starship launch within the current year. Speaking about the relentless efforts of the SpaceX team, they just fired another Starship prototype yesterday. More specifically, Ship 26, the naked Starship, went into what appeared to be a depressed vent. Then it got a bit of fire like a single-engine pre-burner test. So what's the need for this small test? Well, one of the most complex rocket engines ever developed, the Raptor, relies on a Maximally Efficient but Temperamental Full-Flow Staged Combustion Cycle, or FFSC, a concise name for the many, many steps required to turn liquid propellant into thrust. Adding additional difficulty, the Raptor's full-flow staged combustion necessitates the ignition of gaseous oxygen and methane in the combustion chamber. Given that the Raptor-powered Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy Booster exclusively use cryogenic liquid methane and oxygen, a major challenge posed by FFSC is the need to efficiently turn that ultracold propellant into hot gas almost instantaneously. This is where gas generators or pre-burners come in. In a full-flow staged combustion engine, both oxidizer and fuel require their own separate turbopumps, which then require their own pre-burners to create the pressures needed to power those turbopumps and the gas the combustion chamber ignites to produce thrust. A step further is to enable high combustion chamber pressure like Raptor's 300 plus bar or around 4,400 or more psi, those pre-burners need to produce gas at far higher pressures to account for energy losses as those gases wind their way through the engine's plumbing. As a result, pre-burners are possibly the single most stressed system in an engine like Raptor. This has often led SpaceX to separately test each engine's pre-burners as a sort of partial static fire before the actual engine ignition test. But back to another of SpaceX's world-changing contributions, the company is aiming to launch 144 missions next year. You know what, SpaceX has already launched 74 orbital missions in 2023, more than any private outfit has ever done in a single year, but these next two and a half months should see even more spaceflight action. This year, we're going to attempt to fly 100 flights, Bill Gerstenmaier, the Vice President of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX said on Wednesday, October 18th during a hearing of the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Space and Science. Next year, we want to increase that flight rate to about 12 flights per month or 144 flights is our goal. He added during the hearing, which was called Promoting Safety, Innovation and Competitiveness in U.S. commercial human space activities. Hitting the century mark this year would require a significant ramp-up in launch cadence, from one mission every 3.9 days to one every 2.8. But SpaceX is certainly capable of meeting that latter number. The company has launched two missions in a single day multiple times. This past March, for example, it sent two of its Falcon 9 rockets skyward less than four and a half hours apart. And SpaceX has no shortage of payloads waiting to go up. The company is building out its Starlink Internet Satellite Mega Constellation, which currently consists of about 5,000 operational satellites. But SpaceX has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink satellites, and the company has applied for approval for another 30,000 spacecraft on top of that. About 60% of SpaceX's launches in 2023 have been dedicated to Starlink missions. The vast majority of SpaceX's orbital missions to date have been flown by its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, with its powerful Falcon Heavy taking care of the others. The Heavy has eight launches under its belt, four of which have occurred this year. This is such an impressive achievement. However, on the other side of the coin, industry execs argue that SpaceX's dominant position in the launch market is making it difficult for small launch vehicles to compete as a prominent investor warns of a wave of bankruptcies among launch companies. In a panel at the Satellite Innovation Conference on October 17th, executives said that SpaceX's line of smallsat rideshare missions has had a hugely chilling impact on the small launch industry that struggles to compete on price. They definitely control and have a dominant position in the market, said Kurt Blake, former chief executive of launch services company Spaceflight, who now leads the commercial space group at law firm Wilson-Sonsini of SpaceX. I think the real question is pricing, and what is their cost, and why so low? So dramatically low. SpaceX started offering rideshare launch opportunities for smallsats as low as $5,000 per kilogram. The company has since raised those prices to $5,500 per kilogram and plans annual increases in future years. However, in most cases, those prices are far below what dedicated small launch vehicles offer. I don't think they had to go that low to have a commanding share of the market, he said, estimating SpaceX could have gained significant business at prices of $10,000 to $12,000 per kilogram. That had to have a hugely chilling effect on any other money flowing into startup launch companies. SpaceX's transporter line of rideshare launches has focused on missions to sun-synchronous orbit, where the bulk of demand is today, but the company announced in August a new series of missions, Bandwagon, that will go into mid-inclination orbit. They are little by little taking over what the small launch vehicles are able to accomplish, he said, adding that there is still room for dedicated small vehicles for missions to different inclinations, but you have to think of it as a threat. Concerns about SpaceX's pricing of its smallsat rideshare missions are not new. At World Satellite Business Week in September, Marino Fragnito, senior vice president of the Vega business unit at Arianespace, said SpaceX was offering pricing that was not sustainable in the market driving out other companies. Launcher companies could not live with that level of pricing. Is SpaceX squeezing other people out of the market? I think to a certain extent, yes, said Adam Spice, chief financial officer at Rocket Lab on the Satellite Innovation Panel. It'd be a bit naive to think their strategies around rideshare aren't very targeted towards limiting competition. SpaceX's position in the market reduces forgivable failure by other companies, he said, and its approach is exacerbated by the difficulties many companies are facing raising funding even as SpaceX has seemingly endless access to capital in private rounds. It makes that a very difficult entity to compete with, and they can do very unnatural things for long periods of time to make it difficult on everybody else. Other panelists said they were looking for niches for their vehicles as ways to remain competitive in the market. The one-size-fits-all launch market isn't necessarily the best way to go for the long term in order to meet all the different government and commercial needs out there, said Patrick McKenzie, director of government business development at Firefly Aerospace. The market may not be big enough to support many small launch vehicle companies. Earlier at the conference, Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures and an early investor in SpaceX and Planet, said he was puzzled by the large number of companies pursuing such rockets. In short, space is a difficult industry to operate in for all. However, is this SpaceX's fault? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section down below. Otherwise, that's it folks, thank you so much for watching and if you want to support our channel and get access to exclusive content, please consider becoming a patron by clicking the link in the description below. We appreciate your generosity and your passion for space exploration. As always, this is Kevin from GreatSpaceX and until next time, keep looking up!