To continue the Starship revolution, Handmer has a followup. But first, let's look in on Elon. Super Heavy (the booster) is to attach to the Starship next January.
Elon raises the FAA as the bottleneck but he's not done working on the project. So nobody can blame the FAA... yet . . . unless the FAA slips the timeline past January. Just like we couldn't blame Bezos' stupid lawsuit, although we may assuredly enjoy a good laugh at Bezos' expense (UPDATE 8 PM: like the judge just did). More serious is, of course, the "civil-rights" grift and, down the line, the company has micronesian NIMBY to look forward to.
I'd be unsurprised if Elon packs up and heads back to his native continent - Africa. Nairobi has oft been presented as a spaceport. Hey, maybe NASA's "Muslim outreach" will finally bear fruit; it does seem that Western Christendom is in its "moral science" phase, like Islam in the later Middle Ages.
Elon says the payloads will be decoys through 2022 although, if he ask me, I'd recommend he run some real loads: cheap / prototype loads that nobody will miss overmuch should a mishap occur (i.e., not The Webb Telescope), but will be Nice To Have if it all works. Handmer suggested mass-producing Lyra-probes, one-shots to interstellar visitors like 'Oumuamua, or to some 'stroid if the aliens don't visit that year. Seems win/win to me: prototype launches with prototype probes.
If it all works, SpaceX plans on Saul Perlmutter's telescope. Then Artemis, if NASA is even doing that by 2023.
I like this: SpaceX is already thinking about a future propulsion system design beyond Raptor
(which is the methane upgrade to that kerosene-burning "Merlin" which nobody remembers, and is in turn being upgraded to a "Raptor 2"). This will be a wholly different design, he says - not a Raptor 3 / Merlin IV. I am unaware of what more is to be found with the chemistry of high-thrust, low-duration explosions short of nuclear which they won't let him do. Maybe he's considering the fluid-dynamical advances of late.
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