Musk: “The outcome was roughly in what I expected, and maybe slightly exceeding my expectations, but roughly what I expected, which is that we would get clear of the pad.”
Musk: “I’m glad to report that the pad damage is actually quite small” and should “be repaired quickly.”
Musk: “The vehicle’s structural margins appear to be better than we expected, as we can tell from the vehicle actually doing somersaults towards the end and still staying intact.”
Musk: From a “pad standpoint, we are probably ready to launch in 6 to 8 weeks.’ “The longest item on that is probably requalification of the flight termination system … it took way too long to rupture the tanks.”
Musk: Time for AFTS to kick in “was pretty long,” about “40 seconds-ish.”
Musk: “There were 3 engines that we chose not to start,” so that’s why Super Heavy booster lifted off with 30 engines, “which is the minimum number of engines.” The 3 engines “didn’t explode,” but just were not “healthy enough to bring them to full thrust so they were shut down”
Musk: At T+27 seconds, SpaceX lost communications due to “some kind of energy event.” And “some kind of explosion happened to knock out the heat shields of engines 17, 18, 19, or 20.”
Musk: “Rocket kept going through T+62 seconds” with the engines continuing to run. Lost thrust vector control at T+85 seconds.
Musk: Generated a “rock tornado” under Super Heavy during liftoff, but SpaceX does not “see evidence that the rock tornado actually damaged engines or heat shields in a material way.” May have happened, but “we have not seen evidence of that.”
Musk: “It was actually good to get this vehicle off the ground because we’ve made so many improvements” in Super Heavy Booster 9 “and beyond.” “Really just needed to fly this vehicle and then move on to the much improved booster.”
Musk: After AFTS, “the ship did not attempt to save itself.”
Musk: Big thing for next Starship launch is “insuring that we don’t lose thrust vector control” with Booster 9.”
Musk: “We’re going to putting down a lot of steel” under the launch tower before the next Starship flight. “Debris was really just basically sand and rock so it’s not toxic at all … it’s just like a sandstorm, essentially … but we don’t want to do that again.
Musk: “We certainly didn’t expect” to destroy the concrete under the launchpad.
Musk: Speculating, but “one of the more plausible explanations is that … we may have compressed the sand underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete effectively bent and then cracked,” which is “a leading theory.”
Musk: Reason for going with a steel plate instead of a flame trench is that for payloads in the rocket, the worse acoustic environment doesn’t matter to the payload since it’s about 400 feet away.
Musk: Flight was “pretty close to what I expected.”
Musk: “Got pretty close to stage separation … if we had maintained thrust vector control and throttled up, which we should have … then we would have made it to staging.”
Musk: “Our goal for the next flight is to make it to staging and hopefully succeed.”
Musk: “My expectation for the next flight would be to reach orbit.” Next flight profile will be a “repeat.”
Musk: “The goal of these missions is just information. Like, we don’t have any payload or anything — it’s just to learning as much as possible.”
Musk: “Definitely don’t” expect lunar Starship (under the HLS project) to be the longest lead item for the Artemis III mission. “We will be the first thing to really be” ready.
Musk: Probably an 80% probability of reaching orbit with Starship this year, and “I think close to 100% change of reaching orbit within 12 months.”
Musk: Slowed down Raptor engine production “because we’ve got more Raptors than we know what to do with.”
Musk: Expect to spend ~$2 billion this year on Starship.
Musk: “We do not anticipate needing to raise funding … we don’t think we need to raise funding.” Will do the “standard thing where we provide liquidity to employees.” “But to my knowledge we do not need to raise incremental funding for SpaceX.”
Musk: For the next flight, “we’re going to start the engines faster and get off the pad faster.” From engine start to moving Starship “was around 5 seconds, which is a really long time to be blasting the pad.” Going to try to cut that time in half.
Musk: Starship didn’t get to what SpaceX thought was “a safe point to do stage separation.”
Musk: “I thought the SpaceX team did amazing work.” “This is certainly a candidate for the hardest technical problem done by humans.”
Musk, on environmental response: “The rocket uses non-toxic propellants and … scattered a lot of dust, but to the best of our knowledge there has not been any meaningful damage to the environment that we’re aware of.”
Musk: SpaceX has yet to make a final decision on which Starship prototype and Super Heavy booster will fly the next launch.
Musk: “Going to be replacing a bunch of the tanks in the tank farm, but these are tanks that we wanted to replace anyway.”
Musk: “Tower itself is in good shape. We see no meaningful damage to the tower even though they got hit with some pretty big chunks of concrete.”
Musk: Starship sliding laterally off the launchpad was “because of the engine failures.”
Musk is signing off, and says he plans to do another Starship update in “3 weeks-ish”