Starship's Tenth Flight Test

Just saw the splash down. I think this was 100% successful test.

Not quite, but it's a major milestone. Still quite a bit of work to go on the rapid reusability part (burnt flaps, oxidized body, missing tiles, tile waterproofing). Starship might actually deliver payload to orbit on flight 11.

They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry.

But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.

TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.

The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.

It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.

The stated goal was always to have a lot of ships, and also to have them be reusable.

Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.