benjamin aaron advisors · dispatch

stellar times

all you need to know about humanity’s journey to the moon, mars, and beyond

weekly · as of 09/29/2026 · mondays 9am ET this week · pdf · slides · deck

lead · starship flight 14

starship reaches orbit for the first time and delivers its first working payload

On Monday, Sept. 28, Ship 41 lost an engine on ascent, held for about 20 minutes, got a go for orbit, and deployed all 26 Starlink V3 satellites before an early, on-target splashdown north of Hawaii.

A single Raptor fed from the header tank closed the orbit, a burn Starship had never done. SpaceX reports contact with every satellite, and Musk posted that all 26 are operating nominally. Each V3 is designed for 1 Tbps down, so this one flight carries roughly 26 Tbps of design downlink, which SpaceX compares to about ten Falcon 9 launches.

What stays open: catching and reusing the ship, and moving propellant from ship to ship, which the lunar and Mars dates depend on. This week’s PDF also covers Anthropic’s up to $84.5B compute deal with SpaceX, the Tesla and SpaceX merger math, and the launch calendar for the next few weeks.

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” John F. Kennedy, Rice University, 1962.

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also: slides · deck pdf · flight 14 note

notes · further reading

Front page stays signal and spark. Open a note for commentary and context, or follow the dedicated note page when you want a quieter read.

ben’s note · reading flight 14 as a gate, not a finale

The temptation in any launch week is to treat the event as a verdict. Prefer a quieter frame: each flight is evidence about repeatability, margins, and whether the next gate on the pathway is getting clearer.

If the flight advances confidence in orbital work, the lunar and mars cargo chapters become less abstract. If it teaches a limit, that is also signal. Either way, the newspaper’s job is to keep the pathway visible, and the curiosity intact.

Fuller write-up: stellar-times/notes/flight-14.html

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