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One other implication of a 1000X reduction in their cost is that the launch market is not a thing that makes money if prices were to drop that much (that;s single-digit $ per kg). Just to maintain current revenue streams from launch will requires a 1000X increase in demand. This kills other launch providers completely, so I suppose SpaceX just charges about what they charge now, and pockets all the cash. Assuming anyone else is a fast follower, then prices drop substantially. Odd to see people estimating that the launch market increases in total revenue—a 10X in revenues could be had with lower costs, and current prices, but should prices drop 1000X, it requires 10,000X demand increases (or just 10X whatever the drop ends up being). Price drops can increase demand (asteroid mining?), but it's not at all clear that such a market will ever come to pass in the near future. Interesting times.

Yeah, they announced V2 (and that it was too big for F9, the current version is a "mini V2") a while ago. Meanwhile, the real reason is still... Mars: "Since your handle is “Whole Mars”, perhaps this lengthy reply is apropos: Getting the cost per ton to the surface of Mars low enough that humanity has the resources to make life multiplanetary requires a roughly 1000X improvement in rocket & spacecraft technology. Recent US Mars missions have had a cost per ton of useful load to the surface of Mars of about $1B. Moreover, it has become more, not less, expensive over time! To build a city on Mars that can grow by itself likely requires at least a million tons of equipment, which would therefore require >$1000 trillion, an obviously impossible number, given that US GDP is only $29T. However, if rocket technology can be improved by 1000X, then the cost of becoming sustainably multiplanetary would drop to ~$1T, which could be spread out over 40 or more years, so <$25B/year. At that cost, it becomes possible to make life multiplanetary, ensuring the long-term survival of life as we know it, without materially affecting people’s standard of living on Earth. Starship is designed to achieve a >1000X improvement over existing systems and, especially after yesterday’s booster catch and precise ocean landing of the ship, I am now convinced that it can work."

Starlink V2 has always been an internal use for Starship. F9 sticks around for a while if for no other reason than Dragon—as landing people propulsively I think is a loooong pole.

On a less philosophical note, there are 2 starlink launches in the next ~4 hours.

^^^ I think it's a sense of the future from here, vs the here and now. Apollo 11 in the here and now (1969 here and now) was astounding, and way, way beyond IFT-5 historically. That said, at the time, had you asked people what it would look like in 10 years, or 20 years, many would have predicted that the movie 2001 was just showing what they'd in fact see 32 years in the future, or something very similar. The Shuttle was supposed to do that. Pickup truck to space. Constantly flying, building stuff in orbit, like maybe the Moon rockets to build a base there! Or, instead... nothing much at all, for 3 decades. This feels like the post Apollo 11 vibe at the time, that things were going to look more futuristic—and this time I actually think the cool things will be tried. I sure hope some are before I'm dead.

I think the Apollo comparisons were more in my "vibe" sense. For anyone old enough to know what was going on, Apollo was a shocking historical achievement that they witnessed. For those of use who saw it, but as little, clueless kids, or those who know it afterwards, it's a historical fact, without much emotional feeling about it (thinking it's cool is not the same as knowing how cool it is watching it in real time). This is the latter, watching something cool taking shape in real time, and this is such a critical first step to full, rapid reuse that it has I think a similar feel. Like I said up thread, for me, growing up with Apollo, landing people on the Moon was just a thing we did. VERY cool and interesting to me, but something, well, normal. Maybe that's why I have such disinterest in which particular dude is the 13th human to make footprints on the Moon, it's something we already know how to do, and our lack of doing it has just been lack of will. Sunday was an exercise of will, and it bodes well for the near future of spaceflight. Counterfactual: You saw Apollo 11 at the time, and knew we'd do it a few times, then all the people involved would likely be dead before we did anything that interesting in space again. Would that change your view of the whole era/program? I think it would for me (I still feel gypped out of the cool space future we were supposed to get ).

I agree completely. But like I said, the "vibe" is that can-do attitude, the grit to keep at it—as we did with Apollo. That's what's so cool. It's not solved, but yesterday was proof of concept. It's now safe to say it's certainly doable. Both stages returned intact enough to make controlled landings, one with apparently something like 0.5 cm precision (I thought Gerst misspoke, but that catch fitting has little room for error)—or at least a few (single-digit) cms. Amazing.

Looking at that latest landing video (only 3 running), it's certainly different than the others, but watching the 13 drop to 3 on the stream rebroadcast, it seemed to be running when they said it was running, then when they shut down the outer, gimbal engines, that one went black sooner. Maybe it ran rich or something, and was cooler?

That's a better expression of the vibe than I gave. Can-do!

I think it's just eddies of flame from right after the outer 10 shut down and it was flying into exhaust.

I apologize in advance for the overuse of "vibe" in the following, lol. I was thinking about the "vibe" discussion we had earlier. It's sort of like this. Growing up with Apollo as something we saw on TV as a little kid, I guess the "idea" of giant rockets flinging us to other worlds became normalized because of that program. That's my Apollo vibe in this case, not the historic achievement of Moon landing, the normalcy of Moon landing. I didn't see it in historical terms as my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents (the latter literally born in the 1800s!) did, I saw it as normal to push the envelope. I was older for Shuttle, and saw it as the cool thing it clearly was, and it rapidly became so normalized it was actually hard to pay attention (launches not even having live coverage). So the feeling was a combination, but I think still riding on the "cool space stuff progressing is NORMAL" vibe. I soured on Shuttle later in part I think because it killed the vibe of progress being made, it became stagnant. The vibe with Starship I guess, is seeing it as a historical milestone (cause we're paying attention), but looking back at previous programs and knowing it will be normal soon. I'm anticipating progress again. Progress is the vibe. Also:

I've seen claims that the F9 booster uses a voting trio of dual core x86s. So not terribly compute intensive. SH is certainly not concerned about the mass of different possible computer systems, whatever it is is probably lighter than a single reinforcement stringer