My understanding is that the real fly in the ointment has been that Starship isn't anywhere near its target payload capacity, and it may be difficult to get it there. I don't know if that's changed with this flight or not.
This launch put 50T in orbit, which is half the stated goal. If it never improved past this, it'd continue to be the largest and least expensive heavy lift rocket into the foreseeable future.
[−]literalAardvark · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:09 UTC ·
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> half the stated goal
It's 1/4 of the design goals though. Pretty massive haircut.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:06 UTC ·
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Due to the nature of spaceflight, payload tends to be around 1-3% of total mass. You don't tend to max payload during testing for stuff you expect to have a reasonable chance of going boom.
This was the third heaviest payload ever put in orbit. None of the others had a reusable first stage, second stage or fairings, so they cost vastly more (throw away the entire stack each launch)
Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.
That's because when launching from Texas, they have to do a dogleg maneuver to avoid populated islands such as Cuba. If they launch from Florida, they claim they'll get 100 tons.[1]
> Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9.
SpaceX currently claims that each launch is 10x the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch, and is 50ish tons of payload, so launching from Florida would be around 100 tons of payload.
It's 1/4 of the design goals though. Pretty massive haircut.
Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.
> Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9.
SpaceX currently claims that each launch is 10x the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch, and is 50ish tons of payload, so launching from Florida would be around 100 tons of payload.
1. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/spacex-now-fundamental...