{"id":963045,"date":"2026-11-13T13:42:19","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T13:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/963045\/"},"modified":"2026-11-13T13:42:19","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T13:42:19","slug":"rocket-report-starship-set-for-historic-test-flight-a-century-of-electron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/963045\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocket Report: Starship set for historic test flight; a century of Electron"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>All eyes on the ship \u2026 Starship\u2019s initial return-to-launch-site mission is expected to orbit the Earth at an altitude of about 275 km and complete approximately 14 orbits around the planet over the course of a more than 22-hour flight.\u00a0Starship\u2019s primary mission will be to deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites to orbit. But really, this mission is all about the landings, first of the booster and then, more dramatically, of the upper stage Starship on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>SpaceX is now an \u2018infrastructure\u2019 company. For a long time, SpaceX has been synonymous with developing newer, larger, and ever-more-reusable rockets, <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2026\/11\/spacex-now-fundamentally-an-infrastructure-company-senior-official-says\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ars reports<\/a>. But that began to change over the last decade with the introduction of Starlink, and the change has accelerated during the last 18 months as the company has pivoted to data and artificial intelligence. At last week\u2019s UP.Summit conference in Florida, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company\u2019s changing focus.<\/p>\n<p>From AI to Mars? \u2026 \u201cIn the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point,\u201d Dontchev said. \u201cWe\u2019re building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars.\u201d However, Dontchev insisted that human settlement and Mars remain part of the core of SpaceX\u2019s aspirations. \u201cWe have come to understand that this tool is critical to us accelerating our pace of innovation,\u201d he said of artificial intelligence. \u201cWithout AI, I think we still would have gotten to the Moon. I think we still get to Mars with SI. We\u2019re going to get there so much faster.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Next three launches<\/p>\n<p>Nov. 13: Vulcan | Amazon Leo LV-01 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:54 UTC<\/p>\n<p>Nov. 13: Starship | Flight 15 | Starbase, Texas | 22:45 UTC<\/p>\n<p>Nov. 14: Soyuz 2.1b | MKA Kinosputnik, others | Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia | 00:50 UTC<\/p>\n<p>                        <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"120\" height=\"120\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/rocket.png\" class=\"center full\" alt=\"\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All eyes on the ship \u2026 Starship\u2019s initial return-to-launch-site mission is expected to orbit the Earth at an&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":963046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-963045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=963045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/963046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=963045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=963045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=963045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}