VP of Launch @ SpaceX and father of Finn and Otie
Cocoa Beach, FL
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The Cape Gigabay is getting closer to being ready for Starship! Teams recently installed the 420-ton crane – which we’ll use to break over and move Starships and Super Heavy boosters preparing for flight. One step closer to the Moon and Mars 🚀🚀🚀
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The new Astronaut emergency egress vehicle! LFG @cybertruck
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Fingers crossed for good weather!
Three Falcon rockets vertical at three of our launch pads in Florida and California → spacex.com/launches
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Great notes from @Erdayastronaut. Public and personnel safety has always been and will remain the #1 priority.
I find it funny that some people got hung up on Starship not having gone orbital before Flight 14 when in the grand scheme of things it was completely arbitrary in terms of performance. The 19ish second burn only added about 91 m/s of velocity (a 1.2% increase in velocity)
This capability has been physically capable since Flight 6 which demonstrated a single Raptor relight in space. Heck, Flight 13’s burn was about 14 seconds, but intentionally oriented to primarily do a plane change instead of a prograde insertion burn for continued safety.
Any of the relights COULD have done the orbital insertion burn, the duration was not of any special technical capability. The reason Starship didn’t go orbital until Flight 14 is probably what we should applaud them for the most… SAFETY.
Their methodical approach to getting good data and going one step at a time while hucking the single most massive object ever put into space proves they weren’t just doing things haphazardly, despite the occasional narrative from the outside.
While it’s easy to compare Starship to vehicles like SLS or Vulcan or New Glenn, the reality is the focus hasn’t been on orbit, it’s been all on the “downhill” side of that. Safe and targeted de-orbit, clean reentry, targeted and soft splashdown. That’s the part that has (almost) never been done before.
And here I do have to add a little Space Shuttle admiration for figuring out a lot of these things on its first flight in 1981 (although it came a bit close to not being successful). Pretty amazing there was a vehicle of similar scale capable of such precise deorbit and reentry that it landed on a runway with no go-around capabilities. Crazy.
But Starship is well on a path to absolutely leap-frog the Space Shuttle in terms of performance (already over double and someday 6 fold) and hopefully in terms of full and rapid reuse. I hope we see the latter part speed up even more now that orbit has been demonstrated.
Exciting times ahead!!! Keep going @spacex @elonmusk
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One of our top notch recovery vessels, Doug, arrived in the Port of Long Beach last week. Reusability is core to @SpaceX operations, and Doug will help our West Coast teams safely and reliably sustain the blistering launch cadence 🚀
Shout out to the West Coast Recovery team in Long Beach. Keep crushing it!!!
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Nailed it!
From concept to reality.
@SpaceX has successfully deployed Starlink V3 satellites into Earth’s orbit and made contact with them for the first time.
At scale, one Starship carries 60 V3 satellites, the same network capacity as about 20 Falcon 9 launches.
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WTF
From concept to reality.
@SpaceX has successfully deployed Starlink V3 satellites into Earth’s orbit and made contact with them for the first time.
At scale, one Starship carries 60 V3 satellites, the same network capacity as about 20 Falcon 9 launches.
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One (very big) milestone down! Three more launches to go. All systems go for the Falcon triple header on Thursday. Crew-13, Transporter-18, and Falcon Heavy NROL-97
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Just insane work, LFG @SpaceX and Team Starship!
Splashdown confirmed. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the first orbital flight of Starship!
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Kiko Dontchev retweeted
It is poetic that Starship reached orbit 18 years, to the date, after the Falcon 1 rocket. 'Orbit Day' should be a perpetual holiday at the company.
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Who is ready for an epic week 🚀
This upcoming week:
• Monday: Starship flight 14 (first orbital launch)
• Thursday: Falcon 9 launching Crew-13 to ISS
• Thursday: Tesla Roadster unveiling
• Thursday: Falcon Heavy launching classified National Reconnaissance Office payload
• Friday: Tesla Q3 delivery report
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The progress in Memphis is 🤯
SpaceX's supercomputing facilities in the Mid-South rank among the world’s most advanced AI training clusters, spanning over 2.5 million feet, millions of GPUs, and over two gigawatts of compute → spacex.com/Mid-South
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Kiko Dontchev retweeted
We are committed to the Mississippi and Tennessee communities we call home, and to building the infrastructure that powers the next generation of technology.
Study finds no major pollution increase around Colossus 1 data center in SW Memphis wreg.com/news/local/study-fi…
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Kiko Dontchev retweeted
Great news for Whitehaven!
Some recent upgrades are complete at Fairley High School – students and faculty are now enjoying an updated gym with soon-to-open renovated locker rooms, classrooms, and restrooms.
We are proud to work with our local schools and community to complete upgrades that will benefit students and teachers. We’re excited to keep working with Memphis schools to inspire the next generation of explorers on the road to making life multiplanetary.
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Kiko Dontchev retweeted
As someone who travels nearly every week for work, Grok @bot has been a genuine time-saver.
It books reservations, notifies my family with my plans, drops it on my calendar, and even pings me before cancel windows expire.
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Kiko Dontchev retweeted
We are hiring for our super compute teams in Memphis and need to build a construction army fast.
This includes engineers, electricians, maintenance technicians, server technicians, plant operators and other roles unique to data center operations and construction.
You must work extremely hard with a maniacal sense of urgency and have a proven track record of exceptional performance in construction or industrial environments.
Apply at spacex.com/careers or message me if you are ready to help make life multiplanetary.
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Kiko Dontchev retweeted
Not a good day. I woke up to a phone call from Joe Kenahan telling me that “the rocket is gone.” We had no idea what happened for a few weeks. We had a war room set up in HT01 where we had high speed plots and video frame stills taped to the wall in chronological order, zoomed in to the order of milliseconds. We used accelerometer data to triangulate the origin of the failure, similar to what we did for the CRS-7 investigation. To our surprise it pointed to a similar location near the lox tank COPVs. It took weeks of testing to replicate the failure and when we did, it was a strange mix of feeling overjoyed that we figured it out and extremely sad that we didn’t prevent the failure in the first place.
That said, shooting COPVs from a mile away with a long-range .50-caliber rifle was pretty cool. Thankfully we were able to close that branch of the fault tree 😂
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Kiko Dontchev retweeted
We successfully launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope today about 9 months ahead of its formal readiness date.
Today’s Falcon Heavy mission was what we call a RXR mission (return-expendable-return), which signifies that the side boosters are to be recovered by returning to the launch site.
The center core had to be expended today in order to achieve the proper delta-v for the 10 ton telescope to reach L2 - the second Sun–Earth Lagrange point, a spot in space about 1.5 million km from Earth on the far side of our planet from the Sun.
Falcon Heavy launches @NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from pad 39A in Florida, beginning its more than three-month journey to its destination where it will generate never-before-seen photos of the universe
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