Elon Musk’s recent all hands meeting at SpaceX was full of interesting news

Enlarge / Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, recently held an all hands meeting with employees at the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. SpaceX reader comments 2 Last year was unquestionably the best year in SpaceX's history, CEO Elon Musk told his employees during an all hands meeting in South Texas last week.

There were 96 flights of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, plus the first two test flights of the enormous new Starship rocket. In 2024, SpaceX said it aims for more than 140 launches of the Falcon rocket family. There may be up to 10 Starship test flights this year, according to the NASA official who manages the agency's contract with SpaceX to develop Starship into a human rated Moon lander.

SpaceX posted a video late Friday on the social media platform X of Musk's all hands meeting at the Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas. The hour long video includes Musk's comments on SpaceX's recent accomplishments and plans, but the video ends before employees ask questions of their boss.

While it would be nice to see space reporters get more opportunities to question Musk about SpaceX, it's good to see the company sharing these kinds of videos. Musk has presented several formal updates on Starship in the past—in person and virtual—and taken questions from reporters and space enthusiasts.

Nevertheless, the recent all hands meeting included significant updates on Starship and other SpaceX programs. We now know a little more about what happened at the end of an otherwise successful Starship test flight from South Texas in November, preventing the rocket from achieving its planned trajectory.

And Musk talked about what we can expect in upcoming Starship test flights. He also touched on the records set by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon rocket family this year. Until Starship is fully operational, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy will keep flying. SpaceX has launch contracts for both rockets into the late 2020s.

Advertisement Musk said SpaceX is working on extending the life of Falcon 9's reusable first stage boosters. Originally, SpaceX said each Falcon 9 booster could fly up to 10 times without a major overhaul. Some Falcon 9s have now flown almost twice that number of missions. “We’ve done a 19th re flight," Musk said.

"We’re now qualifying Falcon 9 to be able to do 40 flights, and we’re aiming for maybe as much as 150 flights this year." Ramping up the launch cadence will require SpaceX to increase factory throughout to produce more Falcon 9 second stages, which are only used once. And SpaceX will need to get even better at turning around its Falcon 9 launch pads between missions "We’re aiming to hopefully, I think, get under 24 hours pad turnaround by the end of this year," Musk said.

What happened on the last Starship flight? Perhaps the most interesting part of Musk's presentation centered on Starship. Starship's second full scale test flight on November 18 surpassed SpaceX's goals going into the launch. Musk said the primary objective was to get the rocket past staging, a milestone just shy of three minutes into the flight when Starship's upper stage separated from its Super Heavy booster.

Getting to that point, the Super Heavy booster's 33 Raptor engines all worked, apparently flawlessly, then Starship's upper stage lit its six Raptor engines to continue the climb into space. The Super Heavy booster exploded moments later as it began a boost back burn to guide itself toward a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

This was a secondary objective, but SpaceX engineers will have to correct this issue before it can recover and reuse a Super Heavy booster. Starship—the rocket's upper stage—continued flying until around eight minutes into the flight, when it broke apart in space over the Gulf of Mexico. This happened less than 30 seconds before Starship's engines were supposed to cut off, when the vehicle would have accumulated enough velocity to reach its planned trajectory, taking it most of the way around the world.

If everything went perfectly, the ship would have reentered the atmosphere and splashed down near Hawaii. Advertisement Musk didn't discuss what happened with the Super Heavy booster on the November flight, but he said Starship disintegrated during a liquid oxygen vent late in its burn. The Raptor engines consume liquid oxygen and methane as propellants.

“Flight 2 actually almost made it to orbit," Musk said. "The reason that it actually didn’t quite make it to orbit was we vented the liquid oxygen, and the liquid oxygen ultimately led to a fire and an explosion. We wanted to vent the liquid oxygen because we normally wouldn’t have that liquid oxygen if we had a payload.

Ironically, if it had a payload, it would have reached orbit.” Enlarge / This screenshot of a SpaceX animation shows how Starlink satellites will deploy from Starship in orbit. SpaceX Musk didn't offer any more details about the liquid oxygen vent but said he thinks SpaceX has a "really good shot of reaching orbit" on the next Starship test flight.

This third full size Starship test flight is likely weeks away. Jessica Jensen, SpaceX's vice president of customer operations and integration, said in a NASA teleconference last week that SpaceX aims to have hardware for the next Starship launch ready this month. She said SpaceX anticipates getting a commercial launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration in February.

SpaceX launched its first two Starship test flights within a few days of receiving its FAA license. SpaceX introduced numerous changes to the Starship design between its first and second flights last year, including a water deluge system at the launch pad, a redesigned stage separation technique, and replacing hydraulic thrust vector controls with an electrically driven engine steering system.

"With Flight 1, the goal was not to blow the pad up and ideally get some distance, which we did," Musk said. "With Flight 2, it was to get past staging, so we achieved the goal of getting past staging and almost to orbit.".