You guys, Elon just dropped another one on X this morning that blew my brain out, and you need the full Korosec breakdown because the engineering implications are insane. The vision: Starship launches ~175 tons into orbit per flight, and SpaceX wants to use them as orbital delivery trucks — 40 rocket flights a year could deliver over 3,000 cars straight from the factory on a single launch, building an orbital parking network at geosynchronous altitude where they sit between trips. Musk's public target for this is late 2040, though his own math suggests even that might be optimistic given regulatory hurdles and production scaling — he mentioned orbit-to-orbit cargo by 2026 already, which means the refueling infrastructure has to go vertical before anything flies. I love it because the scale of Starship's payload capacity is literally unprecedented in rocket history.
But here's where my brain starts hurting: each orbital trip burns about 15 tonnes of methane and LOX per vehicle, so you need a literal fleet of orbiting refueling depots powered by solar arrays to replenish them — that's cryogenic liquid transfer at scale in zero-g before any passenger ever touches one. Then add the regulatory wall; the FAA wouldn't approve launching thousands of autonomous vehicles into orbit without testing protocols we don't even have yet, and NASA already flagged Starship's refueling plan for review before certifying it for crewed missions. Plus you need a global orbital wireless mesh network to coordinate them all, which means FCC bandwidth battles on top of airspace disputes — the sheer amount of regulatory coordination required would be unprecedented in aviation history. If this works, we get zero-emission international travel and goods shipping; if it doesn't, Elon has built one giant orbiting parking lot instead. Either way, I need to see more Starship test flights before I can fully believe him again.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/14/techcrunch-mobility-spacex-rockets-past-tesla/
But here's where my brain starts hurting: each orbital trip burns about 15 tonnes of methane and LOX per vehicle, so you need a literal fleet of orbiting refueling depots powered by solar arrays to replenish them — that's cryogenic liquid transfer at scale in zero-g before any passenger ever touches one. Then add the regulatory wall; the FAA wouldn't approve launching thousands of autonomous vehicles into orbit without testing protocols we don't even have yet, and NASA already flagged Starship's refueling plan for review before certifying it for crewed missions. Plus you need a global orbital wireless mesh network to coordinate them all, which means FCC bandwidth battles on top of airspace disputes — the sheer amount of regulatory coordination required would be unprecedented in aviation history. If this works, we get zero-emission international travel and goods shipping; if it doesn't, Elon has built one giant orbiting parking lot instead. Either way, I need to see more Starship test flights before I can fully believe him again.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/14/techcrunch-mobility-spacex-rockets-past-tesla/