Starbase This Week (2026-10-18) | Written by @Space_Mr_Banana There's a saying that Starbase never sleeps, and that remains true despite SpaceX taking their time preparing for the upcoming flight next month. Working on both the Launch pad and reinstalling all of Ship 40’s engines, it has not been quiet. Welcome to this week's Starbase This Week. Production Site After its transport from the port to the production site, finally making its trip full circle, Ship 40 had the Ship aft horizontal transport hardware attached and was subsequently lifted up rather slowly until it finally once again sat in a vertical position. It was then moved into Megabay 2 and placed onto one of the workstands in the building. What SpaceX plans now is unknown but it's likely they will strip the heatshield in places for further inspections alongside taking close looks at the rest of the vehicle. We still do not know what the eventual fate of Ship 40 will be, whether it is put on display or Scrapped. Also inside of Megabay 2, Ship 42 has finally got engines again ahead of its Static fire campaign for flight 15. If you remember a couple of weeks ago, S42 had all engines removed after flight 14, we don't know exactly why they did this but it was possibly due to engine issues experience on flight 12 and 14, or it was simply that they needed to test Ship again without engines as they did send it out to Masseys on the Cryo stand. The newer Ship 44 also made good progress in the last week, with SpaceX rolling out its transfer tubes from Starfactory to join with the rest of the vehicle already stacked in the bay. Moving over to Megabay 1, Booster 24 received both its final aft section (AX:2) and its landing tank. So with the lower half of the booster now complete, making up the Liquid Oxygen (LOX) tank, the next steps are to start the stacking of the Methane (CH4) tank and finally to mate the two halves, completing the full height of the vehicle. While stacking vehicles for the upcoming flights SpaceX is also continuing work on the Gigabay, which will give a huge increase to the possible rate of production at the site as teams will be able to fully utilise their capabilities with the extra space the new building will provide. As of this week, the first of two bridge cranes has been lifted and installed in the bay, these are capable of lifting up to 420 tonnes, each one covering one of the two aisles in Gigabay. Starbase PEIS and Launch Site Increasing the rate of production is all well and good, but it doesn't matter unless SpaceX is actually able to and allowed to launch however many more vehicles. Right now, SpaceX is limited to 25 launches per year from Starbase, but a new programmatic environmental impact statement which SpaceX and the FAA are in the works on, increases that number all the way up to 456 in two phases. The first phase increases from 25 to 100, also allowing 200 landings of Ships and Boosters combined. Phase two increases the allowed cadence from 100 to the final 456 launches per year from the site, which means a whopping 912 landings. It was also noted that this will take several years to implement as Starship matures, but just imagine, we’ll get an average of 1.5 ish flights per day if they are able to hit that cadence. To help improve the cadence before we get this PEIS, SpaceX has been working on upgrading pad 1 to support Starship block 3. This week saw teams lifting the center flame bucket part into the trench alongside also beginning to install the launch mount legs, bringing the pad one step closer to being able to support a launch again. The last flight from the pad was flight 11. Over at Pad 2 SpaceX has been in full prep mode for Flight 15, where we are expecting to see hopefully both a Booster and a Ship catch. Teams have been preparing for this outcome by testing the chopsticks a lot. Over multiple days we have seen the chopsticks perform various tests raising to the top of the tower and conducting movements we might see during a catch attempt. Massey’s Now there's been a bit of an HLS update but before we get into that… Over at Massey’s, SpaceX’s test site at Starbase, teams were working on two vehicles primarily; Booster 23 which completed only one cryogenic proof test — where they load Liquid Nitrogen and Oxygen onto the vehicle — before rolling back to the production site, and S43.1, a Ship nosecone + headertanks test article. Booster 23’s rollback having only done one is an anomaly as all previous boosters (apart from BN3 in 2021) have conducted at least two. It's unknown what the cause for this early end to the initial cryo testing is, but it's possible that SpaceX found some issue, or got everything they wanted. Ship 43.1 is in a similar situation, only it is slightly more unfortunate as we have seen some visible damage in the form of buckling around the nosecone tip. It's likely that this occurred during a test on the 14th October. The one glint of potential good news is that SpaceX had a host of sensors around where it buckled which means that this is likely exactly what they expected to happen, suggesting that it was intentional — although that is unconfirmed. With that bombshell (although thankfully not that catastrophic) This weeks Starbase this Week has come to an end. When do you think Flight 15 will launch after SpaceX finally static fires both vehicles? And how long until Pad 1 is complete? For real-time updates, join us in the Discord: discord.gg/ZbrSYPzDAq To explore our maps yourself and track every movement, check out our Figma, now at both Starbase and Cape Canaveral: Starbase: figma.com/design/2AvC161FuB1… Cape Canaveral: figma.com/design/lHRSgzUwyjD… #SpaceX #Starbase #Starship