SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 + Kimi K3 Freakout | The Brainstorm 142

**Nicholas Grous** (0:00)
Was Starship Flight 13 a success? Yes, no, what are the nuances we should be looking at?

**Brett Winton** (0:05)
The cost decline for inference at the frontier is kind of on my most recent calculation. It's 97-fold annualized.

**Tasha Keeney** (0:15)
I don't see the case for many businesses wanting to use a Chinese model.

**Nicholas Grous** (0:19)
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Brainstorm. Today we are Downsam, but Tasha is here. Brett, as always, we are talking about Starship SpaceX and then we are going to look at the AI frontier because we cannot go a single episode without talking about AI. It's too important. Okay, Brett, Tasha, was Starship Flight 13 a success? Yes? No?
What are the nuances we should be looking at?

**Tasha Keeney** (0:48)
I would say, okay, so was it a success? Yes, did they do everything they wanted? No, they wanted a soft landing for both the booster and the ship. They got a soft landing on the ship. The booster had a hard splashdown, but overall, again, a number of improvements since the last test flight, including they got 20 real satellites out. They were active for about 20 minutes. They got a bunch of data back from them. They got more images of the heat shield.
They also relit an engine in space on the ship to test capability for the next mission. For the next test mission, they plan to go fully orbital and to attempt a catch of the ship, which will be the first.

**Nicholas Grous** (1:40)
They've already caught the booster? Yes.

**Brett Winton** (1:44)
Yes. A couple of times, right?

**Tasha Keeney** (1:45)
Yeah.

**Brett Winton** (1:46)
They come in a couple of times and caught it.

**Tasha Keeney** (1:48)
Yes. But they're doing the splashdowns because they're suborbital flights. It's like a hop versus a full circle.

**Brett Winton** (1:57)
Okay. Yeah.
They redesigned the booster and the ship basically for this new variant. This is the variant they're going to go to space with their V3 satellites on. As Tasha alluded to, the new engines, some of them didn't relight to create a soft splashdown for the booster, so they still have some engineering work to do. But I think that the hardest engineering challenge, at least, that we had anticipated, was whether or not you can make that heat shield reusable on the Starship. From that perspective, this was a wildly successful flight. As in, optically, the heat shield came down. Their first flight of the Starship, it was like burning through. It was like something out of Interstellar or something, as it was coming in to land and it barely flopped into the ocean. This one seemed quite successful. It landed so softly that it didn't even explode as it fell over.
Optically, the heat shield looked like it was in great shape. Now, I'm sure it wasn't perfect, but it seems like they're really narrowing in and tuning in on what that can look like. From a modeling perspective, we really didn't anticipate in any meaningful sense that they would have a fully reusable stack until 2027, until kind of like mid-2027. And even that would be slightly ahead of schedule relative to the balance of how we modeled the company. So if they can make this fully reusable earlier, it means they can lower their costs to orbit from hundreds of dollars per kilogram to, you know, around 100 or 100 or less. And so then that preserves capital for the company to devote to satellite manufacturing and spanning up kind of all of their production facilities. And so it really impacts the financial model for the company in a pretty big way, you know, on the order of, depending on kind of like when they actually get it into reuse, you know, it could kind of double or more expectations for 2036 and, you know, on the order of a 20 to 40% increase in our expectations for earnings in 2031 So I would say that it's in terms of like their various de-risking things that SpaceX has to do, this is the first and, you know, and some would say it's impossible to create a rapid, reusable top stage. So this is a milestone along the way, and it's a positive milestone, but by no means are they all the way there.
I think that's how I'd think about it. Tasha.

**Tasha Keeney** (4:49)
Yes. And so, and you touched on it, Brett, but just to make crystal clear, so the importance of the soft splashdown and the fact that, you know, this is not like a charred ship, like last time, is that now they get a lot more information back from it. You know, they can go and see what happened and there's things that are still intact. So, sort of every test flight, they get a lot of information back to fix things for the next time.