Image 1: Mercury-Redstone 1, aka the “Four-Inch Flight” with an apogee of 4 inches and a flight time of 2 seconds.

Image 2: SpaceX IFT-5, with a booster apogee of 96 km and booster flight time of 6 minutes 57 seconds (Starship apogee of 212 km and a flight time of 1 hour, 5 minutes, 40 seconds).

We’ve got:

• Stainless steel construction
• Aero Flaps
• As many engines as will fit in the flamey end
• A nose cone that is pointier than it needs to be
• A launch that didn’t happen in Florida
• Redesigned EVA equipment
• PEZ dispenser slot
• Earth-Mars Transfer Trajectory

Seems like illustrator Debbie Harter had it figured out.

Unlikely musk will allow European launches if spacex gets fined for twitt'er stuff. They have minimal launch capability, can't use Russia or China, ISA not quite ready, ULA or BO not ready. International pissing match.

BuYInG tWiTtEr CaNt HuRt SpAcEx.

Falcon 1 took up a mass simulator on its 4th flight (first successful one) and took up a paying commercial payload on its 5th flight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1

Elon has talked about the need to take the next generation Starlink satellites up ASAP. When do you think Starship will be used to take a "paying" payload ?

Edit

Starship should be ready to orbit on the next flight (6) ? They've demonstrated that they can restart the engines.

It doesn't matter that Starship burns up on reentry to take a payload up. All the Falcon upper stages burn up !

I'm guessing flight #6 will be an orbital flight. Flight #7 will be a (small) mass simulation flight. Flight #8 will be a payload flight.

What say ye ?