Somewhere at SpaceX, there's a marketing team that has learned the power of saying almost nothing. Its flying-saucer-shaped capsule just went to orbit for the second time, and the most detailed spec sheet available still comes from a government environmental document.

32 Payloads, One Very Quiet Disk

A Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 40 at 7:04 a.m. EDT on October 20, carrying 32 payloads on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission, after a weather scrub the day before. Among them was Starfall, SpaceX's uncrewed reentry capsule, on only its second flight since debuting in June. SpaceX deployed all customer payloads, and the booster was set for its 19th flight with a droneship landing about nine minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX describes Starfall as a microgravity lab for researchers and entrepreneurs, including those working on in-space manufacturing. According to an FAA environmental assessment, the disk is about 0.75 meters tall and 3.1 meters across, weighs around 2,100 kilograms and can bring up to 1,000 kilograms of payload back to Earth. SpaceX hasn't said what, if anything, was aboard this time, or where and how this one will come down.

Orbital Factories Are Getting Crowded

Starfall wasn't the only return capsule along for the ride. Varda Space Industries flew its W-7 capsule, its ninth reentry vehicle, to study whether microgravity improves the solubility of a cancer drug. When the company that dominates launch starts building its own return capsule, the in-space manufacturing market stops looking like a science-fair project and starts looking like a real industry.

The angle people miss: rideshare missions have turned space into a shared hosting plan. Dozens of customers, one rocket, split the cost. That's the same economics that made cloud computing explode, just with more fire and fewer status pages, and it's why startups can now run experiments in orbit that once needed a national space agency. The bottleneck has moved from getting up there to getting stuff back down, and Starfall is SpaceX making a play for that return trip. Given its track record of turning experimental hardware into routine service, the competition should probably take the quiet saucer seriously.

The saucer is real, the factory floor is orbital, and SpaceX is keeping its cards close to its heat shield.

Your website may not need a heat shield, but it does need a solid launch plan — tell us what you're building and we'll help you get it off the ground.

Source: Spaceflight Now