Is there a publicly documented (or guesstimated) timeline for Starship? What comes next?
What has been guesstimated by the observers and/or stated by Gwynne/Elon:
- next flight some time in jan/feb
- next flight will be a V1 booster with a V2 ship (still Raptor 2s)
- next flight profile will be similar to this one, if they land the ship in the ocean precisely again, the they will try to catch the next one afer that (note this is not currently possible as no existing ship has catch hardware installed)
- stated flight test cadence they would like to reach in 2025 is 25, observers think 10-12 are more likely, in both cases they need to move pretty fast
- both the star factory and the second launch pad should come online fully within the first half of 2025, launch cadence should improve a lot after that
- for Artemis 3 they need to demonstrate fuel transfer in 2025, otherwise the timeline of that program will for sure have to be extended (probably even beyond the already expected delay to 2027)
- elon wants to send a few starships to mars in the 2026 window, and that may actually happen if everything goes smooth as butter until then, but the 2028 window with humans on board is just a wish, very much "elon time", most observers do not think starship will be human rated for such long flights before 2030s
They are not that far behind the aspirational goals Elon laid out at IAC in 2016.
Then it was called ITS not the starship and steel was not yet thought about. https://youtu.be/WVacRKN1tAo?si=s0MBP8ejQt3zv-sF&t=3309
As you can see from the chart Mars flights from late 2022. But there was a pandemic amongst other things that came along etc.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/02/yusaku-maezawa-opens-up-publ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DearMoon_project
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259588/tesla-lawsuit-au...
It looks like it will take as long as any space project. It will be delayed and take almost a decade from start to completion.