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Starship Flight 14 is in orbit; it's just finished deploying satellites as I type. Looks like @TheDag won his bet with @ArjinFerman, with about 3 months to go. Recent discussion of this and other bets.
IMHO I'm still on track to lose my bet with Arjin, though there's three years left for things to get more interesting there. Things got a little more interesting in the wrong direction this morning, with SpaceX making a last-minute call to do the final (only 19 seconds long! Their suborbital trajectories really are really close to orbital!) orbital insertion burn after an ascent in which one of the six upper stage engines shut down early.
An early engine shutdown or two (they had one on the booster too) isn't the end of the world for the ascent - they carry extra fuel reserves for that contingency, and just keep the other engines lit a little longer if it happens - but it does mean a higher chance that the most exciting potential failure here is still to come. Starship did go to orbit, but we have yet to learn for certain whether Starship should have gone to orbit. They're hoping to do about 8 more hours of orbital coasting, then relight an upper stage engine for a deorbit burn. They also get to a "checkpoint" every hour or two where they can do an early deorbit burn and an early controlled reentry over ocean if they anticipate any issues with the full-length mission. But, if there's anything wrong with the upper stage that prevents the relight, then instead of another nice reentry and splashdown, we'll have the largest individual vehicle to make orbit (at least 25% heavier than the Shuttle orbiter, and something like a quarter the mass of the entire International Space Station after all its individual parts were assembled) stuck in orbit, eventually reentering out-of-control. This would be the largest event ever of that nature (Skylab was maybe 75% the mass of the Starship orbiter) and would be by far the largest recent event (the series of irresponsibly-littered Long March 5B upper stages were something like 20% the mass of Starship).
Beat me to my concession speech! @TheDag, if you're still here, send me a charity of your choice, or if you prefer to get the goods directly, some privacy-preserving way of transferring the money (happy to buy you a game on Steam, or something).
This one was a real nail-biter, originally they actually called off the orbital burn, only to change their mind again and go ahead with it.
I'll go ahead an concede a few more things. Over the years my opinion on Elon / SpaceX improved. Originally I was sure that Starlink was a gimmick, but between the Ukraine war, and every competitor trying to get their own version of it running, it seems pretty obvious like it's here to stay, and so no matter what happens in the coming years, I have to give him credit for implementing an idea that, frankly, seemed deranged just a few years ago.
As I've said, Starship can't not work.
Don't get carried away. Plenty of projects died because they couldn't iron out all the kinks, or couldn't do ao fast enough.
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