I believe flight 13 also satisfies "02 - deployed satellites" - they were functional and in a decaying orbit

@JoeandSeth 5 Jan 2025 post below said

"Mass simulator to suborbital seems like it shouldn't count, but I am wondering whether this is because it is suborbital or because it is a non working test item or whether both intent to be working and deploy to orbit is needed to resolve yes.

I am inclined to think both but if anyone wants to argue differently, please do present arguments."

Both was decided leading to an update to the description. These went suborbital not orbital.

Not sure why you are using "decaying orbit" which I understand and seems defined as "the gradual loss of altitude and energy of an orbiting object, primarily caused by atmospheric drag, leading to its eventual re-entry and breakup". These re-entries are caused by being suborbital rather than orbital in the first place and rather than atmospheric drag causing decay of the orbit so no, I don't think it should be described as a 'decaying orbit'.

Now added to description for clarity
Edit 26 July 2026L orbit in above means they must complete at least a full orbit.

@ChristopherRandles mmm. I saw working real satellites in space, the text of the question says real satellites and not orbit, and the clarification came in a comment thread.

My mistake for not reading everything, I suppose.

@JoeandSeth The description included
Satellites must be deployed to orbit and be functional items but functional as a test item is OK.
in bold for the last 18 months or so and this says to orbit so it wasn't only in a comment.

That I had resolved
02 Deploy satellites by end of 2026/07 i.e. Jul 2026
early is also perhaps a good indicator of my intent that they had to be fully orbital.

Sorry if you were misled though. Do you feel I should refund your losses in these circumstances?

Also edited options to include "to full orbit" to better clarify now.

@ChristopherRandles nah, I agree I should have read the whole thing. Felt a bit underpriced, that should have been warning enough

Appreciate the offer.

I believe Flight 13 satisfies the definition of ship recovery?? @ChristopherRandles

@notarealuser it's not clear that they'll actually recover it instead of scuttle it though

@Mqrius the data should be valuable enough for a recovery effort, let's see

@notarealuser The data is valuable and it is largely intact without major deformation.

They might scuttle it and that doesn't seem like recover it to me. Towing it back to land for fuller inspection would seem more like 'recover' and that might still be a possibility.

However a second issue is it says "Things that might possibly be repairable like missing tiles and/or hole in flap and/or flap torn off is acceptable." so I think this is and was intended to indicate that major things that have no chance of repair are not acceptable. I am less sure about whether engines being dunked in sea water means that flight 13 won't count.

@ChristopherRandles: Whoa, when you wrote "recovery" you didn't just mean tower catch and didn't phrase it poorly? I presumed the lack of clarification on if it must be a catch or not was because you'd presumed it was a catch so didn't think to clarify.

And yeah, I'd be mighty impressed if they do all that's necessary to keep it afloat, tow it multiple days just to very quickly end up paying people to scrap it once they get it to the shore.

@BodeyBaker I was mainly thinking catch as the expected recovery method. However, if their plans changed such that they landed a Starship on a barge but on the way back if fell over and had to be scrapped/sunk then I believe I would say the landing worked but the recovery failed because they didn't get it back to land. (Wikipedia has decided on this approach with some Falcon 9 boosters that have landed on barges but then fallen over so treated as 'not recovered'.)

So my post above is trying to say there seem to be two ways in which flight 13 could fail the recover requirements:
1. Not recovering to land
2. If a dunk in sea water means there is no way they can consider repairing it to fly again.

I believe I am trying to stick to the meaning of the words I used. Recover potentially covers more methods than just catch but recovery is more than just land intact somewhere, they have to get it to somewhere useful. Flight 13 still has a lot to be shown to count as recover.

Sorry if this hasn't been clear until now.

What I have read with little idea of whether sources are real or how reliable and well placed these sources are

"Update from a source at SpaceX: Ship 40 is not intact. Its nose section was partially crushed when it impacted the water. Not enough to cause structural failure as seen on previous water landing. But it's damaged beyond repair nevertheless."

Market for whether it's recovered to land at all, without needing it to be ready for re-use

Did you add new answers recently or is it me? @ChristopherRandles

@JasonMendoza2008 The markets up to 10 have been there quite a while now. I did recently resolve some July 2026 markets as mentioned below and added
06 Refuel a starship in orbit by end of 2027/12 i.e. Dec 2027
and maybe some other later dates.
Let me know if you think more are needed.

markets 7, 8 and 10 don't seem to have probable date options so I will add a later date to those shortly.

SpaceX announced plans for flight 13
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-13

Clearly no catches or orbit in July 2026 so resolved those.

They're applying for a license to return the starship to the catch site from August through to December

https://x.com/iniallanderson/status/2066875875014947292?s=46

Are there two of "03 Launch from a different tower by end of 2026/02 i.e. Feb 2026"?

@Nat Oops my mistake. Well there were 2 but not anymore. Thanks for pointing it out.

@ChristopherRandles I don't understand which of these dates applies (general comment)

@JoshuaWilkes 2026/3 is March 2026 then I wrote it out again as March 2026 where is the confusion?

Edit added i.e. to make clearer that it is a repetition.
(Year/month has to come first for alphabetic sorting.)

@ChristopherRandles this might be hard to believe but I genuinely read this as End of 2026 OR March 3rd 2026 🤣

@JoshuaWilkes Yea done plenty of crazy misunderstanding myself. As soon as I wrote "where is the confusion", I guessed you were seeing 3rd March 2026. Anyway, better to avoid someone else being confused by adding the i.e.

@ChristopherRandles Honestly it would be more readable if you deleted the ambiguous form entirely

@SimonWestlake Ambiguous? or do you mean simply delete the duplicated part starting with i.e.?

@ChristopherRandles It's not that ambiguous actually, but I think it would be clearest with just "Mar 2026”, for example. You could even spell out the whole month with the extra space if you wanted haha

@SimonWestlake If I delete the numeric form then they don't sort into order correctly.
If I just use numeric like 2026/01 someone might misinterpret as 1st day of 2026 or something.

@ChristopherRandles ahhh that makes sense. I agree you should keep both in that case