Resolves YES if a SpaceX Starship reaches an Earth escape trajectory, such that it is no longer gravitationally bound to Earth.
This will be determined via statements from SpaceX that Starship has reached an escape trajectory, or from telemetry data showing Starship having a speed of at least:
where d is Starship's altitude as measured from the centre of the Earth.
Note that SpaceX livestreams ordinarily show speed telemetry data in a frame rotating with the Earth, so a coordinate transformation may be needed to determine whether Starship has reached escape velocity or not, if it's close enough for the rotation of the Earth to matter. I know how to do the needed transformation, as long as altitude telemetry is also available, and Starship's downrange direction is known (from these one can infer the full 3D velocity vector).
Resolves NO if no Starship reaches escape velocity before 2027, and N/A if it's not possible to reasonably determine whether escape velocity was reached or not.
The relevant timezone for "before 2027" is local time at the launch site.
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@Eliza I'm not sure if this is still on the cards but Musk had been talking about uncrewed flights to Mars in late 2026:
I'm not aware of any other reasons they might exit Earth's gravity well - one day for commercial deep space launches maybe, but probably not for a while.
I guess they might do a test flight on an escape trajectory like they did with Falcoln Heavy - there was no real need for that but they did it anyway.
@Eliza Musk has said 'slight chance' for uncrewed mars launch and a lot of things would have to go right for that. Trans Mars insertion burn for this would be late 2026 as the only time this could be done until 2028/2029. With Musk, 'slight chance' might mean no chance and in addition since then ship 36 and booster 18 destructions have delayed things so not 'going right'. However it is rather unclear if Musk was talking about a landing attempt and maybe they still get to try out a launch to Mars orbit or flyby if things go well in 2026.
There is also in the moon plans indications that there would be a long duration test (ie make sure they can relight engines after some cold soak time in deep space. I don't know where this would be done and perhaps for lunar plans a lunar orbit makes more sense than an escape trajectory. However for space debris reasons perhaps an escape trajectory could make more sense and might even be better testing conditions particularly for Mars. So not at all clear whether this test would be an escape trajectory or not and also not at all clear if this is now likely delayed to 2027.