Starship / Super Heavy
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For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top.
It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.
The ability to lift that into orbit (minus most fuel and booster) with both halves still able to land is an insane feat.
Why is it efficient? [https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2z534g/...]
Real rocket science teams really use phrases like this, including this one. Is it a joke? Yeah, kind of. Is it what they would say if they had no sense of humour? No, probably not. Is it still a thing the experts actually say to actually talk about what's going on? Yeah, it is.
a few more examples:
"Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" : explosive destruction of the rocket
"Lithobraking" : it's like aerobraking, but with less aero and more litho
Falcon 9 does the same, relighting 3 engines (out of 9 total) for the boostback burn, 3 for the entry burn and then just 1 for landing.
It’s called a RUD: Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
If you can reuse it, great, if not, well, it's a rocket.
They didn’t launch humans on the Falcon 9 for the first 10 years either. Lots of time to iron out the kinks (though it will likely be much less than 10 years this time)
That looks like an awful lot of G’s that this maneuver is pulling there.
This suicide burn is just to try to recover the rocket to save money.
This sounds even crazier than the bellyflop-swivel-to-suicide-burn (BSTSB).
So the Starship system is some type of 3 piece mechanism? Where the 3rd piece is the human module?
And they’re going to land this with parachutes? Where? In the ocean?
Won’t this kill the reusability of the plan, for quick turn around time?
Granted, if the BSTSB is to only be used for transporting inorganic materials, like fuel, then G-forces does not matter for human usage.
Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.
So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.
In 1963 a LES killed someone, in 1983 it saved lives.
Which manned abort in 1963 is that specifically? Why are you trying to skew discussion into some direction?
Note: LES stands for Launch Escape System, usually a small solid rocket that activates in case of a failure during ascent to take the manned capsule away from exploding rocket under it, perhaps equivalent to airbags in a car.
People gets hurt by airbags all the time trying to service them. That doesn’t tell if it’s worth having them in actual situations they’re designed for, nor whether the situations are worth preparing for.
Also, an escape system adds weight to a rocket. That weight could be used for other stuff that makes the rest of the system more reliable (slightly stronger fuel tanks, redundant pumps, whatever). Designing the escape system also takes resources away that could be used to improve the safety of the primary system.
For rockets, it’s not easy to decide what’s the best choice; we launch too few of them, and the ones we launch change too often to gather reliable statistics. Getting real-world data on the reliability of escape systems definitely is hard, as it requires numerous rocket failures or elaborate test setups (a full test must include high speed and an explosion that may throw material through the engine of the escape capsule)
> Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.
> So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.
Is this supposed to be a recursion joke? Sorry if I'm not getting it.
[1]: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-r... "Largest rocket"
I remember being amused the first time a flight attendant said "we'll be taking off momentarily".
Trivial fact would perhaps be better as 'factette' or 'microfact'.
In this incorrect usage of the word, take the following sentence: "Nice little factoid!", could also be written as "Nice little nugget of info!"
I've adjusted my expectations quite a bit due to the lack of mobility progress since then.
That of course is biased towards the contracted projects, but still provides cashflow and leverage for capital.
What got in the way was politics.
What revived space tech was competition.
Politics and bureaucracy can plague private enterprise and competition can be had between or at the behest of government institutions.
It's not as simple as government bad, private good. In fact that simplification can be quite dangerous if it leads to the erosion of government as policy.
Saturn V: 3 people to the Moon; Starship: 100 people to Mars (unproven, of course). Mars is a little further than the Moon. Granted, that's with in-orbit refueling.
People on these vehicles going to Mars are mostly going to complain about not being able to go back, as any kind of return mission will be Non-reusable.
What are you talking about? Starships will be refueled on Mars and will return back to Earth. Why shouldn't they be reusable after their return?
I care about actual practical capabilities and achievable mission profiles. What do you are about?
(Apparently the aircraft launched from an aircraft carrier aren't really airplanes, either!)
Because of in-orbit refueling each Starship will land over ten times the payload on Mars as each Apollo mission landed on the moon.
Also, the Saturn V came back. That requires quite a bit more delta v. Actually, going to the moon and back is not that far off a one way trip to Mars.
Since we're nitpicking: The Saturn V didn't come back – the tiny command module came back, and it wasn't reusable. In fact, the only reusable part of the Saturn V were the astronauts.
> Actually, going to the moon and back is not that far off a one way trip to Mars.
You're moving the goalpost. This is getting ridiculous. What are you even arguing about? Starship + Super Heavy will be a much more capable rocket, superior to the Saturn V in almost every way. That doesn't detract from the incredible engineering of the Saturn V, which was developed 55 years earlier, in record time, with slide rules (!), and which first launched 10 years after the first artificial satellite (!!) That is impossible to beat, and there's no need for a pissing contest.
That being said, that rocket alone isn't going to be more capable than the Saturn V in moving a payload around. It will be less capable. If you have many rockets then you'll have the capacity to move that payload around as a far as a Saturn V.
There, is that the comparison you wanted?
The Starship is designed to carry 100 people. SpaceX will be able to send more people to the moon in one mission than all the moon landings ever sent. Wow...
As a result the Lunar variant actually needs a lot more fuel delivered to it than the Mars version. Even one full refuel in LEO isn’t enough, and it needs to boost part way to an intermediate elliptical orbit and get another top up.
It seems like for every full refill you could provide in space it'd take an additional 3-4 ships just to get it up there?
Starship’s usable volume is over 100 times that of an Apollo lunar lander.
To land that with Apollo would take 100 launches of a single use craft.
Each would be launched atop the common Super Heavy booster.
Depending on the trip, a passenger Starship would do an on-orbit refuelling from the tanker variant.
E.g. for a lunar mission: it takes 9.4 km/s Δv to get to low Earth orbit (LEO), but only 5.5 km/s Δv to get from there to the Moon [1]. Raptor (the engine used on Starship) has an exhaust velocity of 3.2 km/s on Earth, and 3.7 km/s in vacuum [2]. Plugging those numbers in the rocket equation, to get to LEO you need about 19x your payload mass in fuel. However, to get from LEO to the moon surface, you only need 4x your payload mass in fuel. So while a tanker can indeed only bring a small fraction of its launch mass as fuel to orbit, once you're in orbit you don't need that much fuel to get to the moon.
In reality the numbers to get to LEO are lower because of staging and the vacuum engines on Starship which can be used in the upper atmosphere, and you also need fuel to get back from the moon, but it probably won't add up to a full Starship.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
As an attributive adjective, "foot" is indeed correct, e.g. "a 130 foot yacht."
As a predicative adjective, "feet" is correct, e.g. "the yacht was 130 feet long."
Occasionally, in certain regional variations, you may hear "foot" used in the second case: "the yacht was 130 foot long."
A nice combination of SF and fantasy in one picture :-)
And whenever I realize that the full Starship + SuperHeavy stack is going to be much taller than that hill, I am just speechless. That is one big freaking rocket, one big trampoline for mankind, so to say.
It may also help for rapidly testing orbital refueling in 2022, though the plan is to do orbital refueling with 1 launch pad, 1 Super Heavy and 2 Starships (1 standard, 1 refueler) with 1 hour turnaround times between launches (and 5-6 launches) before Starship is ready to depart for the journey to Mars.
Watching the two heavy boosters landing on neighbouring pads was similar - except real. It was that shot that made me think “the future is here”
I mean, if you are spending hundreds of millions to launch something, that something better work once up there, right? So you spend 20 years engineering a "perfect" payload, the costs do what they always do, and now you have a billion-dollar payload.
But if a launch was $2M and bookable with a month's lead time, you'd just de-risk the whole thing by having a simple-to-build, likely-to-work payload. Or ten.
(This might not apply to something like the JWST specifically, since even a terrestial mirror of that size is a huge challenge. But I bet a lot of other kinds of science payloads will be built very differently a decade from now.)
Their current approval is good for testing (vertical) flights of Starship and Superheavy, but does not currently permit orbital flight from Boca Chica as I understand it.
They are currently in a public comment period thru Jan 22.
For this reason, I think the intent is for Superheavy launches to be mainly done far out at sea. But Boca is needed in the interim for testing purposes.
Isn’t that why launch complexes are usually on coasts? They immediately point out over the ocean, and if it’s off course the flight is “terminated” (i.e. exploded) before it reaches populated areas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety
Though that's generally true, Everyday Astronaut watched the SN8 launch up "close" and reported the sound was (relatively) mild. Indeed the raptors sounded differently, with less of the violent "cracking up". There may be a bit of a surprise coming here.
the full stack will have 30ish, full throttle, perhaps even above 100% current. the sound is going to break rocks apart. i wonder what the suppression system will look like.
Similar calculations state that a Starship with full tanks and 6 or 7 engines might just be able to make it into orbit on it's own, assuming it doesn't have any payload or heatshield.
Since that's useless and wastes the ship, they will never do it. But it still boggles the mind that they are using a craft that is almost a SSTO ship ... as a second stage, on top of a massive first stage. The Raptor engines are freakishly good, near the top in both efficiency and thrust.
Then there's he environmental impact of more frequent launches (originally the area was approved for 12 falcon 9 flights a year) - sound impacts on wildlife, habitat impact of larger construction areas, more staff around reduces habitat quality for wildlife, etc.
and if it explodes on the pad... 1kt TNT equivalent? that's a tactical nuke.
Is there not piped water? Is it just another eco friendly sounding thing to put in the plan? Is it to hedge against newspaper headlines saying how much water spacex is wasting?
Desalination has to be more expensive than piped water (both financially and environmentally).
The bubble wall tech will probably be a big enough problem to sort out once they try to build them.
My guess is that water systems are needed to reduce damage to the launch pad.
Would you ride it?
Similarly, the Saturn V MLP had "rainbirds" to wet it down, even though the vast majority of the water used was down the exhaust trench for sound suppression.
During launches, they need to spray water- a lot of it. Using salt water would probably be problematic. Lots of residue left over.
I would guess that it is driven by a real need for water and a hedge against environmental assessment difficulties.
I'm just guessing here, but that's my half informed idea.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-19/sydney-desalination-p...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90338907/a-new-breakthrough-lowe...
Or they can disperse it atmosphere to fight climate change
https://www.livescience.com/62140-can-salt-stop-climate-chan...
Finally they can serve it with shitload of tequila :)
"There are no shops or restaurants or amenities of any kind around, including municipal water pipes; Cameron County regularly trucks in gallons of water, which is stored in outdoor tanks."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/space-x-...
The whole piece is worth a read btw, great article.
Not, there is not. All water is currently delivered, and the nearest municipal water is over 15 miles away.
Arranging for a water pipeline would not be cheap, but moreover would take a lot of time. Desalinization plant is plug and play; pipe is going to require a lot of bureaucracy besides a pretty fair capital investment.
Both solar and wind power have gotten incredibly cheap (~ $15/MW), and more importantly will continue to get much cheaper over the next decade. Boca Chica has lots of wind & sun.
Desalination can also handle the variability of wind & solar quite well: just use water from a big water tank when both wind & solar aren't available. Expensive batteries not required. And to a first approximation it's always windy in Boca Chica, so not much storage is required anyways.
OTOH, piping water from Brownsville to Boca Chica is probably a 9 figure project.
Indeed.
https://reddit.com/r/SpaceX/w/launches/manifest?utm_source=s...
The wildcard for profit here is government. No doubt China and possibly Russia, EU and India will want to race for position when the see America claiming stake here.
I could see huge government funds from US and even allied countries coming through to support the development and get the fast claims.
The way I see it, a lot of interesting things are closer than Mars. There's plenty of space rocks near Earth, that could be nudged into Earth orbit and mined, ultimately enabling orbital construction. I'm hoping a whole economy in cislunar space will eventually take off. That would go a long way towards making servicing Mars cheaper, too.
As a lay person, this sounds kind of dangerous - wouldn't there be a risk of the rock hurtling towards earth and causing a huge impact?
Of course, the very capability of altering trajectory of asteroids creates risks of its own, similar to the capability of splitting atom.
Although hydrogen would be hard to come by, the atmospheric concentration is very low. That said, I doubt there's that much hydrogen on Mercury either.
So who knows, maybe Venus is a better place for a human base than Mercury?
They are of course in eternal darkness, but if want an artificial sun, just raise a diffuse reflector over the crater rim. If you need more concentrated energy, raise a mirror.
Mercury on the other hand swings in temperature from uninhabitably cold to about as hot as Venus's uninhabitable surface, and it has essentially no atmosphere. Not necessarily impossible, but it definitely seems more difficult. A little info here, but it doesn't seem to have been looked at in nearly as much detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization#Mercury
Remember Venus has about 91% of earth mass, so a significant rocket would be needed to get into orbit. Maybe Starship could be a capable single stage LVO transporter, but I have difficulty seeing it floating in the clouds, fully topped up, tethered to a balloon.
I think getting off Venus from 50km up wouldn't be too bad. If you've got enough flotation to carry a research station or city or whatever, with water supply, food production, life support, etc., you can carry a fuelled up Starship and Super Heavy (if your base is smaller, use a smaller rocket [1]). Launching them seems like it would be doable: drop in belly flop orientation, it glides a bit away as it falls, then starts the main engines and pivots to upright, and away it goes. "Landing" or whatever arrival would entail seems more complicated, but you might be able to make a platform a bit like landing on a barge (but one that can go down to cushion the landing).
[1] A fully fuelled up Falcon 9 weighs more than the ISS, so we're talking a big research station for this to be feasible.
I think that's becoming less true with LEO megaconstellations of satellites, but it's still probably too low volume for now to warrant an entirely separate federal agency.
Might be hard getting USA, China, Russia and the EU on the same page though.
They've already said they plan to launch from floating platforms in the ocean...
Do we have any feasible non-rocket options to do on Earth, though? Air-breathing first stage is all I can think of (but it's essentially still a rocket). Skyhooks and space elevators will have to wait for advances in materials science and will require orbital manufacturing capabilities. Launch loops seem to be too complicated either. Mini launch loops / big guns / other constructs that provide all kinetic energy at ground level won't work because of atmosphere density, and even if you had magic materials that'd survive hypersonic shocks and G forces, it'd still be a ridiculous waste of energy compared to rockets.
At this point I think we don't need anyone surpassing SpaceX, we just need more people copying them. In of itself, it'll drive launch costs further down.
Not yet, no — but a decade ago we didn’t have powered landing and rapid reuse of first stages either. While that observation doesn’t guarantee future tech could (or should) be made, I am an optimist when it comes to tech.
There are a couple of projects along these lines right now, both involving Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites [2,3].
Stratolaunch went through several iterations of spacecraft, at one point I believe it was even going to drop a SpaceX rocket! With Paul Allen's passing not sure what the plans are currently.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_White_Knight... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Stratolaunch
When launching to space you would want to launch to the east to get assistance from the earth rotation. You would want to launch over ocean so any debris/stages don't crash into populated areas. There's not that many places that is suitable.
China has due to geo politics and secrecy three space ports deep inland and it's not unusual that launch stages crash into populated areas. Probably why they've started to launch from ocean platforms.
There should be a FSA that FAA coordinates with for the low altitude region of launch, and above that the FSA handles all sorts of space traffic, satellites, etc.
I don't know anything about this, but probably each launch has to mix between doing their own space window and launch path monitoring, and leaning on some group like NASA. This seems non-ideal. FSA could become the source of this.
I don't think the coordination would pose a blocking challenge. And I think the scope of the space domain warrants its own agency.
And that last phase where the ship flips vertical from the bellyflop, looks insane for human passengers inside. How many G’s is that maneuver pulling?
SN8 appears 90% successful, but I’m wondering if that remaining 10% is the killer.
As they say: You spend 10% of your time, solving 90% of your problem. And then you spend 90% of your time, solving the last 10% of your problem.
Between high speed re-entry, and thermal protections, I wonder how well the Starship design was modeled, to handle hypersonic re-entry speeds. It appears to be a very large spacecraft that’s re-entering the atmosphere at very high speeds.
If it succeeds, then maybe it’ll open up space travel and make it cheaper. If not, then well, nice try. Back to the drawing board.
But maybe, we’ll see results soon enough, with SN9.
Of all of those, only RocketLab has managed to do it, and their rocket is basically as tiny as you can build a orbital rocket.
SpaceX did an orbital rocket bigger then RocketLab in 2008. RocketLab doesn't yet have real competition, despite many billions invested.
SpaceX at the same time went from the tiny Falcon 1 to a gigantic Starship program more ambitious then Saturn V and Apollo.
I think we do our self a dissevers by just saying 'well, we have computers now so its easy'. Given how many people have tried and how many have failed or taken many, many years longer then they thought, it is clearly not easy at all.
And mass producing them reliably is even harder.
SpaceX and Elon Musk are clearly special and unique. Something we have never seen before.
I also didn't talk about China or Indian launch who are also doing it.
the biggest risk was the reverse belly flop and that went flawless to everyone's surprise. to quote musk, the crater is in the right place, and it didn't even properly explode anyway - the nose cone was more or less intact :) if the fuel pressure issue really is fixed and SN9 lands on the pad, it'll be a mark of a new age of space industry - and not that long after the previous one set by the same company! the most recent NRO mission flew on a booster used four times previously; fifteen years ago you'd be laughed out of the room for just suggesting the possibility of launching a national security payload on a used rocket.
Also, Blue Origin is just an expensive hobby compared to SpaceX. They're older, but have never flown anything to orbit, compared to the 100+ missions SpaceX has performed.
Who cares? They are building interesting stuff too. We are in an amazing time for Space tech.
Why do Musk fans talk of "supporting the mission" out of one side of their mouth, and denigrate the competition every chance they get out of the other? It happens with Tesla and EVs too. Toxic communities.
However, saying SpaceX, the established company, should relocate to be next to Blue Origin, the new start-up that hasn't shown much yet, for unspecified reasons just doesn't make any logical sense.
Also, I think part of the reason space enthusiasts don't like Blue Origin is that it has had a terrible return-on-investment so far. There's a limited amount of money that will put into space, and it's great that Jeff Bezos wants to spend a billion a year on it. It would just be great if there was more to show in return for that money. For example, Elon Musk claims SpaceX has spend about a billion on reusability for the Falcon 9. Just imagine such a leap forward every year.
Another reason Blue Origin gets a bad rep is that they don't exactly try to play fair. As mentioned by a sibling comment, they tried to patent something (landing on a ship) that's at best just common sense. When NASA wanted to lease LC-39A to commercial providers, Blue Origin tried to block NASA from leasing it exclusively to SpaceX on the basis that it'd be unfair to them, even though they hadn't flown anything that could use the pad yet (and still haven't). They landed their New Shepherd after a suborbital flight to 100.5 km just weeks before SpaceX landed their first Falcon 9 booster -- claiming to be the first to land a rocket propusively. That would be fine, except Bezos then tweeted "Welcome to the club" to Musk, ignoring the fact that orbital rockets are much, much harder (as evidenced by the fact that they still haven't launched, let alone landed one, 5 years later).
Here is the popular graphic of the current (2020-12-27) production line by https://twitter.com/brendan2908
https://twitter.com/brendan2908/status/1342967357006729216/p...
Edit: and the 'decommissioned' product line:
https://twitter.com/brendan2908/status/1338689061817487360/p...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-ipho...
A Tesla Model 3 weighs about 4,000 lbs. In the last 6 quarters, about 600,000 vehicles were delivered.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
2.4e9 > 6.5e8
TL;DR: Cars are heavy. The total mass of the vehicles Tesla has delivered in the past six quarters exceeds the total mass of all the iPhones that Apple has ever sold.