SpaceX will soon fire up its Super Heavy booster for the first time
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
4-6 times the payload to LEO as the Space Shuttle, but 100% reusable with the aim of fast turn-around times and minimal refurbishment, at a fraction of the price.
Detract from the eccentricity of the company's owner all you want, but the engineers making that rocket happen are doing brilliant work, in my book.
I feel the key insight behind both SpaceX and Tesla is that both the napkin engineering from first principle and then having the force of will to personally see it through /are/ the most important thing. Both qualify as engineering.
Happy to have my fairy tale hero's journey view of success corrected.
If your goal is to get rich and play golf and relax, that is one thing. The fact that Elon is one of the wealthiest people in the world and also as passionate as someone working in their garage seems kind of like a crazy situation.
I wonder if there is similar historical precedence in terms of an ultra wealthy person being interested and involved like he is.
Given that SpaceX lives or dies by how well their rockets work, I don't think there's really anything more important for Musk to be doing.
Seriously: when you have Bond-villain levels of fame and fortune, I expect you to be at least as clever as Peter Thiel in fucking over people who crossed you. Musk just randomly calling people he doesn’t like “pedophiles” on Twitter always feels… I dunno, “small”?
Asking his team to build a sub is inexcusable. Still love his product, despite the distraction.
Is that what actually happened? Version I heard is that his engineers came up with the sub idea themselves, the idea didn't actually come from Musk. He just told them they could work on this and use corporate resources/funds to do so.
The sub didn't end up being used in the rescue. But, were the rescuers to any significant degree hindered by SpaceX/Boring/Tesla's offer of help? In a scenario like that, it makes sense to explore different solution options in parallel – the fact that some of them end up being culled doesn't mean it was wrong to explore them to begin with. Musk released an email exchange with the (co-)head of the cave rescue diving team [0], in which he asks if he should stop work on the sub and is told to continue with it. A lot of people paint it as if Musk and his team were hanging around the rescue site doing nothing but annoying the rescuers and getting in their way – but you'd think if that was actually true, they would have told him to abandon the submarine project not continue work on it.
That is, he knows enough about the engineering to hire people who know a lot about the engineering.
That, combined with his relentless drive (to the point of overwork both on himself and his employees) seems to be the key to SpaceX success.
No ventilation means more thermal mass in the place of airways to absorb and disperse heat. I specifically bought this model because I am tired of fans in my laptops, which have failed multiple times or become loud to the point that I couldn't even have it in a meeting room without it being a major distraction. Perfect, guaranteed silence at all times from my electronics is a beautiful thing.
And he got really exceedingly lucky with his initial hires. One of the founding employees was the best living rocket engine designer in the world, and then later the best rocket salesman in the world convinced him that SpaceX needed proper sales/business development, even in the early stage, and Musk basically replied: "Okay, you're hired", to which she basically replied: "No, that's not what I meant... but okay."
- Gwynne Shotwell
- Tom Mueller
- Eric Berger
Talent and Engineering prowess are pointless without direction, and Musk provides strong leadership to move the company in the direction he sees fit. The actual rocket scientists are Woz, and Musk is Jobs.
By using a 100% reusable vehicle and the cheapest fuel available the aspirational launch cost of starship is $2M.
Even Apples to Oranges it will be an order of magnitude cheaper than the current paradigm of $35M per Falcon9 launch. When you further consider it has 10x the payload capacity, this experiment gets really exciting.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1094793664809689089?s=20
100 reuses is not the limit either. The first stage in particular may be made for a lot more.
Methane (Starship fuel) is massively cheaper than Kerosene (Falcon 9 fuel). Methane also has a much higher specific impulse, which means you can use less of it to get the same increase in velocity. Methane can be stored in liquid form in same temperature as oxygen, which means less insulation the two propellant tanks. Inversely, Kerosene will freeze at the temperatures required to get oxygen into liquid form.
Basically, nothing you said is accurate.
Methane on the other hand is starting out at a much lower temperature, and it's very difficult to get methane molecules to react with each other to form large molecules as you're not starting with any single C-C bonds. Isolated free carbon atoms (soot) aren't much of a problem.
The raptors don’t run fuel rich, which should reduce that problem.
20% of the cost of the whole rocket. With no reuse. Now that reuse has cut the cost of launch way down, the second stage is much more than that of the cost.
As Elon likes to point out, imagine how expensive it would be to fly if, after every flight, they threw away the plane. That's exactly what people traditionally did with rockets. The result is that the cost to fly a jet is mostly the cost of the fuel, while the cost to fly a rocket is the cost of the rocket.
Consider a Falcon 9 launch. Thanks to reuse, the cost to relaunch is in the neighborhood of $30 million. The cost of the fuel is about $200,000. Over 99% the launch cost is depreciation, maintenance, or having to replace what you didn't reuse.
The aim with Starship is to make the cost of a launch as close to the cost of the fuel as they can get.
They are aiming for daily launches of starship, so the site operations costs would be divided by potentially hundreds of launches per year instead of the one or two dozen a year nowadays.
The cost model per flight of Starship is more like that of a jumbo jet than that of a Falcon 9.
Seemingly, SpaceX is the current best in the world and they couldn’t do it.
Also, you’d have to redesign F9 somewhat. Starship has the fairing integrated with the upper stage, which reduces recovery costs. Starship’s booster also does Return To Launch Site nominally, which means you don’t need a separate recovery droneship (Falcon 9 does that, too, but to make the most out of every expended upper stage, it makes sense to use down-range recovery). The F9 legs are sort of complicated logistically whereas Super Heavy is supposed to be recovered by the actual launch site, reducing turnaround time and costs. Also, using methane means less coking in the engines, which reduces turnaround costs and maintenance. Lots of things like that you’d need to reengineer to enable $1 million launch costs, but it’s feasible for an MLV. Relativity is planning to do it.
Right now SpaceX is the only company that recovers their orbital class booster. And that didn't happen until 2016! Prior to that, everyone dismissed landing rockets as impossible. Given the lack of competition for launch vehicles + the fat defense contracts being awarded, there wasn't much incentive for the incumbents to even try to bring the cost down.
Designing a rocket that can land and be reflow is a multiyear process. As other comments have said, more design changes would been needed to F9 to make it more reusable, those changes have tradeoffs. Instead, SpaceX chose to invest in a new design and more capable vehicle.
Other launch providers like RocketLab and Blue Origin are pursuing reusable vehicles.
"Why has no one done it?" give it time... it will happen sooner than we probably expect.
Something New Glenn sized definitely could.
Long-term marginal cost is determined by the nonreusable component cost + minimum refurbish & refit costs per launch. Effectively, the benefits of reuse offer diminising marginal benefit per reuse. Though designing for long-term use (say, a personal automobile vs. a rocketship) can still make sense.
An automobile used for daily commute with a 5 year life sees ~1,000 re-uses. You can vary the parameters to get different results. There are fuel, maintanance, garaging/parking, tax/registration, and insurance costs as well.
I am skeptical of the claim that they will just be able to refuel and go. Every reusable space vehicle has had that goal and always cost more than expected to refurbish for the next launch. Yes, we may get there eventually but not in the next few decades, the risks of a catastrophic component failure are too high to do no refurbishment.
The starship and super heavy are certainly cheaper to construct but that has more to do with fabrication techniques than the material cost.
Methane is less dense than kerosene so needs larger tanks but it does have more energy per unit mass. The overheads of using cryogenic fuel are reduced on a larger rocket but the performance gain is probably only 10% or so.
I am not aware of any significant insulation between tanks on the Falcon 9 and it certainly isn't a major cost factor.
There have only been 2 reusable launch vehicles ever, and both were only partially reusable. Shuttle and Falcon 9. Falcon 9 has already made massive strides in reducing any refurb costs between missions. there is no reason that you couldn’t build one that requires no maintenance in between flights for the same reason that there’s no reason you can’t make an upper stage that can do multiple firings per flight without any maintenance in between. Upper stage reuse will be trickier, but ultimately there’s no fundamental reason why refurb has to be done in between every flight.
Do they deliberately deorbit the Falcon second stage? Would be interesting if we could keep a couple parked in LEO and refuel them for different missions.
Reusing second stages in space only really makes sense once you are making your fuel in space.
For a lot of purposes, Starship should make it extremely cheap to send propellant from Earth. $10/kg in LEO. Cheaper than any lunar mining proposal I’ve seen.
That said, I hope we do make propellant off-Earth eventually.
The whole reason for the full-flow staged cycle is to have much more reasonable internal temperatures. Methane as well was picked partially because its far more clean burning.
There is no reason rocket engines couldn't be as reliable a jet engines.
> far more fuel
RP1 is very expensive. Methane is much cheaper, and they can even produce it local. Ox is very cheap and is basically gone turn into the cost of electricity and they are using local solar to make it.
Helium is also a very expensive part of the Falcon 9. Starship avoids the use of helium.
Additionally the Falcon 9 used TEE-TAB that is also expensive.
And it used nitrogen as well, that not expensive but just one more thing to worry about.
Falcon 9 has 6 different different consumables, Starship has 2.
> generally more expense in all the ground operations
This is wrong. The Falcon needed to have drone ships operating and tug boats for them as well, to catch the fairing they have another 1-2 boats out there to collect the fairing.
Then the stages need to be brought into port, transported back to the launch site and so on. The fairing have to be refurbished as well.
In additional Starship has multiple design upgrades that make it actually easier. Unlike Falcon 9 Upper stage, the Starship will be fueled from below, meaning there is no secondary fuel infrastructure for the upper stage. Not requiring the fueling of the consumables above also makes it much easier.
Plus they were able to apply everything they learned from Falcon 9 and ground operations to this new launch vehicle and launch site.
> In a world where this can be launched for $2M, Falcon 9 can be launched for less than $1M.
Falcon 9 can not do that. First of all, you need to build an upper stage that cost you 5-10M. You can't build that Upper stage fast enough to reach the required flight rate. Falcon 9 is also more difficult to launch and prep for launch. It wasn't designed to be fully reusable and still need more checks and refurbishments.
Now $2M is extreme, even if it is $10M or $20M that only really matters for stuff like Mars. If you can launch it anywhere under $100M its revolutionary vehicle for space flight.
Seriously though, this is game changing at even 100X that number or $200M per launch. Even if they don't get close to the aspirational price it's going to make a ton of stuff possible in space that was unaffordable before.
Just look at the National Team / Dynetics HLS proposals with a bunch of expensive, novel custom hardware vs. Space X proposal which was "basically just Starship". It could obviate a huge amount of resources being poured into one-off disposable space hardware and let us instead focus on actually doing stuff in space.
https://www.space.com/11358-nasa-space-shuttle-program-cost-...
There's some room for argument, but on the order of 1,000x the stated SpaceX Super Heavy booster.
Even if that turns out to be vastly optimistic (not ... unheard of in rocket surgery), it's all but certain that costs will be 100x lower than the Shuttle. Even a 10x factor would be utterly transformational.
I'm not an uncriticle Musk fan, but he's repeatedly delivered on promises I thought were tots redic initially (long-range EVs, reusable boosters, powered return boosters). He's had a few missed deliveries (hyperloop and Boring Co. both seem infeasible, and Mars colonisation still strikes me as a very long shot within 50 years), but we're indisputably closer to those possibilities than before he came on the scene. Credit to engineering teams, there's also something to be said for vision and force of will.
I don't think that's entirely fair. The Orbiter ( developed by Rockwell, not NASA or .gov ) was the result of two decades of hypersonic aerodynamics research combined with the state of materials art at the time. The solid boosters were ahead of the technology curve. The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
[0] presents a somewhat different story. It argues that much of the blame for the compromises, lies not with DOD, but rather with OMB. To give one example, it is commonly claimed that DOD pushed for solids because of the use of solids in ICBMs; according to this account, that push came from Daniel Taft at OMB, not from DOD; Taft wanted solid boosters because they were estimated to be $1 billion cheaper.
[0] https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221.pdf – see pg 417 onwards (pg 435 of PDF)
The problem was, while all of this was achieved, the resulting design was a bit too brittle (heat shields) and definitely too expensive to maintain between flights, so the prices were just off and the desired flight frequencies were never met.
While the engineering of the first edition of the shuttle was just great - especially considering some of the disputable design requirements - the failure rather lies in the fact that it never got a meaningful update. There were ambitious projects to produce a "next gen" shuttle with fixes "all" problems with the first gen, but they all failed. What was missing was updates and iteration. Just build a new shuttle which improves some aspects and keeps the rest of the design. Like a new heat shield, or just optimizing internal structures. That might have driven costs down and produced versions which still could be used. As, for example, we lost the capability to service the Hubble telescope.
It was the wrong curve. RP1 based engines like F-1 would have been far better to get of the ground.
> The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
There were many mistakes made. Space fans love to blame the military and politics. But if you actually go back, NASA leadership made plenty of questionable choices.
The biggest issue with the shuttle is the basic architecture.
Your criticism fails to fit the facts.
In fairness, the current best option, the Falcon Heavy, is already 35x as cost effective as the Shuttle.
But yes, even in the worst case Starship will be far cheaper.
A person walking typically manages about 3 mph / 5 kph.
A typical person on a bicycle can sustain about 15--20 mph (24--32 kph). Early trains operated at about 25--30 mph (40--50 kph), and soon regularly reached 60 mph (100 kph).
The combined factors of speed and cargo capacity make rail utterly transformational to humans (or animals) carrying loads. Even compared with high-tonnage cargo methods of the era (riverboats and canals), rail's speed was a major factor. (The tonnage/speed tradeoff continues between rail and river or ocean shipping today. For bulk, time-insensitive cargos, rail cannot compete.)
Propellor-driven aircraft moved at about 100-250 mph (160--320 kph) --- the DC3 cruised at 200 mph, as an example. Jet aircraft cruise at about 550--650 mph (850--1,000 kph).
And of course, orbital spacecraft / ballistic missiles hit 17,000 mph (27,000 kph), and up.
In the case of marine shipping, speeds didn't vary so much as tonnage did, with the net ton-miles/hour figure increasing accordingly. Clipper ships trended below 200 tons. Maersk's Triple-E class container ships displace 200,000 tons, a factor of 1,000.
The energy cost of lighting over the past 200 years has fallen by a factor of thousands, from candles and oil lamps to LEDs. Lighting uses which were previously unfathomable are now commonplace. Candle-powered outdoor advertising displays might be quaint, however, if somewhat fire-prone.
Again, typically, a 10x gain in some metric pushes applications to an entirely new domain, which was my point. Not that a 10x improvement was the likely limit in this case.
I'm saying that the Falcon Heavy has already achieved a 35x improvement from the Space Shuttle, and therefore if Starship achieved only a 10x improvement relative to the Shuttle it would actually be worse than what we already have and so wouldn't be an advancement.
If you meant 10x relative to current rockets, then yes, I agree that would be significant.
You are not reading the message I am attempting to convey.
So, it means nothing.
The Space Shuttle also was supposed to be cheap and almost completely reusable, it turned out to be one of the most expensive launchers. BFR is not the space shuttle, but I will not make any speculation before I can actually order a launch.
Elon Musk is known for overpromising. The tech is awesome, and SpaceX realizations speak for themselves, but I consider anything Elon Musk says "not even wrong".
I mean, I love SpaceX, and I follow BFR closely, but I think it would be better without the sensationalism.
Self landing boosters is just the logical application of control algorithms. As with the "flip".
Super Heavy Boosters, on the other hand, are an interesting new way to solve a problem.
LOL. Reusable rockets left as an exercise for the reader.
It's the difference between iteration and bigger breakthroughs/shifts in technology.
At a high level everyone was aware that the way the government micromanaging the design/build of rockets with cost plus contracts wasn't sustainable, but the government bureaucracy that awards contracts is heavily entrenched in that mode of operation.
It reminds me of a bigger company version of Masters of Doom. Same hacker ethos driving those early days.
This is an accurate take, but in reality I think they convinced the government to outsource a lean/agile development process.
20+ years ago, NASA went through their "better, faster, cheaper" phase to try their own hand at a more agile environment. Unfortunately, it reduced quality and whenever something bad happened more requirements were levied. Now some are beneficial but there's also some that were bureaucratic and process bloat just because of political risk and the fact nobody wanted to be on record saying the risk was acceptable.
I think one unspoken risk is whether the government, as the largest SpaceX customer, will try to enforce the same quality and safety standards as the company matures, particularly with human-rated spaceflight. Or if they are comfortable with a hands-off approach.
This is the biggest risk in the program, along with how many times they can reuse each piece, which is related. Last I looked Musk was projecting using the boosters hundreds of times and the 2nd stage dozens, both obviously very aggressive projections. If the real numbers are lower then the price per flight rises.
As far as I know we don't have any independent way of knowing whether these projections make sense or not. I hope he's right. Even if he's a little wrong and the flight cost was $20M instead of $2M that would be a great thing. But he could also be very wrong and it might not work at all.
The first re-flight of a booster was in 2017. The practical science of rocket reuse is only four years old. During that time they've flown ~40 missions with reused cores with zero failures. One Falcon 9 has been reused 10 times. My point is that there is no reason to assume that we've reached the limits of reuse in such a short period of time, so it doesn't seem that aggressive to assume that there is room to improve by ~10x
There's an enormous gulf between asserting this and the engineering to realize it. Maybe Raptor isn't as reliable as they hope. Maybe 3mm steel is too delicate so they have to stay with 4mm which makes them overweight. Maybe the thermal protection system is too fragile or doesn't provide enough protection. Maybe their novel alloy can't meet its targets. Maybe the tower catch won't work so they need legs which will add too much weight. Etc, etc.
All of those are extremely nontrivial issues, there's a lot of risk because of how ambitious what they are attempting is. I hope they succeed.
Is there any information available on the activities they actually plan on doing in terms of quality checks and refurbishment? I'm a big fan of SpaceX but I also feel like people talk about this point without actually knowing what goes into aerospace refurbishment regarding the level of quality assurance typically required.
I remember back when they had a Falcon 9 failure attributed to a faulty material spec on a strut and the response was they would perform quality checks on future material.[1] As someone who worked in the industry, my initial question was "Why weren't they already doing this?" as it's a commonplace within industry on safety critical or flight hardware.
I've also been involved in rocket rebuilds and to say they need "minimal refurbishment" is a understatement. Even if none of the components actually need rebuilt, the quality inspections still take a lot of time and money. And there's always the chance you find an issue that warrants a legitimate rebuild.
So, while I'm pulling for SpaceX to succeed, my worry is that every failure or close-call like the strut issue will layer additional quality checks that gradually erode that "minimal refurbishment" claim.
[1]https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/spacex-says-faulty-s...
Flight hardware typically has much higher quality standards. Sometimes they use more exotic materials that don't have the background testing to ensure that quality. If you want to use a cheaper new seal material, for example, there's probably not much data available for its compatibility with hypergolic fuels. It's not uncommon to use one-off components in a design, which means they may not have the same type of well-tried process control during manufacture. Then you have the costs of maintaining hardware pedigree (chain-of-custody, maintenance of material test data, lot material coupons for later testing, some of which may need to be maintained in a bonded, climate controlled room etc.).
New materials and manufacturing processes will definitely help and I think SpaceX is doing good work here. But the demands of spaceflight adds constraints. Steel and titanium are the most common non-fatiguing materials. Steel may be too heavy so you might be left with only using titanium, which is much more expensive. And you still haven't done the compatibility testing etc. So while it's a trivial example, you can see how it can become a tough problem to factor in cost, quality, and speed.
SpaceX is also pretty good about eliminating checks that have become redundant or otherwise redundant. For example they no longer do a static fire on the launch stand before every flight.
The big promise of Starship is the quantity of flights they envision. A thousand flights will give huge insight into reliability, insight that space flight has never had because most articles are never recovered and inspectes.
Organizations with good quality programs know how to assess their suppliers, including those who are ISO/ANSI certified. There’s a lot of information that goes into evaluating a supplier beyond just asking them if they certify their material or have a quality program, including doing site audits. Things can still fall through the cracks of course, but it reduces the probability. I bet if you asked them why they don’t evaluate each lot before the mishap, at least some would claim it’s redundant and unnecessary because the supplier already certified it.
The other failure (non-mission) was when they discovered a real unkown-unkown about COPV tanks and helium tanks in near 0-kelvin temperatures.
So yeah, they should not have made that mistake, but its also the case that nobody has a perfect record. Considering the errors most rocket companies have made, theirs seem fairly reasonable.
I guess the difference is that not double checking your components is a rookie level mistake, properly vetting vendors is a sophomore level mistake.
is my favorite way to watch that launch, just because of the way it integrate the people watching. We haven't had the crowds since the Space Shuttle stopped watching, and DM-2, Crew-1, and Crew-2 all happened during the pandemic - so this shows the old excitement.
If SpaceX can successfully land starship after the first suborbital flight I think it will dwarf the twin booster landing.
I had a goal in 2020 to drive from Toronto to Florida to watch the next Falcon Heavy launch and dual-landings. Then the pandemic hit... but conveniently, they pushed back the FH launches by a year as well!
Depending on the status of the border, the pandemic, and all of that, I might take a trip down if they have one this fall.
One thing to remember though is that launches can easily get scrubbed due to weather, planes flying into the restricted zone etc., so make sure to plan to stay for most if not all of the planned launch window if possible. When I went I stayed at a hotel in Orlando, which can be fun but it's also a bit of a drive so might be worth finding lodging closer to KSC if you're not too keen on driving a fair bit.
If you're viewing the launch from KSC your ticket won't be refunded either, and they'll only open up tickets for the next attempt after the launch is scrubbed so you can't prebook for all attempts either.
When I went the first attempt was scrubbed, but they launched the next night. This actually worked out better for me, since then I could score tickets to the viewing gantry which was closer to the actual rocket, and an amazing experience.
Pro tip: if you're spending multiple days at KSC just buy a year pass – it's worth it.
Also pro tip: don't forget to visit the nearby warbird museum as well, they've got an amazing collection of airplanes and very knowledgeable volunteers on staff!
https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/13/spacex-outlines-plans-...
They are aiming to fly Starship over the Straits of Florida (i.e. between Florida and Cuba) which means it will be low inclination. I assume that this is to avoid overflying inhabited area 'early' into the flight and especially not for too long, a trajectory bit further to the south would e.g. mean that they had to fly over the full length of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I would expect them to be "out of the woods" already at this point in the flight though. The next critical part would be reentry north-west of Hawaii.
This both boggles my mind and makes me giddy with excitement.
It's taken ~60yr for the manufacturing and control systems to get to the point of being reliable enough to chain together enough boosters to put really big stuff into orbit.
Now i just imagined the Ultraheavy, which should be 3 Superheavies strapped together.
The main issue they had is basically that the NK-17 engines were not tested before flight. Even worse, since they didn't have good computer back then, their 'what happens if an engine fails' sequence was very sub-optimal.
I would suggest only one of the N-1 failures can reasonable be attributed to the choice in engine configuration. In one case their internal fuel channels were breaking because of vibration.
All of these things seem much less likely to happen. The Booster has a computer and each engine has its own control. The Booster is much more capable of handing an engine shutdown or even an exploding engine. That has been demonstrated on the Falcon 9 a number of time.
Each engine is individually tested before the flight and often they are then fired together on the ground, so there is much less fear of that.
They have experience with 27 engines and the pipes required. Also, the Super Heavy used short Stainless steel tubes that should be fairly resilient. In general our engineering on how do this is just much better, better simulation, more experience, better knowledge oft the materials and the welding.
Edit: And would this even be the solution? Methane is a greenhouse-gas after all...
Methane + O2 <=> CO2 + H2O + energy
https://www.middleschoolchemistry.com/multimedia/chapter6/le...
The happy consequence is relatively low net-carbon emissions.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/30/no-you-dont-have-to-wor...
The wikipedia article on methane says something like "There is little incentive to produce methane industrially". Basically, we have too much of it already, from fracking, from livestock, from all sorts of places.
Giving it to SpaceX to burn as rocket fuel makes it a less potent greenhouse gas.
Burning the methane will of course release CO2 back into the atmosphere, but if they indeed make the methane by pulling CO2 from the air, it would effectively make Starship (the fuel anyway) carbon neutral.
(I guess actually it's a bit carbon negative because some of the engine burn will happen in space).