- This was the first "integrated test" of the Starship space craft with its booster
- The whole thing together was 120 meters tall
- It will be one order of magnitude larger than the current largest rocket in terms of carrying capacity (~150 tonnes if it needs to return the booster, 250 if it doesn't)
- There's 5 more of these being built right now so the next tests can be done soon
SpaceX doesn't have a test stand where they can static-fire the booster at full power or duration, which feels like an interesting gap in their usual 'hardware-rich, test-often' iterative approach. I'm betting we see something like that roll out soon.
One I find most impressive?
Weight of Starship when fueled: 11 million pounds
> According to official fact sheets, the Empire State Building weighs 365,000 short tons (331,122 t)
But Eiffeltower is only double the weight with 10100 tons.
The countdown process needs optimization. There are things missing and things which shouldn’t be there. We’re talking about speed of loading propellant, density of it, etc.
Then there’s software. So much software.
And a million other things. Rockets are complex, launching them doubly so.
Possible, but not a sure bet by any means and one I'd happily take the other side of.
At some point, your in silico model needs real world data to validate it.
A few
- How long fuel takes to load
- How much is lost due to venting, how fast we need to recycle that to keep the ship on the pad ready to launch
- Actual engine startup times when many starting at once
- Actual thrust as the vechicle leaves the pad
- Actual response to control authority (how fast the ship changes course) for vectoring, gas thrusters, flaps
- Actual vibration measurements, how much measured acceleration is noise
If that's true, then they can just fix whatever is wrong with the stage separation. And if it's something else, they can probably fix that too. Doesn't seem like it was anything unchangeably / structurally wrong with the entire craft.
The HLS contract SpaceX has gotten from NASA is a fixed-fee contract (like most contracts NASA gives out these days), so the final cost absolutely matters to SpaceX's bottom line. Anything they spend beyond the contracted amount they'll have to come up with themselves. A good example of this is Boeing, which is now booking losses on the Starliner program every quarter because it has gone over time and budget.
That doesn't give us details about how much it will cost SpaceX but its good information.
I don't know about other metrics for comparing engine efficiency. But the design requirements seem quite different here - they have to be restartable (not something the F1 engines on the SV had to worry about), probably more steerable, and able to throttle down to quite low power for landing. And presumably the fact that there's so many in an array also imposes its own constraints on the design.
it doesnt, please eLI5
It, uh, didn't do so well. As it turns out, getting 30 rocket engines to run at once is not trivial.
> > SV first stage had 5 engines, vs 33 on the Starship's booster. Which I think answers your question :)
> it doesnt, please eLI5
I kinda suspect bad faith/trolling, but if not... 6.5 times the number of engines for twice the thrust means that you are getting less thrust per engine.
What are you an SME on that should be catalogued.
Mostly that people stopped caring after it was proven that, yes, the US can land a person on the moon.