Yesterday on August 06, 2021, SpaceX created history WITHOUT launching a rocket
or sending a spaceship to orbit. Reaching a major Starship milestone,
Elon Musk’s SpaceX mated Spaceship 20 and Super Heavy Booster BN4 to create the tallest,
most powerful, rocket humanity has ever built. In this video we’re going to be talking about all
the key events that took place during the stacking of the starship 20 and the super heavy booster.
And what lies before and beyond the first SpaceX Starship orbital flight.
There’s plenty to unpack, so stay with me and enjoy the ride.
The stacking was complete just before 10 am Eastern Time on Friday morning.
The integrated stack of Ship 20 and Booster 4 was a nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle,
dethroning the mighty Saturn V rocket as the "tallest" and "most powerful" rocket ever.
If you placed the stacked vehicle next to the Great Pyramid of Giza that’s how high it would be!
The vehicle's two segments - an upper-stage called Starship and a booster called
Super Heavy - were connected together at the firm's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
When it eventually lifts off, it will produce
twice the thrust of the vehicles that sent men to the Moon.
For comparison, the main engines on Apollo's famous Saturn V rockets delivered some 35
meganewtons of force off the pad. The new SpaceX Super Heavy should achieve around 70 meganewtons.
A gigantic crane was deployed to mate the two segments together. They were held in the stacked
position for an hour, allowing for fit checks and photo ops, before decoupling them again.
Starship prototypes stand about 160 feet tall, or around the size of a 16-story building,
and are built of stainless steel. Super Heavy booster, which makes up
the bottom half of the rocket, stands at about 230 feet. It’s fitted with 29 Raptor engines including
20 “boost” variants and 9 gimballing “center” variants, as well as 4 non-folding grid fins.
The Starship 20 upper-stage is fitted with 6 Raptor engines – including three
vacuum-optimized engines or RVacs and 3 sea-level engines in the middle.
One notable difference between previously shiny starship prototypes and Starship 20 was that one
half of the Ship 20 was covered in the small hexagonal heat shield tiles to help it survive
the intense process of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and improve the ship’s durability.
Musk noted that work on the tiles is about “98%
done” for Starship 20, as “the remaining tiles are unique shapes requiring machining.”
Despite Friday’s successful stacking, SpaceX may be several weeks, even months, away from the
inaugural flight before which extensive testing will be done in preparation for the orbital hop.
Musk outlined four significant items that SpaceX has to complete over the next two weeks
in preparing Starship 20 for launch. He said SpaceX needs to add the final heat
shield tiles to the ship, add thermal protection to the Raptor rocket engines in Booster 4,
complete work on ground propellant storage tanks, and add a quick disconnect arm
to the top of the recently-built launch tower. The quick disconnect arm connects power and
fuel lines to the rocket before launch. The orbital flight will entail the booster
hauling the Starship into space for three quarters of the way around the-Earth trip.
The flight will terminate with Starship "landing" in waters
off the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Super Heavy will be dumped in the Gulf of Mexico.
Mind you, this is just a test flight. Ultimately, SpaceX plans to engineer controlled touchdowns
for both segments, either on land or on sea platforms, so they can be re-used.
You can watch my video on the sea platforms and what future Starship flights will look like,
by clicking the link in the top right corner. SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, says when fully developed,
the Starship system will be capable of taking humans to the Moon and Mars.
It could also ferry people quickly around the globe. Putting satellites in orbit
is another obvious application. In fact, the American space agency, Nasa,
has already awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to produce a version of the Starship upper-stage
that can land astronauts near the lunar south pole this decade.
Friday's milestone follows months of feverish activity in Boca Chica,
because Elon Musk is keen to launch the starship vehicle as soon as possible.
However, the pair won’t be allowed to launch until SpaceX has secured a licence
from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The government agency is currently conducting
an environmental review, which means, the maiden orbital outing is still a way off.
But that didn’t stop Elon Musk from described the brief
stacking of the segments as a "dream come true".
This is a big statement coming from a man who’s known to be a workaholic and who rarely sleeps
long enough to have any dreams in the first place. But we’re certainly keeping our eyes wide open
for what unfolds next. That’s a wrap. Thanks for watching.