SpaceX is always doing something crazy out there.
Out of all those insane things, one of the most technologically advanced rockets is also being tested in Boca Chica, Texas.
On the 5th of May, SN-15 prototype of Starship successfully completed its launch and a perfect Belly Flop landing.
Realistically speaking, Starship will be the most powerful rocket ever made after its full assembly.
A fully fueled Starship could weigh more than 9 million pounds or 4 million kilograms at the launch pad.
That's about 30% heavier than a Saturn V, though Starship would belch out twice as much thrust from its Super Heavy booster rocket.
The Saturn V rocket can provide an impressive 3.4 million kilograms of thrust and if all goes as planned, Starships can deliver up to 7.3 million kilograms of thrust.
It’s a tremendous improvement over the most powerful rocket ever sent to the moon.
In a reply to a tweet, Elon stated that the estimated Delta-V of Starship when fully fueled in space with 100 tons of cargo to the moon is around 6.9 kilometers per second.
Delta-V is a measure of the impulse per unit of spacecraft mass that is needed to perform a maneuver such as launching from or landing on a planet or moon or an in-space orbital maneuver.
Now let’s look at some details provided by SpaceX...
At first, Starship is not only the name of a full rocket but also the upper stage.
But the name of the first stage, which is where the booster stays, is Super Heavy.
It’s made up of Stainless Steel and stands 120 meters or 394 feet tall.
The Starship uses new Raptor engines for every stage.
The Raptor is the most ambitious engine ever created in the history of mankind.
It is powered by sub-cooled liquid methane and sub-cooled liquid oxygen, using a staged combustion cycle, unlike the simpler "open-cycle" gas generator system.
The closed cycle makes the engines extremely powerful and up to 98 percent efficient.
To know more about ‘Raptor engines’ or ‘Starship’ in general, click on the ‘i’ button or check out the link in the description below.
Unlike other rockets, the upper stage of Starship does a Belly Flop Maneuver to land. In the past, to bring older spacecraft back to Earth, engineers used to rely on parachutes or designed the vehicle so that they could land on a runway.
But the Starship upper stage takes a different approach.
When it is ready to land, the ship initially re-enters the atmosphere at a 60-degree angle and then belly-flops to the ground in the horizontal position.
The vehicle, therefore, uses 4 steel landing flaps, positioned near the front and rear of the vehicle, to control its descent.
This is much like a skydiver uses their arms and legs to control a free-fall.
At first, everyone was uncertain about whether the “belly flop maneuver” will work or not, but after the SN10’s and SN15’s almost perfect landing, we are sure that it’s going to work in the next prototypes and it will eventually be a part of the final release.
Now, how will the Booster of this gigantic rocket land?
SpaceX will attempt to “catch” the heavy booster, which is currently in development, using the launch tower arm used to stabilize the vehicle during its pre-takeoff preparations.
The Super Heavy launch process will still involve the use of its engines to control the velocity of its descent, but it will involve using the grid fins that are included on its main body to help control its orientation during flight to “catch” the booster — essentially hooking it using the launch tower arm before it touches the ground at all.
The major benefit of this method, which will obviously, involve a lot of precision maneuvering, is that it means SpaceX can save both cost and weight by omitting landing legs from the Super Heavy design altogether.
Another potential benefit raised by Musk is that it could allow SpaceX to essentially recycle the Super Heavy booster immediately back on the launch mount it returns to — possibly enabling it to be ready to fly again with a new payload and upper stage (consisting of Starship) in “under an hour.”
If this sounds too far-fetched, think about everything SpaceX has achieved this far and you will see it's an extremely likely possibility.
Both stages are designed to be fully reusable, enabling both high reliability and very cheap launch cost.
The operational cost of Starship could be as low as 2 Million dollars per launch.
This seems too good to be true, but this might hold its own as Starship will be fully reusable unlike any other rockets ever made as of today.
Musk said, “If you consider operational costs, maybe it'll be like $2 million, out of SpaceX's pocket each time”.
Next up on DiscoverZen, let’s discuss “How would SpaceX make Rocket fuel on Mars?”.
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