Cargo transport is a huge business as humans move things across the globe over air,
road, rail, and water.
Elon Musk is preparing to revolutionize this business using the
new powerful Starship spacecraft his company SpaceX is developing and testing!
As Musk reveals a cargo version of the Starship,
people have lots of questions!
How will transporting cargo with the Starship work?
What does the Starship offer freight movers?
And who will use the new cargo Starship?
When you manufacture your product in one part of the Earth and want to sell it in
another part of the Earth, you need the services of cargo carriers.
For example, Elon Musk’s other company, Tesla, makes electric
cars in China and sends them to other parts of the world.
You can see here Tesla loading almost five thousand cars from its
Shanghai factory onto a cargo ship en route to Slovenia in Europe!
The company aims to ship 300,000 cars from China in 2022!
With his own company shipping things all over the world, it is not a surprise that Musk
is thinking of entering the transport business!
And as you can imagine, Musk is planning to turn the industry upside down!
However, Musk’s plans for the future of transport go
beyond the Earth!
Space cargo transport is a lucrative business that SpaceX is already
involved in!
The company regularly launches satellites for itself, government
organizations like NASA and the US military, and anybody else who wants to put a
satellite in orbit!
SpaceX also delivers cargo to the International Space Station on a regular basis using
its Dragon Capsule.
However, SpaceX itself will soon need to transport cargo further
into space than it has ever done!
With his burning desire to settle people on Mars, Musk
has to transport countless tons of materials to the planet.
These will help prepare the planet for the arrival and subsequent habitation!
Imagine all the machinery and equipment Musk has to transport, like excavators,
food supplies, shelter equipment, and fuel manufacturing equipment!
He must be able to move as many tons as possible at
once to reduce the number of round trips he has to make!
And imagine moving them millions of miles from the Earth to the Red
Planet!
Musk needed a fast and cheap way to move all these cargoes both on Earth and in
space, which is part of the reason he is developing the Starship!
One of the requirements of the mighty rocket is to be
able to lift a large mass at a time, and the Starship can do just that!
The spacecraft was conceived to carry in excess of 100 metric
tonnes to earth orbit.
However, with the upgrades made to the Raptor rocket engine,
and the increase in the number of engines that the Starship uses, the Starship can lift
close to 150 tons at a time!
This makes the Starship the world’s most powerful launch
vehicle ever develop!
It stands 120 meters tall and has a diameter of 9 meters.
The Starship is made of two stages, the upper stage, known as the Ship or just the
Starship, and the lower stage, the Super Heavy or Booster.
The two will separate after the booster has propelled both of them to
escape the Earth’s gravity.
The Ship will then continue to its destination.
SpaceX has made a cargo version of the Starship, which several modifications to suit
the purpose.
But before we go into how it works, there is a question you might be
asking.
Since space rocketry and travel are expensive, how is Musk going to make the
Starship work competitively with other modes of transport?
The idea is if it is too expensive, nobody will use it!
The secret lies in the reusability of the Starship!
When the two stages separate, as mentioned earlier, the booster returns to
the Earth and is prepared for another launch.
SpaceX is working towards reflying the booster in less than an hour!
In fact, SpaceX has designed a landing mechanism that involves
catching the booster midair and quickly transferring it to the launch pad!
By saving the booster, instead of discarding it after a single flight, the launch cost
comes down significantly!
However, SpaceX will reuse the Ship, too, as it has been
designed to survive re-entry into the atmosphere, despite the heat created by the
process!
This makes the Starship superior to the Falcon Heavy, which can only save
the lower stage!
By saving and reusing the Ship, SpaceX further reduces the cost of
each flight!
For companies launching relatively small cargo to space, SpaceX is offering launch
sharing, which allows multiple companies to bear the cost of a single launch, which will
make smaller companies able to put stuff in space affordably.
The Starship will even be able to deliver payloads to different orbits
in a single launch!
The Starship, thanks to its design, is fit for moving lots of cargo at once.
It has a fairing height of 18 meters and a width of 9 meters,
giving it more usable cargo volume capacity than any other launcher!
In fact, that was one of the factors that swung the
Lunar Human Lander contract in favor of SpaceX because NASA said the Starship
offered the most cargo space of all the proposals it considered!
The fairing has a crocodile-like opening that allows SpaceX
to load even oddly shaped payloads.
It is spacious enough to launch even telescopes
larger than the James Webb, which had to be folded to fit on its launch vehicle!
SpaceX is differentiating the cargo version of the Starship by adding a special module
for launching multiple satellites at the same time.
The company is on a frenzied launch of Starlink satellites and is putting them
up in batches, so it is normal for it to be thinking
of how to make the job easier!
There are other uses for the cargo Spaceship on the Earth, as you shall soon see, and
with eager customers!
However, another group of people salivating at having access to
a powerful rocket like the Starship is planetary scientists.
Musk himself teased how they could use the Starship, asking them to imagine
sending a 100-ton object to the surface of Europa!
That object could be a whole drilling rig that would allow scientists to dig into
the core of the moon!
They could drill on bodies suspected to contain water and test for
the signs of life!
The possibilities are actually endless with a powerful spacecraft like the Starship!
Consider that SpaceX might provide a regular rideshare flight to Jupiter every two
years.
Several large and small probes might be carried by a single Starship, using its
power and propulsion to reach the Jupiter system.
Once there, each spacecraft could fly into their orbits or destinations and rely
on Starship for a communications relay back to
Earth.
This would provide a huge mass and propellant savings on each spacecraft!
Or the fuel savings by the JWST if it had been
transported to its orbit by the Starship!
The cargo Starship works for freight movement on the Earth too!
SpaceX is already putting the finishing touches on a point-to-point
method of transporting cargo on Earth.
This is simple in theory; the Starship goes to orbit at one point on the Earth and lands
at another point!
This is a rapid method of transport; trips that take more than seven hours,
like New York to Paris, can be completed in half an hour!
While point-to-point travel can also be used to transport people, the cargo Starship is
better suited for the application.
Humans may get sick at such a high speed, which
won’t happen with cargo.
Also, the setup for human transport may not be so appealing
because Musk said every seat would be basic coach travel, and there won’t even be a
toilet!
The US Air Force is already on board with Space with the cargo Starship.
In fact, the military already has an experimental program
called Rocket Cargo, which is led by the US Space Force.
The program conducts research and helps develop capabilities such
as landing a rocket on a wide range of non-traditional materials and surfaces,
engineering a rocket cargo bay and logistics for rapid loading and unloading, and air-
dropping cargo from the rocket after re-entry in order to service locations where a rocket
or aircraft cannot possibly land.
Backed by a 50 million dollar budget, Rocket Cargo looks at fully reusable private
rockets that can launch between 30 and 100 tons.
Currently, Starship is the only rocket in development that plans to both be reused
and can both launch that much mass!
Describing the Starship, Dr. Greg Spanjers, who leads the Rocket Cargo program, said,
after talking to multiple contractors, they discovered SpaceX has the most advanced
and most visible system to enable Rocket Cargo.
The military is looking at transporting supplies, including implements of war, rapidly to
its troop, anywhere they are.
However, it might use Starship to transport personnel, too,
if it works out that way.
Let’s hear what you think of the cargo Starship in the comment section below!