SpaceX has flown several prototypes of Starship but we haven’t seen it fly higher than 12.5 km
or 41,000 feet.
That is about to change.
The Super Heavy booster is set to lift Starship into orbit for the very first time.
The scale of Super Heavy is insane.
It stands roughly the height of an entire Falcon Heavy.
With Starship stacked on top, together, they measure 120 meters or nearly 400 feet.
The largest rocket ever!
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell says the company is “shooting for July” to launch
its first orbital flight though it could very well be delayed.
CEO Elon Musk can afford to wait.
After all, he’s dreamt about this moment for twenty years when he first started SpaceX
to try to make spaceflight affordable.
His way of doing that is by building the fully reusable Starship which he hopes will drive
down the cost of a launch to $2 million.
Compare that to the estimated $2 billion per flight of NASA’s non-reusable SLS.
This booster will not be the one to fly.
It’s intended to be used for ground tests to pave the way for a successor.
Both the boosters and the Starship spacecraft are under development at SpaceX’s Boca Chica
facility in South Texas called Starbase.
The combo will lift off from there, like the previous tests of Starship.
The two stages separate about three minutes into the flight.
The booster will come down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Boca Chica.
Meanwhile, the upper stage will go into orbit.
One of the uses of Starship besides going to Mars is to travel from one place to another
on Earth which this flight aims to achieve.
The spacecraft is anticipated to go all the way to Hawaii before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean
off the northwest coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
This will involve many more engines than the three used on Starship so far.
Musk has teased the possibility of Starship having up to nine engines.
Three for atmospheric flight and as many as six for propulsion in space.
The Super Heavy is currently planned to fly with 32 or 33.
That’s a massive number.
It helps the booster perform better, as it has more power to propel itself as well as
the Starship above it.
Raptor engines are fuelled by liquid methane and liquid oxygen, providing double the thrust
of the Saturn V - the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever built.
Starship would surpass Saturn V in all aspects.
Successfully launching Starship is one giant hurdle, landing is another.
In the future, SpaceX envisions “catching” the Super Heavy with the launch tower arm
so it can be put back into service quickly though of course, this hasn’t yet been tested.
It’s intended to be such that the booster can be used...a dozen times
a day. And the ship could be, y'know, basically, every couple of hours.
Wow.
And the ship could be, basically, every couple of hours.
Since each booster can lift numerous starships a day, there will be fewer boosters made than
Starships, though it’s unclear how many will be made.
We do know that SpaceX wants to build a Starship every three days to make it to 1,000 ships
in about a decade in order to colonize Mars which I talked about in a previous video.
so it requires, for example, a heat shield to enter Mars’ atmosphere.
It’s also the portion that carries passengers who require a place to sleep, air to breathe,
water to drink, exercise space, and a life support system.
All of these additions make it a more complex beast than the booster.
On the other hand, the Super Heavy could be viewed as a much larger Falcon 9 booster in
many ways. Except, it’s made out of stainless steel.
SpaceX hasn’t disclosed how much it’s spent on the development of the Starship system
but Musk has said he expects the cost to be over $5 billion.
Much of that will be paid for by SpaceX’s new satellite internet service Starlink
which aims to provide high-speed Internet to remote areas on Earth.
SpaceX now wants to test out Starlink on the upcoming orbital flight.
It has asked the FCC to allow the booster and the Starship to be equipped with this
pizza-sized terminal in order to connect to the Starlink constellation.
So, what does SpaceX want to test out?
When a spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere there’s a communication blackout lasting
around 10 minutes due to a sheath of plasma enveloping the spacecraft which blocks out
most radio waves.
SpaceX thinks it can beat this blackout with Starlink and if that happens, it could be
game-changing.
When Musk celebrated his 50th birthday in June, he was asked what he wanted for his
big day to which he responded: Starship Super Heavy.
He’s closer to getting his wish.
If all goes well, he has said that Starship could be flying people around the moon as
early as 2023.
With Mars to come.
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For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom