How will SpaceX add 32 Raptor engines to a Starship Super Heavy Booster?
When is the next test and when can we expect that first Orbital Starship Flight?
Let’s find out!
My name is Felix, and I am your host for today’s episode of What about it!?
And as always, there’s been a lot going on in the space industry lately, so let ’s dive right in!
Starship Updates
I didn’t have an episode for a whole week!
I got vaccinated and we are working on a meet-up for my European WAI family in June!
More on that towards the end of todays Episode.
I am also entering the end phase of our move to Florida, so there’s a lot to come in the next few month!
When it comes to the Space Industry, we’ve had an unprecedented amount of activity in 2021 already.
SN15 flew a little over one month ago and there never was a re-flight.
Two days after the big flight, Musk tweeted that they might refly SN15 soon.
SN15 must have done its job so good though that SpaceX just doesn’t need to do another high-altitude flight test anymore.
On May 27th SpaceX just decided to roll SN15 back to the construction site.
The three raptor engines had been taken out just before the transport.
Rumor has it that SpaceX might be preparing SN15 for display, which would be just the right thing to do.
SpaceX has saved very little of their prototypes and SN15 is a historic milestone.
The pinnacle of atmospheric test flights for the Starship program.
These Phases are part of SpaceX’s environmental plans for the South Texas launch site and they are as follows.
Phase one was all about the so-called low altitude hops.
In a first step SpaceX developed the systems that make a Starship fly in the first place.
Engines, Tanks, Thrust puck design, avionics.
All these components were tested with two low altitude hops.
SN5 and 6 did well. They took off, hovered, flew sideways and landed safely again.
The raptor engines demonstrated their throttling capability in flight.
Amazing to see back in the days.
Then came phase two. How to make a skyscraper fall from the sky.
Each Phase brings more excitement and so Phase 2 was a wild rollercoaster ride.
Five flights. Some of them more and some less successful but all of them worth the time and all of them working towards one goal.
To get enough data and to get enough proof of concept for all sorts of vital Starship systems to enter phase 3. SpaceX demonstrated safe liftoff
capability, Engine relights, skydive maneuvers, fin controlled descend.
What SpaceX did in such a short amount of time is pretty amazing.
And they went through this phase so fast that they seem to be ready for phase number 3 now.
Orbital Flights!
Phase 3 will confront SpaceX with their biggest challenge yet.
How to build a booster that dwarves anything built to date.
More than 70 meganewtons of thrust will power the ascend of this beast.
It’s super heavy of course. SpaceX’s new booster rocket.
In principle a Falcon 9 booster on steroids.
Same concept, more power, different landing strategy.
In fact, if SpaceX didn’t have so much knowledge already collected with Falcon 9 flights, they’d have difficulties now building Super Heavy.
The good news is that Super Heavy production is in full swing right now.
What you’re looking at here is Mary’s view of SpaceX unpacking a very special present.
A brand new Super Heavy Thrust puck.
It’s the part of the rocket that transfers the thrust built up by the engines into the main frame of the rocket.
It has to withstand full thrust conditions from up to 31 engines.
Expectations were, that Super Heavy would be planned with 28 engines up until now.
Welp. Elon Musk just upped the game by adding another engine immediately and on later designs another three which brings us to a total of 32 engines.
And 32 later down the year definitely sounds like SpaceX is intending to test super heavy boosters more than once in the next couple of months.
The crazy journey seems to continue.
Erik from ErcXSpace has made a very nice render illustrating the thruster setup as we should see it down the line towards the end of this year
on flight number 2 or three of the orbital Starship test phase.
The inner 12 engines gimbal together to steer the booster through the atmosphere on the way up and back down again.
SpaceX is Raptor engine constrained.
32 engines for the booster and 6 for an orbital Starship.
That’s a total of 38 engines per flight and test.
If you loose both the Starship and the booster, which in the beginning is to be expected, that’s a lot of Raptor engines gone in one flight.
On May 30th, Musk replied to my friend Tim Dodd, that SpaceX is approaching one Raptor engine every 48 hours.
That’s 76 days worth of engine production for one test flight.
That makes it very clear, why the initial goal for Raptor production was to be at one every 12 hours by the end of 2019.
SpaceX is not there yet. In fact one every 12 hours would be 4 times the production speed.
The raptor is a difficult beast to design on its own and while SpaceX is working on it,
they’re also tackling numerous other design choices for the booster alone.
Lots of design choices still need to be figured out.
How will SpaceX design the engine bay to withstand the stress?
Will the boosters hull withstand a catch attempt?
They recently switched the design from Methane tank on the bottom and LOX on top to the heavier oxidizer being below and closer to the boosters
base. Same as on the Starship now.
The booster has no legs in the current design.
A booster catcher mechanism on the tower itself to catch the booster.
Likely not by the fins, but by the hull itself.
Lunar Caveman has made a very nice concept drawing I want to point out here.
It shows the Super Heavy catch mechanism and how it might be attached to the launch support tower,
which right now is under construction at SpaceX’s Starship Starbase in south Texas.
Recent imagery has shown that there are rails running down on the sides of the four main support beams of the tower itself.
SpaceX could build a clamp system that runs up and down alongside the tower guided by these rails.
Either way it will be very interesting to see them build this contraption and even more to see it actually attempt a first catch.
There’s a lot to look forward to in phase 3.
Going onwards to the next crazy rendering project from the community, Alex Svan,
known for his incredible Raptor engine renders in the past has outdone himself again in an attempt to actually simulate plasma flow along a Starship
while on reentry. He did this to better predict how a Starship heat shield would need to be shaped in order to properly protect a Starship on
reentry. What you can see here is the plasma created by the extreme heat of an atmospheric reentry of such a heavy and large object that a Starship
is and how the plasma flows around the Starship engulfing it while it slows down due to atmospheric drag.
We have all the numbers. Posting a short video of a heat tile test in March 2019, Musk stated that the tiles will get up to 1650 Kelvin,
which would be 1377 degrees Celsius or 2510 degrees Fahrenheit.
And he commented on Alex’s latest video as well.
Pretty close. No tiles on back side of flaps.
Some tiles towards leeward side of ship.
Trailing plasma spilling off rear of flaps.
Imagine the camera views of that plasma spiling off the rear of those flaps!
And to get to such a camera view in the quickest way possible, SpaceX will as always start testing immediately.
What you’re looking at here is another one of Mary’s videos.
She’s on site day and night , capturing all these important moments for the world to see.
BN2.1 has been rolled out to the launch site in preparations for a first cryogenic proof test.
It’s just part of a booster and a lot of components are still missing.
It has one main tank and a thrust puck.
And under all of it there’s a new thrust simulator.
One that simulates the thrust of 9 center Raptor engines.
It’s been built at the construction site and has been added to the top of a modified test stand before rollout.
Owe has made a wonderful animation explaining the insides!
It consists of 9 hydraulic rams oriented in such a ways that each piston can push against a single engine mount spot on the thrust puck of the
test tank. The tanks are pressurized, and the pistons push the whole assembly up simulating an engine burn at flight conditions.
This way SpaceX can make sure that the system is up for the task before having to build a full-sized booster and lighting up the engines.
With the test tank arriving at the launch site it’s time to look out for road closures again, as testing will commence shortly.
As of recording this episode we have road closures set for today, June 8th and tomorrow, June 9th.
It is unknown, if SpaceX will test BN2.1 to failure.
SpaceX will collect first data on the thrust puck under flight conditions.
Preparations for that first test have already begun.
There might already be news about the test on the upcoming Friday episode!
And after BN2.1 has done a successful test, we’ll get BN2, and Starship SN20.
Let’s take a look at the progress!
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This is another one of Mauricios beautiful aerial views of the SpaceX Starbase in South Texas.
It shows the High bay, currently the largest finished building at the SpaceX site and as you can see, it’s occupied.
Inside we can see Starship SN16 and right next to it Super Heavy BN2.
Formerly known as BN3 it’s recently been renamed and is by now partly assembled.
It’s the first fully built booster once it’s finished and the plan, despite the name change,
is still to send it to Space together with Starship SN20.
Depending of course on a clean test with BN2.1, BN2 will be rolled to the pad soon after.
SpaceX want’s to get it’s Starships orbital as soon as possible and internals for BN2 are being built.
This for example is the methane downcomer.
It’s the link between the methane tank on top and the engines on the bottom.
It connects the common dome in the middle and the manifold on the bottom, supplying fuel to 29 and later 32 Raptor engines.
And it’s already inside the high bay for installation.
The size shows once more, what kind of rocket SpaceX is building here.
This is just the center fuel line we’re looking at and on its own its as big as a small rocket.
It’s unclear as to what SpaceX intends to do with Starship SN16 as it’s built for high altitude flight tests.
It’s missing the Raptor engine mounts needed for a Starship to properly go into orbit.
And Starship SN20 will have them.
This is its aft dome,
so the tank dome holding the thrust puck and all the engine mounts on the bottom of every Starship and those large round disc like objects attached
are the mounting adapters for those Vacuum Raptor engines.
Shown here in an official picture by SpaceX a vacuum Raptor or short RVac is much larger than a sea level Raptor engine.
And what makes it larger is the enormous engine bell needed to have an optimal exhaust gas expansion in space.
Since the pressure is much lower and the exhaust has expands much faster, the bell needs to be larger to reach an optimal trust level.
Three of those will be attached to the SN20 aft dome together with three normal size sea level engines.
After SN20 separates from BN2 at the edge of Space these Vacuum Raptors will push the Starship the rest of the way into a stable orbit
And they will also decelerate it again and move it into the reentry corridor.
It is essential for an orbital Starship to have these two kinds of engines.
The smaller Sea Level Raptors get to work again for the flip maneuver and the soft landing in the water after a hopefully successful reentry.
Finally, to launch all of this into Space, SpaceX needs an orbital launch facility, which is growing extremely fast as well.
Back in RGV’s plane, we can take a closer look at the current progress.
Two segments stacked on the support tower itself.
A massive achievement on its own.
Stairs have been removed by now and the rack and pinion elevator explained in Episode 166 is now in full service already,
enabling workers to quickly move between the different levels for construction work.
More segments are ready and should be stacked soon.
Another 4 to 6 weeks and the tower should almost be ready for first crew rehearsals!
Right next to it we of course have the orbital launch mount itself which has seen significant progress in recent days as well.
As expected for a while now, SpaceX has attached the shorter pillar extenders on top of the existing structure.
Next, SpaceX can commence with the orbital launch table, which has also seen some interesting upgrades.
As seen here through Mauricio’s birds eye view, clamps have been installed on the inside of the launch table.
They can also be seen laying on the ground ready for installation right next to the table.
There’s strong belief within the Starship community right now, that these might be hold down clamps for a Super Heavy booster.
This is, what it would look like according to Owe’s animation.
First the extenders added on top of the existing pillars.
Some beams in between to stabilize the structure.
Then comes the launch table itself on top.
And this is how the hold down clamps would work in theory.
Sliding out of the inner wall of the launch table they would secure a Super Heavy Booster sitting in the middle.
This way it can fire downwards and the up to 32 engine exhaust plumes get in contact with as little of the mount and as short as possible.
What do you think? Is this what SpaceX is building here?
Do you have a different idea? As always, tell me in the comments!
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As promised in the beginning of the episode, we’re planning the first ever EU WAI family meet-up for this month!
The Date is June 19th. The Location is Eifeltor Mechernich and a Link can be found in the description.
There is a Hotel if you want to stay over night as I will and there are activities for young and old besides meeting the most awesome community
in the world! Check out the link in the description, do your covid tests and plan your trips!
We all can’t wait to have an awesome evening with you!
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Today’s team shout out goes to Mike.
Gone far too soon and loved by the entire community.
Rest in peace, Mike. We will never forget you.