After SpaceX’s previous two Starship prototypes met their explosive demise at the southern
tip of Texas, Starship Serial Number 10 has finally stuck the landing! And then it exploded.
Still, this proved a major part of the Starship concept, but there is still much more to come.
So what can we expect from SN11 and beyond?
SpaceX was founded with the goal of eventually
taking humans to Mars, and their Starship spacecraft—along with its planned enormous
first stage booster called the Super Heavy— is the ship company founder and CEO Elon Musk
believes will take us there. Before we get into what’s next for the program,
let’s first give SN10’s flight its due. In the past few years, SpaceX has been racking
up so many successful Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy booster landings that it’s almost
become expected. But when SN8 and SN9 failed to land and experienced what SpaceX euphemistically
call Rapid Unplanned Disassembly, it was a reminder that space flight is never
easy and certainly never routine. Landing SN10 was a huge milestone for the project,
even if it disassembled itself a few minutes later.
Complicating matters is the fact that the Starship prototypes are using a new engine
that’s truly revolutionary. Falcon 9 boosters use SpaceX’s Merlin engines, which burn
liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosine to produce thrust. By contrast, Starship’s
Raptor engines use liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Methane offers higher performance
at lower cost than kerosene. Methane can allow the engines to run at higher pressures and
it eliminates the need for some special equipment because it can actually pressurize itself.
It also doesn’t build up deposits within the engine, making it possible to reuse the
same engines over and over with less refurbishing. It might even be possible to create methane
on the surface of Mars, which means a Starship mission to the red planet won’t need to
bring along fuel for the return trip home. Despite all these benefits, SpaceX’s Raptor
engines are some of the first methane-powered rockets. They’re also the first flying examples
to use what’s known as a full-flow staged combustion system, which uses all its fuel
for propulsion and doesn’t waste any getting the process started unlike Merlin’s more common
open cycle system. Put all these design choices together and the Raptor engines can
produce double the thrust of a Merlin and squeeze propulsion from as much fuel as possible.
So it’s no surprise figuring out how to land a 50 meter tall prototype rocket powered
by three of these new engines has taken some fine-tuning. Indeed the issue with SN9’s
landing seemed to be failure for one engine to relight and control the landing. Now that
SN10 has proven the concept, there’s still a lot of work ahead of the SpaceX team in
Boca Chica, Texas. The next launch we’re looking forward to
is Serial Number 11. SN11 is almost identical to the previous three Starships, which have
been improving in small ways from one iteration to the next, with things like more robust wiring,
a better nose cone seal, and more mature Raptor engines. Because SN8 and 9 reached their high
altitude goals, managed to switch fuel tanks, and steer themselves on the way back down,
it seems SpaceX thought a soft landing was within reach and decided that Serial Numbers
12 through 14 wouldn’t be necessary. With SN10’s post-landing detonation, that means
they’ve only got one more ship from this batch to figure out the landing completely.
The next major upgrades to the design will come with SN15, so we’ll keep our eyes locked
on Texas to see what exactly they’re cooking up.
Aside from perfecting the soft touchdowns, SN11 can provide other valuable data, like
how the planned heat shielding handles the stress of liftoff and landing. A recovered
Starship will also let SpaceX engineers examine how their raptor engines hold up after repeated
use, and if Elon Musk’s ultimate ambition of engines that can be flown 1000 times is
within reach. It’s possible we’ll see the same prototypes lift off multiple times
as the engineers push the envelope. The next Starship launch should look remarkably
like the previous three. Ideally this time around the landing legs will deploy, the structure
won’t be damaged on touchdown, there won’t be a fuel leak or fire, and SN11 stays in
one piece. SpaceX has made historic progress already
with Starship. Considering that there’s still a lot of work to be done on both Starship
and the Super Heavy rocket, there should be many exciting rocket launches from the southern
tip of Texas in the future. Hopefully they’re groundbreaking in the way SN10 was, and not
in the way SN8 and 9 were. For more Countdown to Launch, check out our
playlist here and if there’s another launch you’d like to see us cover, let us know
in the comments below. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time on Seeker.