on Saturday September 28th SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stood in front of an audience
in Boca Chica Texas and presented the fully assembled spacex starship 50
metres tall and made from shiny stainless steel as part of his
presentation musk showed off the history of the company's development so far and
gave us an updated view of what starship and its first stage super-heavy booster
will look like when they're fully operational it was actually a pretty
short presentation and there weren't a lot of details but he stuck around and
answered questions from many space journalists and we've got a much better
idea about starship and what happens next in his presentation musk described
the promise of starship in comparison to every other vehicle out there from cars
to airplanes the critical breakthrough that's needed for us to become a
spacefaring civilization is to make space travel like air travel when you
fly an airplane you don't throw the whole thing away after you reach your
destination it gets refueled other passengers come
aboard and the airplane flies to another destination but doing this with rocketry
has always been a challenge nobody has been able to make any rocket capable of
reaching orbit and back with full reuse needing only maintenance and refueling
in fact as musk stated in his presentation the laws of physics
nearly prohibited if the pull of the Earth's gravity was much stronger it
would be truly impossible to develop a fully reusable rocket using existing
chemical rocket technology with the math saying that a fully reusable rocket
technology should be theoretically possible SpaceX has been working to
develop an actual prototype that can fly to orbit and return it's gone through
several iterations from the original interplanetary transport system to the
bfr to the modern starship and super heavy booster and if all goes well this
huge rocket will blast off in just a couple of months fly to an altitude of
20 kilometers and return to its landing pad so let's talk about recent
developments what what's different and what happens next
the fully assembled starship orbital prototype reaches a height of 50 meters
or about 165 feet tall the rocket is now made of stainless steel which is
actually a significant departure from the carbon fiber that SpaceX originally
planned to use part of this is because stainless steel is much cheaper to use
and easier to work with it's $130,000 a ton for the carbon fiber
and $2,500 a ton for the steel so the steel is about 2% of the costs of
the carbon fiber so this is a good thing we changed from corn fiber steel by far
in fact SpaceX was going down the carbon fiber route until October of 2018 before
they decided to change direction stainless steel is also easy to work
with the rocket was welded outside without a factory often in the rain and
if Martian colonists need building materials they could just cut up a
starship and use it for other things but the biggest benefit according to musk is
how well it deals with the heat of reentry back into the Earth's atmosphere
after being in the cold of space when a spacecraft comes back from orbit it's
traveling at 28,000 kilometers per hour when it hits the denser part of the
atmosphere stainless steel doesn't become brittle in the cold of space and
it can reach 1,500 degrees Celsius before it starts to melt
according to musk no heat shield at all is required on the leeward side of the
rocket the part facing away from the heat of reentry on the windward side
they're planning to use reusable ceramic heat shield tiles in the areas that
experience the highest temperatures it's this reentry from orbit that has led to
the overall design changes of the starship from its original design
several years ago the spacecraft now has two wings at the bottom and top which
allow it to belly flop into the atmosphere like a sky diver bleeding off
as much velocity as possible then once it is slowed down enough starship will
use its maneuvering thrusters to kick the tail around and then it'll make a
propulsive landing the completed starship will have a dry man
of approximately 120 tons and weigh a hundred and fifty tons fully loaded
it'll have six of the methane fueled Raptor engines on board and just one of
these engines was attached to the bottom of the star hopper prototype which flew
to a height of 150 meters last month in Boca Chica to actually reach orbit
starship will be stacked on top of the super heavy booster lifting off from an
elevated platform the booster and starship will land on pass near the
launch platform and be stacked up again rapidly potentially several times a day
it's amazing to think how far starship has already come in the four years since
the concept of the interplanetary transport system was first announced
we've seen the launch of Falcon Heavy and the landing of all three stages
propulsive landings by Falcon are commonplace but to really drive the
point home there's actually a 50 meter stainless steel prototype rocket right
there in Texas things are getting real but what comes next we'll talk about
that in a second but first I'd like to thank Christopher Jones James Milner
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today and get in on the action of course starship is only half the rocket stack
that'll eventually fly to the moon and on to Mars musk also provided an update
on the first stage known as the super-heavy which will also be fully
reusable like a scaled up version of the Falcon 9 booster Musca anticipates that
we'll have twice as much thrust as a Saturn 5 using 37 Raptor engines a few
will gimble providing the ability to change direction and the rest will be
locked in place in a follow-up question musk laid out what he expects the
timeline will be he anticipates things to move very fast in one to two months
the starship mark 1 will make its flight to 20 kilometers mark 2 is being
constructed in Florida now and should be pleaded within a couple of months mark
three should be done in about three months mark for in four months we are
going to be building ships and boosters at both Boca and the Cape as fast as we
can and and and each successive VN absolutely I mean it's gonna be really
nutty to see a bunch of these things I mean not just one but a whole stack of
them it'll be marked four or five that actually goes into orbit ideally within
about six months once the first two starships are completed at both Boca and
the Cape SpaceX will begin construction of the super-heavy first stage booster
the limiting factor is actually supplying all the Raptor engines to
launch with each one needing at least twenty four and as many as 37
Musca anticipates they'll need about 200 raptor engines in total for a
super-heavy booster in both Florida and Texas as well as a couple of starships
at both space ports Raptors will be coming off the assembly line every few
days then they plan to scale up building multiple super-heavy boosters and
starships at both locations as quickly as they can improving their design and
manufacturing exponentially although it'll be a massive effort less than 5%
of the company is actually working on starship with everyone else fulfilling
their commitments with Falcon & dragon while Mark 1 & 2 were built in sections
stacked on top of one another their plan for mark 3 is to take the rolls of
stainless steel the diameter of starship and then just do a single weld from top
to bottom like a zipper what about crude missions musk hopes
that the first humans will climb aboard a starship in either Boca Chica Texas or
Cape Canaveral Florida in 2020 this is because the complete reusability of the
rocket allows them to test out safety in each starship super-heavy stack in a
matter of days you fly the booster 20 times a day you fly the ship three or
four times a day that's what I mean by reusability a fleet of 10 starships
could launch more mass into orbit than a thousand times the current capabilities
of the world's rockets combined the long-term
strategy of course is to fly to the moon Mars and other destinations in the solar
system maybe even the outer planets here's starship at Saturn according to
musk as long as you have some kind of propellant plant on your destination
starship can blast off and return to Earth without a first stage using
Earth's atmosphere to slow down the first starship sent to other worlds
would be uncrewed demonstrating the ability to manufacture the fuel needed
for the return journey and as we've mentioned in previous episodes the key
to reaching other destinations will be orbital refueling for a starship that
flies to another world there will be multiple tanker launches that will
transfer propellant giving the starship enough fuel to make the journey of
course SpaceX will need to master the techniques of orbital refueling and we
did a whole video on this which I'll link at the end at the end of his
presentation must talked about our place in the universe as far as we know we're
the only consciousness or the only life that's out there there might be other
life but we've seen no signs of it the window has opened for life to spread out
into the cosmos but there are existential threats like
self-destruction and natural disasters that could shut that window again and a
few hundred million years from now as the Sun gets hotter and hotter boiling
the oceans on earth that window closes for good this is our chance to become a
true spacefaring civilization now I don't know about you but my head is
spinning like is this all actually gonna happen
Elon Musk's deadlines are aspirational and in my experience covering SpaceX for
17 years of its existence things take longer than we expect but Falcon Heavy
flies and we've seen star hoppers successfully demonstrate the reality of
the Raptor engine and its ability to make a water tower soar through the air
there's 50 meters of Raptor powered stainless steel stacked up in Boca Chica
Texas and it's almost ready to fly it's only gonna be a couple of months now for
the next test and eventually orbital flights no matter
what happens we won't have to wait long to find out what do you think let's hear
your guess what day do you think starship will hop 220 kilometers what
day do you think we'll make to orbit and what day will humans first fight a
space on the system let me know your predictions in the comments here are the
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podcast not I put a link in the show notes want to learn more about orbital
refueling we did a whole video that goes into what this will take in great detail
in another video including the plans for starship as well as other ideas by
Lockheed Martin and practical tests by NASA