7.02.2022

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk promises long-awaited Starship update next week

While running behind schedule in classic fashion, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’ll present the first big Starship program update in two and a half years on Thursday, February 10th.

Additionally, as an apparent centerpiece for the event and update, Musk says that SpaceX will perform the second-ever “full stack” fit test with a Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster.

This does not make a great deal of sense. One obvious explanation would be that those arms – despite completing multiple lift tests with hundreds of tons of water bags in recent weeks – are not ready for lifting and stacking operations. However, Starbase does not have a crane large enough to lift Starship S20 onto Booster 4, meaning that SpaceX almost certainly intends to use the tower’s arms to do so.

By replacing the need for large cranes, stacking with arms can free SpaceX from the significant weather and wind restrictions cranes impose when lifting large objects. In theory, giant rigid arms affixed to a mostly immovable tower will be able prevent high winds from causing Starships or Super Heavy boosters to sway dangerously. On the South Texas coast, where high winds are present more often than not for months at a time, that’s essential for SpaceX to ever be able to rapidly reuse Starships launched out of Boca Chica.

Further, while there are many reasons to doubt the viability and rationality of SpaceX’s plans to catch Super Heavy and Starship out of the air, it would have a good deal of sense to at least test part of that process with Super Heavy B4 by using the arms to lift the booster up the tower and lower it into the launch mount. If the arms aren’t capable of doing that, the only operation they will be truly useful for is stacking Starships on top of boosters.

Ultimately, there is hopefully just some minor problem with the arms that means SpaceX has enough confidence in them to lift a 100+ ton (~220,000+ lb) Starship about 100 meters (330 ft) off the ground but not enough confidence to lift a 200+ ton (~450,000 lb) booster ~50 meters (165 ft) off the ground. It could also be an issue with Booster 4, which is a first-of-its-kind Super Heavy prototype, though Starship S20 is no less of a pathfinder.

Up next could be the tower arms’ first test with real hardware – Starship S20, in this case. Depending on SpaceX’s readiness, the ship could probably be lifted onto Booster 4 as early as today – February 6th – but the company has a few days of buffer before Elon Musk’s planned February 10th presentation. The fully stacked Starship will likely serve as a backdrop for the event – extremely impressive even if Booster 4 is nowhere close to ready for flight.

Quelle: TESLARATI

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Update: 10.02.2022

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SpaceX’s Starship update comes at a critical time for the program

The biggest question: Are these vehicles truly ready for flight?

A view of Starbase in South Texas on Tuesday morning, with Ship 20 and Booster 4 ready for stacking.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk will host a "Starship presentation" on Thursday evening in South Texas at the company's launch and production site.

The event will provide Musk's first comprehensive update on the vehicle's progress toward launch—and plans for when it is operational—since September 2019. SpaceX has made enormous progress on the Super Heavy rocket and Starship upper stage since that time, but some critical questions remain. The presentation will certainly be livestreamed by the company, and Ars will be on hand for the event.

Here are some of the biggest things we're looking for.

Is Starship ready for flight?

This week, engineers and technicians at the South Texas facility, which SpaceX calls Starbase, will stack a Starship vehicle on top of a Super Heavy booster. The Starship will be "Ship 20." There haven't been 19 previous Starship prototypes, but there have been a lot. And this ship will be stacked on "Booster 4." It will make for an impressive backdrop, but will either of these vehicles take flight?

The answer: probably not. While Booster 4 will have 29 Raptor engines, they appear to have been painted for the presentation, which does not seem like something you would do to a vehicle before a flight.

At the same time, at the nearby production site in South Texas, work is progressing on Ships 21, 22, and so on—and at least Boosters 7 and 8. So what is the plan for all of this hardware and its readiness for an orbital launch attempt?

Frankly, there have been rumors swirling that SpaceX may not even attempt an orbital launch this year due to technical issues with the Raptor engine. All of this information has been vague and unconfirmed. However, it's true that SpaceX has been testing the "Raptor 2" engine at its facilities in McGregor Texas with some urgency. Hopefully Musk will clarify all of this.

Will Starship fly from Texas?

Setting aside the rocket's readiness, there are also questions about the Federal Aviation Administration's review of the South Texas site for orbital Starship launches.

This past September, the FAA released its initial environmental report on South Texas, kicking off a public comment period. At the time, the FAA said it planned to release a final assessment at the end of 2021. Then it delayed that release until the end of February. Now, there is chatter that the FAA may delay the process beyond the end of February.

Whenever the process reaches a conclusion, the FAA is expected to issue one of three rulings: a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), a Mitigated FONSI, or a Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. A "FONSI" would allow the formal launch licensing process to proceed. If a full Environmental Impact Statement is needed, launches from South Texas would likely be delayed by months, if not years, as more paperwork is completed.

In recent months, SpaceX has begun restarting operations at a Starship worksite near Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Is it doing so in case the company needs to pivot its Starship program from South Texas to Florida? Again, hopefully Musk will share SpaceX's view on launch site availability.

How to use Starship?

Starship is the most ambitious rocket ever built, and that's no hyperbole. It is massive and designed to be flown many times, at low cost, with minimal refurbishment. To get there, a good deal of development work and testing remains. We know that initial flights will test the capability to launch and land the Super Heavy booster—a landing that should be spectacular, as the plan is to "catch" the massive rocket with a set of "chopsticks"—as well as the Starship vehicle. This will likely require several attempts. Once SpaceX is confident that Starship is reasonably reliable, it will begin to launch large batches of its own Starlink satellites.

But what will happen then? One of the biggest space stories in 2021 was NASA's selection of Starship to serve as the lander for its Artemis Moon program. This put Starship squarely on the critical path of NASA's most important program, a return to the Moon. How is work coming on this lunar-lander aspect of Starship's development?

And what of Mars? Clearly, there will be no Martian flights in 2022, but it remains possible that SpaceX could make a Mars launch window in the fourth quarter of 2024. Planetary scientists have expressed an interest in putting research payloads on these early flights. Does SpaceX have any cargo plans for its first Mars missions?

Getting humans to Mars remains the ultimate goal, of course. And certainly, someone will ask Musk when he thinks the first humans will fly on Starship to Mars. It's a dumb question, because no one knows. Musk doesn't. NASA doesn't. I don't. There are a hundred critical funding and technical and regulatory hurdles that must be leaped before humans launch on a mission to Mars.

If it happens in the next 10 years, it would be a miracle. But also, it won't happen in our lifetimes unless Starship is a success. Such are the stakes of SpaceX's effort.

Quelle: arsTechnica

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Update: 12.02.2022

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SpaceX's Elon Musk: 1st orbital Starship flight maybe March

SpaceX's Elon Musk says the first orbital flight of his towering Starship could come in another month or two

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- SpaceX’s Elon Musk said Thursday that the first orbital flight of his towering Starship — the world's most powerful rocket ever built — could come in another month or two.

While he anticipates failures, he’s confident Starship will reach orbit by the end of this year.

Musk provided his first major Starship update in more than two years while standing alongside the 390-foot (119-meter) rocket at SpaceX's Texas spaceport. He urged the nighttime crowd, “Let’s make this real!”

“This is really some wild stuff here,” he said. “In fact, hard to believe it's real.”

NASA plans to use the fully reusable Starship to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2025. Musk, meanwhile, hopes to deploy a fleet of Starships to create a city on Mars, hauling equipment and people there.

For now, the initial flights would carry Musk's internet satellites, called Starlinks, into orbit.

“There will probably be a few bumps in the road, but we want to iron those out with satellite missions and test missions” before putting people on board, he said.

SpaceX's Super Heavy first-stage booster has yet to blast off. But the futuristic, bullet-shaped, steel Starship — perched on top and serving as the upper stage — successfully launched and landed on its own last May, following a series of spectacular explosions. The rocketship soared more than 6 miles (10 kilometers).

SpaceX is awaiting approval from the Federal Aviation Administration before proceeding with Starship's next phase: going into orbit. Musk said he expects the go-ahead in March and that the rocket should be ready to fly by then as well. That would put the launch in the next couple of months, he added.

If the FAA demands more information about potential environmental impacts or lawsuits emerge, Musk said Starship launches could move to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But that would delay the first orbital launch by more than half a year, he noted.

The full-size Starships are massive — taller than NASA's past and present moon rockets, with approximately double the liftoff thrust.

Besides Florida's Cape Canaveral and the southern tip of Texas near Boca Chica, Starships could ultimately launch from floating ocean platforms anywhere in the world, Musk said. He envisions Starships launching three times a day — “rapid reusability" — with refilling stations in space for the longer destinations like Mars. The first refilling test could happen by the end of next year, he said.

Musk estimates a Starship launch could wind up costing less than $10 million — maybe even just a few million dollars with a high flight rate, which would bring down prices. He called it “crazy low” and “ridiculously good” by current space standards.

Starship already has one private customer: a Japanese entrepreneur who has bought a flight around the moon and plans to take a dozen artists with him. Musk hinted there are others interested in buying trips, saying future announcements would be forthcoming.

Until now, SpaceX has relied on its much smaller Falcon rockets to launch satellites, as well as astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station for NASA. Its first private flight, purchased by a billionaire, was last September. Another is coming up at the end of March, this one to the space station with three businessmen who are paying $55 million apiece.

Quelle: abcNews

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Elon Musk gives hotly anticipated Starship update, but it's light on new details

After fully stacking Starship and Super Heavy Booster in August, SpaceX rolled the booster back to the High Bay for final testing. A fully assembled vehicle is expected to be on display again Thursday.

New York (CNN Business)SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spoke for over an hour Thursday night in a hotly anticipated discussion about Starship, which the company hopes will one day take humans to Mars and that will play a key role in NASA's plans to return humans to the moon for the first time in a half century. Still, not many new details were shared.

Musk once again said that he wants to pursue a city on Mars, but did not provide any updates in regard to who would live there or how it would be governed. And he reiterated how some design changes, like an updated rocket engine design, will help reduce costs.

Many more unanswered questions remain. NASA has awarded SpaceX a contract to take astronauts to the moon, but Musk did not delineate what testing SpaceX will have to do before it can carry out its promised crewed missions, nor what the roadmap will look like to getting Starship ready for a moon or Mars mission.

But Musk used the media event to engage with his core fanbase and employees, touting the company's progress during a speech that was back-grounded by the full Starship vehicle — spacecraft and rocket — on a launch pad just behind Musk at the company's South Texas facilities.

SpaceX has been working at a rapid clip to get Starship ready for launch, but so far the company has only sent early prototypes on a few so-called "hop tests," and it's still waiting for regulatory approval to put the vehicle atop its gargantuan rocket booster and attempt to send it to orbit. Musk said that the company had managed to lower the cost and weight of its individual Raptor rocket engines, in large part by consolidating parts and changing flanges to welds in the design. Musk also said that the second generation of the Raptor engine would produce more thrust than the first generation.

The update comes more than two years after Musk announced Starship's first space tourism customer, Japanese fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa. Maezawa paid SpaceX an undisclosed amount of money to secure a seat for himself and a group of artists on a Starship trip around the moon, hoping it could take off as soon as 2023. Maezawa is still in the process of deciding who he'll take with him.

Musk did hint that there will be more Starship sales announced in the future, but declined to share Thursday, noting he didn't want to steal the spotlight from customers who may be planning their own announcements.

All about Starship

Starship is at the core of SpaceX's plans to develop the technology necessary to establish a human settlement on Mars.

SpaceX has achieved regular crewed flights to the International Space Station, sent the first all-tourist crew to orbit, and made its mark as the exciting-newcomer-turned-reliable-mainstay of the US aerospace industry.

But as NASA demonstrated in the mid-20th century, going from brief jaunts to space to getting a spacecraft all the way to the moon isn't easy. And to this day, no human has ever traveled as far as Mars. For all of Musk and SpaceX's achievements, there is still a long way to go. And for all that Musk has achieved, he has also accrued a reputation for missed deadlines on ambitious projects.

Since 2019, however, SpaceX has mostly been in show-don't-tell mode, executing about a dozen test flights of various early prototypes that went from hopping a few feet off the ground to soaring more than 30,000 feet. A few high-altitude tests ended in explosions as the test rockets smashed back into the ground. But its latest test launch, in May 2021, managed to land upright without bursting into flames.

Lately, SpaceX has largely been waiting for federal regulators to clear the full-scale Starship for the first orbital launch attempt. It'll be no small feat — getting to orbit requires speeds that exceed 22 times the speed of sound, and to get the Starship spacecraft moving that fast, it'll ride atop a towering rocket booster, called Super Heavy, affixed with roughly 30 high-powered engines.

And even then, going to Mars entails more challenges than just building a rocket to get there.

On Thursday, SpaceX showed off the vehicle fully stacked, with the Starship spacecraft sitting atop its Super Heavy booster on the company's newly constructed orbital launch pad that lies next to a remote stretch of beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Large "grabber arms" held the rocket in place, as Musk's dream of rapidly reusable rockets would entail a need for the rocket to return to its launchpad after hurling its payload into orbit.

If successful, Starship will become the most powerful rocket humanity has ever launched, boasting up to twice the power of the Saturn V rocket NASA used to take astronauts to the moon in the 1960s.

FAA approval

Before Starship can even get to space, however, SpaceX needs to get a thumbs up from the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial space launches in the United States.

Musk had indicated the company was prepared to launch Starship's orbital test flight as soon as July of last year.

But the back half of 2021 was full of hangups. The FAA was carrying out an environmental assessment to review what the impact would be of launching such a massive rocket from a stretch of rural Texas coastline. A public comment period in October aired the voices of many local residents strongly opposed to the idea, as well as some fervent supporters who weren't necessarily from the area.

Though SpaceX initially expected to get the all-clear by the end of 2021, according to the FAA, the environmental assessment will continue until at least February 28, 2022.

The agency cited "the high volume of comments submitted" and "discussions and consultation efforts with consulting parties" as reasons for the delay.

Musk did not provide a firm update on the anticipated approval, but said that if the FAA required a more thorough review, the company would likely shift some operations to Cape Kennedy in Florida.

Quelle: CNN

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk updates schedule for first orbital Starship launch

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has presented the first significant update on the company’s Starship program since September 2019, offering a couple of new details about the status of the first orbital launch attempt of the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Unfortunately, above all else, the promised update was primarily a rehash of the broad-strokes vision of SpaceX’s Starship and Mars programs, as well as some basic details – most already known – about the rocket, its Raptor engines, and how it will be operated. Nonetheless, a large portion of the event was dedicated to audience questions, some of which actually extracted some specific details from the SpaceX CEO. Perhaps the single most important news: a rough but updated schedule for Starship’s first orbital test flight.

 

To be clear, a great many questions remain unanswered. Months after Starbase’s first orbital tank farm reached some degree of completion, SpaceX has yet to fill four main liquid methane (LCH4) tanks with even an ounce of fuel. Over the same period, the farm’s five liquid oxygen and nitrogen (LOx/LN2) tanks have been filled with thousands of tons of propellant and coolant. Why is still entirely unclear, save for speculation that SpaceX ran afoul of rudimentary methane storage regulations and is ever so slowly rectifying those errors with modifications. Without so much as a partially operational tank farm, SpaceX will be unable to attempt an orbital Starship launch, let alone start the process of qualifying a Super Heavy booster for flight with wet dress rehearsals (WDRs) and static fire tests.

Musk also failed to confirm or offer an educated guess as to which Starship and Super Heavy booster will support the first orbital test flight (OTF), whether the first OTF will truly reach orbit (rather than ‘just’ orbital velocity), and what will happen to Ship 20 and Booster 4 if – as a great deal of speculation suggests – they’ve fallen out of favor. If they’re to be replaced, it’s also unclear why that is or how long it might take to qualify a new ship and booster given that Super Heavy B4, for example, has yet to attempt a single static fire test a full six months after it first reached its full height.

Nonetheless, largely thanks to questions asked by members of the media, Musk did offer some valuable insight into Starship’s first orbital-class test flight. The SpaceX CEO says that he believes the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) could complete an environmental assessment of Starbase as early as March. In the same presentation, Musk stated that SpaceX would “hopefully [complete environmental reviews] a couple months.” A lack of environmental approval has been the single most important bottleneck of orbital Starbase launch operations for months. The FAA originally anticipated that those reviews would be complete by the end of 2021 but recently delayed the estimated date of completion to the end of February 2022. Another delay from February to March (or later) has been expected for weeks.

It’s unclear how seamless the whole process will be but SpaceX will also need to receive an FAA license for orbital Starship launches after clearing environmental reviews. That could take days, weeks, months, or even a year or more. If SpaceX doesn’t receive a Finding Of No Significant Impact (FONSI) on its Starbase environmental assessment (EA) and instead has to complete a far more extensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), Starbase could be stuck in bureaucratic gridlock well into 2023 or even 2024.

Thankfully, Musk is extremely confident in SpaceX’s alternatives. In the event that Starbase becomes indefinitely unusable, SpaceX has already received full environmental approval to launch Starship out of Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A. The company has already begun the process of assembling a Starship launch and catch tower offsite and Musk believes that a Pad 39A Starship launch site could be brought online in just 6-8 months if SpaceX refocuses all of its Starship resources onto Florida.

The CEO also says that SpaceX’s goal is to have the hardware needed for Starship’s first orbital test flight ready to launch around the same as regulatory approval is secured – “hopefully a couple months for both,” in Musk’s words. If Starship S20 and Booster 4 are still assigned to mission, that schedule is not difficult to believe. Starship has already completed virtually all of the ground testing needed to qualify it for flight, while – from the outside – Super Heavy has never looked more ready for static fire testing.

If SpaceX intends to use a different ship and booster, though, the company will have to cut the amount of time needed for final assembly and qualification testing by a factor of two or three relative to B4/S20. If the next ship and booster pair takes a similar amount of time as B4/S20, the hardware needed for Starship’s first orbital launch attempt might not be ready until August or September 2022. SpaceX will also need to build, test, qualify, and ship around three-dozen Raptor 2 engines, the production of which could singlehandedly take at least six or seven weeks at the current pace of production.

Ultimately, no matter where the cards currently in the air end up falling, it looks like SpaceX has an extremely busy – and hopefully fruitful – year of Starship development and testing ahead of it

Quelle: TESLARATI 

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Update: 13.02.2022

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SpaceX considers shifting Starship testing to Florida