14.02.2023
SpaceX rolls naked Starship prototype to test site
SpaceX has rolled a strange, naked Starship prototype from its Starbase, Texas factory to a nearby test site.
Beginning with its cone-tipped nose section, SpaceX started stacking Starship S26 in October 2022. By early January 2023, the prototype had been stacked to its full 50-meter (~165 ft) height and welded together. After about six more weeks of outfitting, Ship 26 left Starbase’s High Bay assembly facility and was transported to one of two stands formerly used for suborbital Starship test flights.
SpaceX lifted Ship 26 onto Suborbital Pad A on the morning of February 12th. Just a few hundred feet to the left, Starship prototype S25 watched from Suborbital Pad B while waiting for the start of its Raptor engine test campaign. Ship 26 is four months younger than Ship 25 and rolled out without Raptors installed, as it still needs to pass several simpler tests. That’s far from the only difference between the Starships.
STARBULLET
Aside from a range of smaller design changes, Ship 26 has three main differences relative to most prior Starships. First, it has zero heat shield tiles. Since the 2020-2021 period of suborbital Starship flight testing, all finished ships (S20, S21, S22, S24, S25) have been fitted with ~10,000 black, ceramic heat shield tiles. Eventually, those tiles will (theoretically) protect Starships from the intense heat created by reentering Earth’s atmosphere at orbital velocity.
Ship 26 also has no flaps. Since SpaceX first fully assembled a Starship in October 2020, every ship the company has completed (SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11, SN15, SN16, S20, S21, S22, S24, S25) has had four large flaps and form-fitting ‘aerocovers’ installed. Starships need flaps to steer and orient themselves during orbital reentries. They also need flaps to control themselves during exotic landing maneuvers, which require ships to free-fall belly-down (like a human skydiver) and aggressively flip into a vertical orientation for propulsive landings.
Finally, and most confusingly, Ship 26 has no payload bay of any kind. The end result is a smooth, featureless Starship that looks like a steel bullet, can’t return to Earth, and can’t deploy satellites. Combined, the fact it exists at all almost seems like an elaborate, multi-month mistake. But SpaceX clearly intended to build Ship 26 and is now preparing to qualify it for flight.
DEPOT, MOON LANDER, OR SOMETHING ELSE?
In simpler terms, Ship 26 is an intentionally expendable Starship with no way to launch satellites. That raises the obvious question: why does it exist? There are a few obvious possibilities. SpaceX is developing at least four types of Starships. The Crew and Tanker Ships will have heat shields and flaps. The Starship Moon lander will have no flaps or heat shield and will be painted white and insulated. A Depot Ship with stretched tanks will stay in orbit permanently and store propellant for in-space refilling.
Based on low-resolution renders, the bullet-like Depot Ship is the most reminiscent of Ship 26. However, there’s no evidence that Ship 26 has “exterior optical properties [optimized] for long duration [propellant storage].” The prototype also lacks any of the hardware likely needed for docking or propellant transfer and has propellant tanks that are the same size as past ships. To survive in orbit for days or weeks, it would need some kind of power source – typically solar arrays – that isn’t present. And even if an expendable Starship like S26 can already achieve SpaceX’s reported target of 250 tons (~550,000 lb) to low Earth orbit, 250 tons is only a fifth of a full propellant load.
The Starship variants required for SpaceX’s NASA Moon landing contracts. (NASA)
Ship 26 could also be used for miscellaneous systems testing or a longevity demonstration in orbit. However, it’s unclear why SpaceX couldn’t simply do that with Ship 24 and Ship 25. Both have had their payload bays permanently sealed, meaning that they are only useful as test articles. The same is true for a tank-to-tank propellant transfer test SpaceX received a NASA contract to conduct in 2020. During that test, Starship will transfer “10 metric tons” of cryogenic liquid oxygen (LOx) between its main LOx tank and a smaller header LOx tank used to store landing propellant. But all Starships built to date have header tanks and could be used for the same test.
Ship 26 could exist primarily to demonstrate that a Starship with no flaps or heat shield tiles is aerodynamically stable during launch. However, expending an entire Starship for what amounts to wind tunnel testing would be extravagant.
PREPARING FOR FLIGHT
Regardless, Ship 26 is clearly destined for more than the scrapyard. The bullet-like prototype was installed on Suborbital Pad A, which SpaceX has modified for cryogenic proofing and structural testing. While coordinating with Ship 25, which needs to conduct static fire tests, Ship 26 will be pressurized and loaded with liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, or both to safely simulate the thermal and mechanical loads it will experience when filled with propellant. The stand is fitted with hydraulic rams that can simultaneously simulate the thrust of six Raptor engines (1380 tons / 3M lbf).
If it passes those tests, SpaceX will presumably return Ship 26 to the Starbase factory for Raptor installation. Strangely, the smooth Starship isn’t alone. It appears that Ship 27 will be more or less identical, with no heat shield or flaps. However, there’s evidence that Ship 27 will have the first working payload bay on a Starship and could be used to deploy full-size Starlink V2 satellites in addition to any other testing SpaceX wants to use it for.
The most exotic (and unlikeliest) explanation for Ship 26 and Ship 27 is that the pair is meant to support SpaceX’s first Starship docking and propellant transfer test. In October 2022, a NASA official indicated that SpaceX’s second Starship test flight would be a “Starship-to-Starship propellant transfer.”
For now, SpaceX’s priority is preparing Ship 24 and Super Heavy Booster 7 for Starship’s first orbital launch attempt, followed by preparing Ship 25 and Booster 9 for the second orbital test flight. Until then, Ship 26 and Ship 27 will likely remain a bit of a mystery.
Quelle: TESLARATI
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Update: 22.02.2023
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SpaceX proceeding with Starship orbital launch attempt after static fire
Both the Starship booster and the pad are in good shape after a Feb. 9 static-fire test, the last technical milestone before an orbital launch attempt. Credit: SpaceX
ORLANDO — SpaceX’s static-fire test of nearly all the engines in its Starship booster earlier this month was “the last box to check” before the vehicle’s first orbital launch attempt, likely some time in March, a company official said Feb. 21.
Speaking on a panel at the Space Mobility conference here about “rocket cargo” delivery, Gary Henry, senior advisor for national security space solutions at SpaceX, said both the Super Heavy booster and its launch pad were in good shape after the Feb. 9 test, clearing the way for an orbital launch that is still pending a Federal Aviation Administration launch license.
“We had a successful hot fire, and that was really the last box to check,” he said. “The vehicle is in good shape. The pad is in good shape.”
Only 31 of the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster fired. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted just after the test that one engine was commanded off just before ignition and a second shut down early. He later said that the engines ran at 50% of their rated thrust.
That led to speculation that SpaceX would need to perform a second static-fire test to get all 33 engines, or to run them at higher thrust levels. Henry, though, suggested that SpaceX was not planning another such test before an orbital launch attempt.
“Pretty much all of the prerequisites to supporting an orbital demonstration attempt here in the next month or so look good,” he said.
The company still needs to obtain an FAA launch license before attempting the launch. “We hope to secure that license in the very near future,” he said, setting up a launch attempt “probably in the month of March.”
Once SpaceX performs that orbital launch demonstration, Henry said the company is ready to move ahead rapidly with operational Starship launches. “We very, very quickly converge on a system that we can operationalize,” he said, starting with launches of second-generation Starlink satellites. “We have a few that are waiting very patiently to be launched on Starship.”
Those initial Starlink launches will serve as a test program, he explained, refining the launch and recovery of the two stages of Starship. “Somewhere in that journey that will be happening this year, we’re going to make a major pivot to the next piece of the Human Landing System architecture,” he said, by demonstrating the orbital depot needed for on-orbit refueling of the lunar lander version of Starship.
That will provide additional experience testing Starship through the tankers that will fly to deliver propellant to the depot. “The nice thing about tankers is that they’ve got to reenter as well,” he said. “We’ve created this rubric, in the next year or two, where we will be able to do a lot of experimentation on that thermal protection system that will allow successful reentry of Starship.”
Starship, Henry argued later in the panel, will sharply drive down launch costs. “We are on the cusp of seeing an opportunity of mass to orbit go from $2,000 a kilogram to $200 a kilogram,” he said. In the long term, costs could further decline to the point where the propellant is the largest factor in the per-launch marginal cost.
“If Elon gets his way,” he said, “you’re at $20 per kilogram.”
Quelle: SN
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Update: 24.02.2023
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The future of Starship includes national security missions
ORLANDO — As SpaceX prepares to attempt Starship’s first orbital flight, the company is contemplating military applications for the super-heavy launch vehicle.
Starship holds the potential to become a mobility platform for the U.S. military, said Gary Henry, senior advisor for national security space solutions at SpaceX.
Speaking Feb. 21 at the Space Mobility conference, Henry said the experience SpaceX will gain launching Starlink satellites on Starship and developing the vehicle for NASA’s Artemis program will help the U.S. military better understand how to employ it for cargo delivery and other missions.
Henry, a former Boeing executive and U.S. Air Force officer, is working with the Air Force Research Laboratory on potential concepts for using rockets for point-to-point cargo delivery under a $102 million five-year contract awarded in 2020.
Other space companies have signed agreements with U.S. Transportation Command to explore rocket cargo concepts but only SpaceX has won a large contract.
Greg Spanjers, program manager for rocket cargo at AFRL, said the military envisions a future when it could be cheaper to send cargo via rocket than by transport aircraft. In a national security or humanitarian crisis, a launch vehicle would fly from Cape Canaveral, for example, and either land on an austere field to deliver cargo or airdrop it.
For the rocket cargo program to be viable, Spanjers said, DoD expects to use launch providers that fly frequently so they can offer competitive pricing. “To make this a success, we need a very high launch rate, and we need to have systems that reenter and that can bring a high down mass,” he added.
With regard to Starship, Henry said, SpaceX is forecasting mass to orbit costs falling from $2,000 a kilogram to $200 a kilogram, or even lower, he said. “If Elon gets his way, you’re at $20 per kilogram.”
“The cost element of this is going to be pretty compelling, and it’ll happen soon,” Henry said.
Col. James Horne, deputy director of operations at U.S. Space Systems Command, said there are “compelling use cases” for shipping cargo around the world on rockets.
“When you think about the situation in the Indo-Pacific Command area of operations, there’s a tyranny of distance issue where you’ve got a vast desert of water … and you have island chains like we saw in World War II.”
That area “presents unique challenges from a mobility perspective that I think applications like rocket cargo could really help solve,” said Horne.
Horne said he could not discuss specific scenarios that are being looked at, but he said the military could face transportation challenges “that cannot be solved by ships or airplanes today.”
If rocket cargo moves forward and the technology matures, the Space Force would take the lead in managing the program and procuring services, he said. “We’re already starting to actively plan for a program standup in the 2026 timeframe.”
On-orbit infrastructure
Henry said Starship’s lunar landing architecture could support the U.S. military by providing on-orbit infrastructure for logistics and refueling.
For NASA’s moon program, SpaceX would launch a Starship to low Earth orbit to serve as a fuel depot for other vehicles that would be traveling to and from the lunar surface. That infrastructure could be leveraged for national security, he said. There are ongoing discussions about “on orbit commodities to enable things like dynamic space operations and ‘maneuver without regret.’”
These are terms used by U.S. Space Command to describe its vision for military operations in the space domain. Dynamic space operations is the ability to maneuver satellites and move payloads across different orbits, something that is not possible today because satellites don’t carry enough fuel and were not built to be refueled.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw during a talk at the Space Mobility conference, said the U.S. military cannot maneuver satellites “without regret” because it has to conserve precious fuel. He said that complicates the nation’s ability to compete in space with rival powers that have maneuvering satellites.
Henry said the Starship human landing system is on a path to support NASA, and not far into the future “we as a nation are going to have a capability that will fundamentally change the way we can protect and defend the space realm. And we are very excited about the prospects of being able to contribute to that discussion.”
Horne said the military is “going to need that infrastructure on orbit, not just for cargo, storage and movement, but for a lot of other applications. We’re gonna need gas tanks in the future. We may even have places where we are manufacturing things,” he added. “We’re going to find military-unique ways to use that from a national security perspective.”
SpaceX's Starship has 50% chance of success on 1st orbital flight, Elon Musk says
'I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement.'
SpaceX's Starship covered in frost during a landmark fueling test on Jan. 23, 2023. (Image credit: SpaceX)
The first-ever orbital mission of SpaceX's huge new Starship vehicle will basically be a coin flip, according to company founder and CEO Elon Musk.
Starship has a roughly 50% chance of succeeding on its debut orbital test flight, which SpaceX aims to launch from its South Texas site in the next month or so, Musk said last week.
"I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement," Musk said on March 7, during an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference(opens in new tab). "So, won't be boring!"
SpaceX is developing Starship to get people and cargo to the moon and Mars, and perform a variety of other spaceflight tasks. The giant, stainless-steel vehicle will be the most powerful rocket ever to fly, featuring about 2.5 times more thrust at liftoff than NASA's iconic Saturn V, Musk said at the conference.
And Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, which Musk views as the key breakthrough needed to make Mars colonization and other ambitious exploration feats feasible.
SpaceX is building multiple Starship vehicles at the South Texas site, which the company calls Starbase, and plans to launch them in relatively quick succession over the coming months.
"So I think we've got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year," Musk said in the March 7 interview. "It'll probably take us a couple more years to achieve full and rapid reusability."
SpaceX's Ship 24 Starship prototype lights one its six Raptor engines during a brief static fire test on Dec. 15, 2022. (Image credit: SpaceX
It's not surprising that Musk would seek to dampen expectations ahead of Starship's highly anticipated orbital debut. Rockets often fail on their first flight, as we saw earlier this month with Japan's new H3 launcher and in January with ABL Space System's RS1.
And we've heard similar words from Musk before: He prepared us all for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy to crash and burn on its first-ever liftoff attempt.
"I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win, to be honest," Musk said of the Heavy back in July 2017.
Falcon Heavy soared high above those low expectations, successfully deploying Musk's red Tesla Roadster, and its spacesuit-clad mannequin driver "Starman," into orbit around the sun in February 2018.
But Falcon Heavy is basically a variant of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9; it straps three Falcon 9 first stages together, with a payload-carrying upper stage sitting atop the central booster. Starship is a more complicated, and novel, vehicle; it employs 33 of SpaceX's next-gen Raptor engines in its Super Heavy first stage and six Raptors in its upper stage, for example. (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy both use SpaceX's venerable Merlin engine.)
You'll want to tune in to the coming Starship orbital flight, whenever it happens and however it ends up going. As Musk said, it won't be boring.
Quelle:SC
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Update: 7.04.2023
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SpaceX plans to finally launch Starship next week
Elon Musk says Mars-bound rocket is ‘key to expanding life beyond Earth’
SpaceX is planning to launch its giant Starship rocket as early as Monday, according to a flight notice.
The 120-metre tall rocket is the centrepiece of Elon Musk’s plans to colonise Mars, with deals already in place with Nasa to use it to shuttle astronauts to the Moon.
Before it can transport any crew or cargo, the biggest rocket ever built must first complete an orbital flight test that will see it lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas, before splashing down off the coast of Hawaii.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) posted a planning notice this week stating that the expected launch date is 10 April, with backup dates on 11 and 12 April.
“The FAA has not made a licence determination for the SpaceX Starship Super Heavy operation, and the FAA’s Command Center planning notice should not be interpreted as an indicator that a determination to issue a licence has been made or is forthcoming,” the agency said in a statement.
The FAA told The Independent that a decision would be made once it is satisfied that SpaceX meets all the necessary safety and regulatory requirements.
The evaluation process involves various components, including reviews on policy, payload, airspace integration, financial responsibility and environmental impacts.
Most of these aspects are formalities for SpaceX, though it is understood that an environmental compliance review could delay the granting of the licence.
SpaceX does not comment on the testing schedule of its Starship rocket.
SpaceX has already completed a high-altitude flight test for an earlier Starship prototype, though many of the tests ended in explosions.
Mr Musk said last month that there was “hopefully above a 50 per cent chance” of his company’s rocket reaching orbit.
“I am not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement,” he told the Morgan Stanley 2023 Technology, Media and Telecommunications conference. “It won’t be boring.”
He added that Starship represented “the key to expanding life beyond Earth”.
Quelle: The Independent
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Update: 13.04.2023
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SpaceX readying Starship rocket for around-the-world test flight as soon as next week
SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket stand fully stacked at the company’s Starbase launch facility in South Texas. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX said Tuesday it won’t perform a final countdown dress rehearsal this week for the giant new Starship launch vehicle, and could send the rocket — standing nearly 40 stories tall on its Texas launch pad — on an around-the-world test flight as soon as next week.
The launch is scheduled no earlier than Monday, April 17, but the schedule will depend on several factors, such as the completion of final checkouts on the rocket, weather conditions, and perhaps most visibly, the approval of a commercial launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The 394-foot-tall (120-meter) rocket will be the largest and most powerful launch vehicle to ever fly when it lifts off from SpaceX’s privately-owned spaceport on the Texas Gulf Coast, exceeding the size and engine thrust of NASA’s Saturn 5 moon rocket and the Soviet Union’s ill-fated N1 launcher more than 50 years ago. It will also overtake NASA’s Space Launch System, which launched the Artemis 1 test flight around the moon on its mission in November.
Thirty-three methane-fueled Raptor engines, burning chilled methane and liquid oxygen, will drive the rocket off its launching stand with more than 16.5 million pounds of thrust at full power. If the rocket functions as intended, Starship will arc into space for more than an hour, bolting around the globe at nearly 5 miles per second before re-entering the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean and splashing down north of Hawaii.
But the first flight of any rocket runs a higher-than-normal risk of a malfunction. The purpose of Starship’s integrated flight test is to gather data on the performance of the rocket, its engines, computers, and ground systems, helping engineers iterate designs for future tests, and eventually operational missions to deploy satellites into orbit and ferry cargo into deep space.
SpaceX launched prototypes of the Starship vehicle — which sits atop the Super Heavy booster on the fully-stacked rocket — on five high-altitude test flights in 2020 and 2021. On the final test flight in May 2021, the Starship vehicle launched to an altitude of about 33,000 feet (10 kilometers) and then successfully demonstrated its landing maneuver, involving a flip from horizontal to vertical orientation using a restart of its Raptor engines before settling onto its landing pad intact at the South Texas rocket complex.
With the sub-scale test flights behind them, SpaceX engineers turned their attention to building a new launch pad in Texas for the fully-stacked Super Heavy booster and Starship vehicle. Much of the work in the last year focused on ground tests of the Super Heavy stage, itself as tall as SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, and the Starship vehicle assigned to the first launch aiming for space.
The Super Heavy for the integrated flight test is known as Booster 7 in SpaceX’s inventory of rockets. The Starship, with heat-resistant thermal protection tiles to shield it from the heat of atmospheric re-entry, is known as Ship 24.
Amid a series of fueling demonstrations with increasing complexity, SpaceX test-fired all six engines on the Ship 24 vehicle at the company’s seaside launch complex on Sept. 8. On Jan. 23, SpaceX filled the entire rocket — with Ship 24 on top of Booster 7 — with a full load of methane and liquid oxygen propellants for the first time.
Ground crews removed Ship 24 from the top of Booster 7 before a test-firing of 31 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster Feb. 9. The static fire test set set a record for the most rocket engines to ignite at once on a single vehicle. Two of the 33 engines did not fire, and the test only throttled the engines to their 50% power level.
“In addition to the testing of Starship’s upper stage, the team has conducted numerous tests of the Super Heavy rocket, which include the increasingly complex static fires that led to a full-duration 31 Raptor engine test — the largest number of simultaneous rocket engine ignitions in history,” SpaceX said.
SpaceX rolled Ship 24 and Booster 7 back to the company’s factory for final checks inside one of multiple hangers that have risen from the barren tidal flats of South Texas some 2 miles (3 kilometers) inland from the launch pad. Meanwhile, teams at the launch site beefed up the launch mount stainless steel armor to protect it from the heat blast from the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines.
Earlier this month, the vehicles returned to the launch site and were stacked together on the launch mount April 5. Ship 24 is expected to be removed from Booster 7 once more later this week to allow technicians to complete arming of the flight termination system, the destruct charge that would be activated if the rocket veers off course in flight and threatens people.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, has said the fully integrated test flight of the Starship launch vehicle is “trending towards near the end of third week of April.”
Advisories issued to mariners and posted on the FAA’s operations plan advisory indicate the daily launch window at SpaceX’s South Texas facility, known as Starbase, opens at 7 a.m. CDT (8 a.m. EDT; 1200 UTC). The launch site is located east of Brownsville, Texas, a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border at a place called Boca Chica Beach.
SpaceX said the launch schedule hinges on regulatory approval by the FAA, which licenses commercial launch and re-entry operations for U.S. companies. The company said Tuesday that it will forego a final launch day dress rehearsal, which would have included loading methane and liquid oxygen into the two-stage launcher, just as they will be umped into the vehicle during the real launch attempt.
“Teams are focused on launch readiness ahead of Starship’s first integrated flight test as soon as next week, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX tweeted Tuesday.
The FAA has said the Starship launch date’s appearance on the agency’s operations website “should not be not be interpreted as an indicator that a determination to issue a license has been made or is forthcoming.
“The agency will only make a determination after SpaceX meets all safety and other regulatory requirements,” an FAA spokesperson said.
The FAA announced last year that it will require SpaceX to take more than 75 actions to reduce the environmental effects of flying its Starship rocket from South Texas. But not all of the mitigation steps are required before the FAA issues a commercial launch license to SpaceX for the first Starship orbital test flight.
This diagram illustrates portions of the Starship integrated flight test, including the vehicle’s liftoff from Starbase in South Texas, stage separation, the descent of the Super Heavy booster to a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico, and the flight of the Starship spacecraft to near orbital velocity, followed by its re-entry and splashdown near Hawaii. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX released new details about the upcoming test flight on the company’s website Tuesday.
“This will be the first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket, a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the moon, and travel to Mars and beyond,” SpaceX said. “With a test such as this, success is measured by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship.”
After clearing its nearly 500-foot-tall launch pad tower, Super Heavy and Starship will steer on a trajectory east from Starbase over the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket will surpass the speed of sound and maximum aerodynamic pressure in less than a minute, when Starship will endure the harshest structural loads of its ascent into space.
SpaceX said completion of each milestone is not required to achieve a successful test flight. “But each milestone completed will certainly make for an exciting test,” the company said.
The engines on the Super Heavy booster will shut off nearly three minutes into the flight, allowing the booster stage to drop away from the Starship upper stage. Then the Raptor engines on the Starship vehicle will ignite, firing for the first time in the airless void of space to begin a planned six-and-a-half minute burn to accelerate to a speed close to orbital velocity.
Starship’s orbit is expected to be elliptical, or elongated in shape, with a high point, or apogee, in space and a low point, or perigee, at an altitude inside of Earth’s atmosphere.
After separating from the Starship vehicle about three minutes into the flight, the Super Heavy booster will reignite some of its 33 engines to cancel out its downrange velocity for a “boost-back” burn. Falling toward the Gulf of Mexico, the rocket will be programmed to light a subset of its engines again just before reaching the sea to slow for a controlled splashdown.
The Starship vehicle will coast around the world, flying over the Straits of Florida, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and the Pacific before a scorching re-entry into the atmosphere north of Hawaii. SpaceX hopes to gather data during the ship’s re-entry, but the mission profile published by the company Tuesday does not indicate the vehicle will fire its engines to slow down before impact in the Pacific.
Both stages of the Starship launch vehicle are designed to be fully reusable, a step forward from SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which require brand new upper stages on each flight.
SpaceX’s concept for recovering the Super Heavy booster involves catching it with articulating “chopstick” arms on the 479-foot-tall (146-meter) launch tower. The Starship will also use its engines to return through the atmosphere and land back on Earth, or reach the surfaces of other planetary bodies like the moon or Mars. The first Starship orbital test flight, however, will not include any recovery and reuse attempts.
“SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket – collectively referred to as Starship – represent a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon, Mars and beyond,” SpaceX says on its website. “Starship will be the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, with the ability to carry up to 150 metric tonnes to Earth orbit reusable, and up to 250 metric tonnes expendable.”
SpaceX wants to use the Starship vehicle to launch the company’s Starlink internet satellites, flying heavier, next-generation versions of the broadband relay stations than the spacecraft now being launched by the smaller Falcon 9 rocket. An animation released from SpaceX showed the company’s concept for deploying Starlink satellites from a Starship vehicle in orbit, using a mechanism that works like a giant Pez dispenser.
SpaceX has also won a $2.9 billion contract with NASA to develop the Starship into a human-rated lander for the agency’s Artemis moon missions. A moon derivative of the Starship, assisted by Starship refueling tankers, will be utilized for a lunar landing with astronauts, an event NASA says could happen no earlier than 2025. SpaceX also has a deal with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to send a team of private citizens around the moon on a Starship flight.
Flights of the Starship beyond low Earth orbit will require the still-untested in-orbit refueling capability SpaceX is developing for the new-generation rocket.
Musk has said SpaceX intends to use the Starbase facility in Texas as a test site for the Starship program. The company is building a second Starship launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with plans to construct more launch sites in the future, eventually building up to a capability to launch multiple Starship flights per day. With rapid reuse, SpaceX aims to reduce costs and give customers unprecedented access to space.
A major step in making this future a reality could happen next week in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.
“Success is far from certain, but excitement is guaranteed,” Musk tweeted earlier this year.
Quee: SN
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Update: 16.04.2023
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FAA gives OK for SpaceX's Starship test flight from Texas
SpaceX has cleared the final hurdle for launching its new giant Starship from Texas as early as next week on a first test flight
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- SpaceX has cleared the final hurdle for launching its new giant Starship from Texas as early as next week on a first test flight.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued the long-awaited license on Friday. SpaceX announced that Starship — the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket — could soar as soon as Monday.
No people or satellites will be aboard the 394-foot (120-meter) rocket. SpaceX will attempt to send the spacecraft atop the colossal booster around the world, from the southern tip of Texas all the way to Hawaii. The first stage will be discarded in the Gulf of Mexico and the spacecraft into the Pacific. No landings will be attempted for this debut.
It will be the first launch attempt of a full-size Starship, made of shiny stainless steel and powered by methane-fueled engines.
The FAA said SpaceX had met all requirements, including safety and environmental. The license is valid for five years.
"We carefully analyzed the public safety risks during every stage of the mission and required SpaceX to mitigate those risks," the FAA added.
Elon Musk envisions using Starships to send people to the moon and Mars. NASA has already signed up for a Starship to put astronauts on the lunar surface as early as 2025.
Quelle: abcNews
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Update: 17.04.2023
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FAA clears SpaceX to launch world’s largest rocket
We’re streaming live views from Starbase, Texas, in partnership with LabPadre.
The Federal Aviation Administration approved a commercial license Friday for the first full-scale test flight of SpaceX’s nearly 400-foot-tall Super Heavy and Starship mega-rocket from South Texas, a launch SpaceX said could happen as soon as Monday morning.
“After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the FAA said Friday. “The license is valid for five years.”
The launch license only covers the first test flight of the Super Heavy booster and Starship vehicle. Following the FAA’s launch license announcement Friday, SpaceX immediately tweeted it was targeting Monday morning for the test flight, with a two-and-a-half hour launch window opening at 7 a.m. CDT (8 a.m. EDT; 1200 UTC).
A cluster of 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines, each generating about a half-million pounds of thrust, will power the rocket off the pad for its inaugural test flight. The Super Heavy booster will burn its engines for 2 minutes and 49 seconds, then separate from the Starship upper stage. The booster will re-light its engines for a series of maneuvers to attempt a controlled splashdown about 20 miles (30 kilometers) off the coast of Texas.
Six Raptor engines are mounted to the Starship upper stage. Those engines will accelerate Starship to near orbital velocity, and the vehicle will coast around the world before falling back through the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, eventually impacting north of Hawaii around 90 minutes after liftoff. An FAA official said the Starship could reach a maximum altitude of 146 miles (235 kilometers), below the height of the International Space Station, and will not reach the speed required to enter a stable orbit.
Eventually, SpaceX wants to recover both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship vehicle after each flight, making the rocket fully reusable. For the first test flight, both parts of the rocket will be expended.
An FAA spokesperson said the Starship vehicle will not perform any propulsion maneuvers during its descent toward splashdown in the Pacific, but will have attitude control capability “using other means.”
But that assumes all goes according to plan on the test flight. SpaceX has performed several sub-scale launches of Starship prototypes, but those flights remained inside Earth’s atmosphere. The Super Heavy booster, which stands taller than the Falcon 9 rocket SpaceX uses to launch crews to the space station, has never left the ground.
“A mishap is part of our business, and it’s a pretty realistic possibility,” an FAA official said. “We see this quite often with first launches of new, and somewhat unproven space vehicles.”
“Success maybe, excitement guaranteed!” tweeted Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO.
“We’re hoping for a safe launch, but you never know where things might break or when things might go wrong, and I think we have really good mitigations in place looking at all the potential hazards that could occur during launch,” the FAA officials said. “And I think we’ve done a good job of making sure that we have our arms around that.”
SpaceX will clear an area extending roughly 4 miles from the Starship launch site, known as Starbase, ensuring non-essential personnel and the public remain well clear of the blast danger area. The rocket has an autonomous flight safety system that would destroy the vehicle if it veered off course and threatens populated areas.
The FAA is responsible for ensuring public safety during commercial launch and re-entry operations by U.S. companies. The agency announced last year that it would require SpaceX to take more than 75 actions to reduce the environmental effects of flying its Starship rocket from South Texas. But not all of the mitigation steps were required before the FAA issued a commercial launch license to SpaceX for the first Starship orbital test flight.
“We’ve been well over 500 days of review on this one particular license application,” an FAA official said.
“I think we’ve put considerable resources on this particular project,” the FAA official said. “It’s a very complicated project. It’s the largest rocket that this office will have ever licensed. It’s a complicated machine. The flight safety aspects of the review are pretty important.”
The official said SpaceX made changes to its license application for the Super Heavy / Starship test flight, requiring the FAA to take more time evaluating the proposal.
“This particular program is dynamic,” the FAA official said. “It’s a test program. SpaceX has done a lot of tinkering along the way, I would say, and as a result of that, the application has undergone multiple changes.”
The changes not only included modifications to the vehicle design, but alterations to the test flight’s trajectory to minimize public safety risk, the FAA official said.
“So each time the application changes, we don’t have to do a complete restart, but we have to take a fresh look at different things in accordance to the regulations to ensure that we’re not missing anything,” the officials said. “So that’s really been a major factor in the amount of time that it’s taken to get this review completed.”
The FAA licensing process includes a series of reviews, including a policy review with other federal agencies, and a safety review to evaluate a launch operator’s approach to ensuring an accident would not harm the people or property owned by third parties. The FAA also requires launch companies to obtain insurance to cover third-party claims in the event of a catastrophic launch failure.
The FAA official said the agency and SpaceX had a “good dialogue” back and forth throughout the licensing process. “We’re in constant conversation with SpaceX daily.”
For the Super Heavy / Starship integrated test flight, the FAA requires SpaceX obtain an insurance policy of at least $500 million to cover claims third-party property damage caused by an in-flight failure of the rocket, and $48 million for third-party claims resulting from an anomaly during pre-flight preparations.
FAA safety inspectors will be on site at SpaceX’s launch facility, called Starbase, to ensure SpaceX is complying with federal public safety requirements.
“We carefully analyzed the public safety risks during every stage of the mission and required SpaceX to mitigate those risks,” the FAA said in a statement Friday. “In addition, the FAA will implement various airspace integration measures designed to reduce the impact of the launch on commercial airline flights and other airspace users.”
The FAA will close and reopen airspace to commercial air traffic as the rocket makes its way around the world, with aircraft exclusion zones mapped out near the Texas launch site and the impact area near Hawaii.
The FAA said the Starship vehicle and the Super Heavy booster will transmit telemetry data to the agency. “Data such as position, altitude, speed and any deviation from its expected flight path will provide the FAA situational awareness, and in combination with other information, help to reopen airspace quicker,” the agency said.
Once the rocket is proven, SpaceX wants to use the Starship vehicle to deploy the company’s Starlink internet satellites, flying heavier, next-generation versions of the broadband relay stations than the spacecraft now being launched by the smaller Falcon 9 rocket. An animation released from SpaceX showed the company’s concept for deploying Starlink satellites from a Starship vehicle in orbit, using a mechanism that works like a giant Pez dispenser.
SpaceX has also won a $2.9 billion contract with NASA to develop the Starship into a human-rated lander for the agency’s Artemis moon missions. A moon derivative of the Starship, assisted by Starship refueling tankers, will be utilized for a lunar landing with astronauts, an event NASA says could happen no earlier than 2025. SpaceX also has a deal with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to send a team of private citizens around the moon on a Starship flight.
Flights of the Starship beyond low Earth orbit will require the still-untested in-orbit refueling capability SpaceX is developing for the new-generation rocket.
There is no operational payload on the Starship’s first space mission set for next week. The rocket will not achieve orbit, and the vehicle’s payload bay door has been welded shut.
Quelle: SN
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Update: 15:30 MESZ
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