- April 18, 2024
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Emilio Cozzi
The SpaceX founder described innovations for the most powerful launcher ever built. Standing 150 meters tall, it will be able to launch over 200 tons into orbit at a negligible cost: $1 to $2 million, a hundred times less than a Falcon Heavy (and a thousand than a Space Launch System launch)
BY EMILIO COZZI
Elon Musk’s life, and with it ours, looks more and more like a movie script. During a speech a few days ago at Starbase, Boca Chica, in front of SpaceX employees-a speech much like a guru’s sermon-Musk returned to talk about Mars and Starship, the launch system that he says will save Humanity from a nuclear apocalypse.
He said so himself, the cosmic guru, commenting on images of Starship’s third test flight, “If this were a movie you would say ‘no way, impossible.’ But it’s real.”
The SpaceX patron never stops repeating that humankind will avoid annihilation only if it can become multiplanetary; to do so, almost obvious to reiterate, will require Starship, the only means that will be, and hopefully soon will be, available to take astronauts and astronauts to the surface of another world. Starting with the Moon, of course, but with the prospect of reaching Mars in no more than 20 years.
Meanwhile, the fate of the most powerful craft that has ever flown is to get bigger and bigger — and cheaper. Because its numbers are also impressive.
He wants to take it all, and he doesn’t hide it, Elon Musk: “If things go according to plan, this year SpaceX will probably take 90 percent of all mass into orbit; China about 6 percent, and the rest of the world about 4 percent, which is pretty crazy.
Later on, when Starship takes off, we will have more than 99 percent of all the mass in orbit.” Although a good chunk of the tonnage is and will be Starlink satellites, produced in-house by SpaceX, there is no question that the current market dominance of the Falcon9 and that in power attributable to Starship’s arrival will struggle to find rivals.
Reusing Starship by 2025
Musk celebrated the SpaceX teams working on Starship and their achievements so far, particularly the cruise phase and re-entry into the atmosphere, although not everything has gone perfectly. Starship’s fourth liftoff will come, he anticipated, “in a month or so,” meaning by May. Everything will depend on permits from the Federal Aviation Administration (Faa), which must proceed with ad hoc investigations with each launch concluded by a failure.
The news of the fourth test flight announced by Musk will be mainly “virtual.” The goal remains the completion of the suborbital trajectory to a predetermined point, that is, beyond the critical phase of atmospheric reentry, with the heat shield overheating.
Instead, the goal for the first stage, the Super Heavy, will be controlled return, a goal never achieved in previous attempts. It will be, Musk explained, to “land on a virtual tower,” because the real one, namely Mechazilla, equipped with two mechanical arms (so-called chopsticks, like Master Miyagi’s chopsticks in Karate Kid) capable of grabbing Starship and the booster, will come into play later. First for the booster, the Super Heavy, which Musk hopes to get in as early as the fifth attempt or at any rate by this year “with an 80-90 percent probability.”
The spacecraft will still have to wait: “at least two consecutive successes for a single Starship design capable of ditching at a specific point.” To get to Starship’s reusability, Musk listed next year as the goal. He then went into further anticipation: two Mechazillas at SpaceX’s Boca Chica base, where testing will continue, and twin ones at Cape Canaveral, to capture in re-entry boosters and shuttles. Other technological innovations accompanied by big numbers, particularly to give more power to a rocket that will have no comparison, not even with the Saturn V, the behemoth that first propelled Humanity to the Moon.
Citius, Altius, Fortius
A giant factory is taking shape in Brownsville, not far from Boca Chica Beach, where SpaceX, at full capacity, plans to build one hundred Starships a year. Six boosters and shuttles are planned for 2024, a number that Musk says will grow greatly as early as next year.
Starship and its gigantic first stage, however, will not always be the same. Musk showed a graphic with the technical details of the upcoming versions: Starship 2 and the Super Heavy will be 124.4 metres tall together, more than three metres taller than the current version, and will be able to carry more than 100 tonnes into orbit. Starship 3 will be a sort of mechanical volcano: the 33 Raptor 3 engines of the first stage (more powerful and less heavy than their predecessors), each capable of developing 330 tonnes of power, will develop 10,000 tonnes at take-off, to carry a system 150 metres high and more than 200 tonnes of mass into orbit (the Ship will have six Raptors for thrust in vacuum and no longer three).
Musk showed his muscles, better, the energy needed to get to the Moon – after some in-orbit refuelling to ensure full load capacity – and, ‘in the next twenty years’, to colonise Mars. It is his sermon, the homily of a visionary who, convinced of the possibility of a global nuclear catastrophe, indicates the need for mankind to become multiplanetary. A plan B is needed if we are not to remain ‘one of those one-planetary loser civilisations’. Which in Musk’s jargon means, within two decades, achieving the capacity to launch thousands of Starships in a window of a few months, every two years, a hundred people at a time, thousands of tons of materials and provisions, to populate Mars with a million colonists.
Low-cost flights to orbit
Starship’s gigantic factory will do just that, as will the Falcon9. Rockets and spaceships will be relentlessly produced to turn Mars into a new home. A purpose that, of course, does not ignore the first stage of extraterrestrial colonisation: the Moon. There Musk has said he wants to build a city. And it cannot be ruled out that the prospect could, ideally, become part of the services that will be purchased by space agencies, as is already the case with transport to the Iss, or, more recently, with the Lunar Terrain Vehicle.
Such volumes of production and reuse – Starship, along with Super Heavy, is the only vehicle designed to be entirely reusable, even several times a day, Musk swears – imply a not secondary objective: to reduce costs by a couple of orders of magnitude, according to the now-famous adage that ‘using and throwing away a rocket for each space launch is like taking a plane and throwing it away at the end of the flight to build a new one’. In essence, it is a matter of taking off, completing the mission, re-entering, refuelling and taking off again. Cutting all the construction costs of the craft.
Should they turn out to be true, the figures that SpaceX’s founder unveiled are, indeed, mind-boggling, especially for competitors: ‘the fully reusable rocket, with low-cost propellant and autonomous pressurisation, actually costs less than a small, non-reusable rocket. The Falcon1 carries about half a tonne in orbit. Starship 3 will have 400 times the payload for less than the cost of a Falcon1. Ultimately, I think we may be able to reduce the cost of flying to Earth orbit to about $2 or $3 million […] unthinkable figures.
Today, an orbital launch of a Falcon9 costs between $67 million and over $100 million. With a Falcon Heavy it goes up to 150 million. It may sound like a movie, but it is not excluded that it will come true.