Starship — The ship to sail the stars
Every species has its own characteristics, and exploring has always been one of the unique features of humankind. Going into unchartered territory, not as a necessity but rather as a luxury or a need to satisfy our curiosity. To wake up feeling the wonder of life on earth, out of all the other million planets (not stressing on the fact that it is the only one we know of life) in the observable universe.
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great- and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization all is about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than our past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” — Elon Musk, CEO and lead designer, SpaceX
Hats off to the first private space firm to send humans to space and back! Even after such a revolutionary feat, the acceleration of SpaceX’s product development and goals realization is nowhere near halting, and the next incredible development of a fully reusable rocket is only months away from undergoing a full orbital test flight — slated to happen during the first half of 2021.
The starship system is the next biggest priority of the thriving space company from June 2020. After the crew members of the dragon were safely and stupendously sent to and from the ISS, all bets on point Starship to be the next biggest impact for human civilization after the Apollo launch, which took place more than half a century ago. This vehicle could very well be the spacecraft that takes humans to Mars, or the moon, or even to the planets beyond the solar system!
Starship is the biggest hype for the space industry right now. Let’s have a look the story of Starship!
What is the starship system?
Starship is a two-stage orbit-launch vehicle that can typically be used to transport cargo, crew, and services to LEO, the moon, or Mars. Starship can also make commercial travel through space flights possible.
It is being developed by SpaceX as its to-be primary orbital vehicle and a replacement to its existing Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon capsules. Starship was originally named the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).
Towering over 120 meters in height, Starship will have a first-stage booster, named Super Heavy — 72 meters in height and 9 meters gross diameter, name justified! — and a second-stage spacecraft called the Starship which will be the long duration cargo and passenger-carrying ship of the system.
The system also boasts the presence of raptor engines — a class of gas-gas engines that uses a reusable methalox full-flow staged combustion rocket engines — which will be extremely efficient and will give the highest thrust to weight ratio in an engine of any kind ever made. There will be 6 raptor engines for the spacecraft and up to 37 of them for the booster. It will also have a deep cryo liquid oxygen tank which will store 1200 tons of liquid oxygen.
Along with its boosters and a space propellant transfer for longer duration flights, Starship is going to be a fully reusable vehicle. Starship is aspired to bring the cost of the launch down to 2 million dollars per launch! And with conditioned usage, perhaps even lesser!
How will Starship make spaceflights a regular travel methodology along with a low cost?
Elon Musk explains that similar to a commercial plane, the Starship system will have multiple copies of itself and will be fully reusable. Hence, the refurbishing costs will be very low.
There is one disadvantage of the excessive propellant necessity for the system, but methane is not much expensive on earth and can even be made on Mars through the Sabatier process!
This is still a big grey area though because a fully reusable rocket system has never been developed before. Only after perfecting the “belly-flop” maneuver and hundreds of launches with satellites, Starship is planning to take humans to space and ultimately colonize Mars. Hundreds of flights require multiple tests in the first place and this is an entirely new technological domain, so Starship commercial space travel may well be decades away for actual use.
But that is where the astonishment takes over. SpaceX has an exponential product development speed — several prototypes are being built and tested simultaneously, and the test results do look promising indeed!
Where do they build and test starship systems?
Well, Starship has only been built for now and not the whole system. The booster stage is not yet built but it is on its way to completion by October 2020.
The first Starship prototype, ‘Starhopper’, was developed during May 2019 at a southern Texan launch site and it ‘hopped’ about 20 meters up and down — landing with a single raptor engine.
From then on, progress has been underway, with the construction of subsequent prototypes whose designs have additions/modifications and which are built from different materials. Two prototypes, SN5 and SN6, completed their maiden 150-meter flights on August 4th, 2020, and September 3rd, 2020 respectively.
Prototype SN 7.1 will be completed by the third week of September while the prototypes SN8 and SN9 are in fast progress. In fact, SN8 and SN9 will be the first prototypes to have nosecone and aerostructures in their build. A super-heavy booster launch pad is also in construction at Boca Chica, Texas, and is due in October 2020.
Updates are almost non-stop for the brand new and much-awaited rocket system!
And when is it designated to launch humans?
With an 8 story-tall payload bay and 40 cabins with a maximum capacity of 4 per cabin, Starship can be loaded with 100 people, for missions to form a lunar base or to colonize Mars. Interestingly, a human mission to Mars is expected to happen during 2024 and Starship may well be in usage at that point in time. With incredible and consistent effort, let us watch the bringing forth of multi-planetary habitability!
Bibliography:
https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
Starship updates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n5qII7laYA&t=338s
https://www.spacex.com/media/making_life_multiplanetary_transcript_2017.pdf
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