Starship Reached Space. What Now?

On the 14th of June SpaceX’s 3rd integrated  flight test achieved something incredible, and  

I was there to witness it while helping my friend  EverydayAstronaut film the event. It reached space  

for the first time. Successfully lighting all 33  of it’s methalox engines. While also performing  

its second hotstaging separation, where the heavy  booster powers down all but 3 of its engines,  

while the six second stage light before separation  occurs. Which is a huge improvement over the last  

test launch where the booster exploded  and Starship failed to reach space due to  

a fire caused by a planned oxygen dump. This  successful maneuver allowed the second stage  

starship to soar past the Karman line, achieving  a max altitude of 234 kilometers. Just short of  

the orbit altitude of the ISS. SpaceX could  have performed a boost burn to achieve orbit,  

but with so much left to figure out, including  the out of control rolling that prevented it from  

performing a re-entry burn, SpaceX aimed  for a sub-orbital launch. This prevented  

Starship from becoming the largest piece of  space junk in the history of space flight.

Starship is massive. Standing at 121 meters tall,  it’s not just the most powerful rocket ever made,  

it's the biggest. And its powerful raptor  engines, the first full flow staged  

combustion cycles to ever fly, are capable  of pushing 150 tonnes into low earth orbit.

Instead it re-entered the atmosphere at  hypersonic speeds, providing incredible  

footage. There is no footage publicly available  of the Space Shuttle during re-entry, I know I  

looked for it for our 3 part documentary. We had  to create our own animations instead. As far as I  

can tell this is the first publicly available  high definition footage reentry plasma cloud.  

That very plasma cloud caused the Space Shuttle  to enter a communication blackout as the free  

electrons in it prevent radio communication, but  SpaceX has something the Space Shuttle didn’t,  

Starlink. Allowing it to communicate upwards,  rather than downwards through the plasma cloud.

This is all incredible. So  what now. What does this mean,  

and how does this change the  face of the space industry?

At this point, you might be overwhelmed  with the amount of new rockets. It seems  

that every divorced billionaire  is starting a rocket company,  

in the same way a divorced middle  aged man buys a Mazda Miata.

But unlike the Miata, Starship can  carry more than just 1 sad lonely  

person. Starship is capable of launching  more into orbit than anything before it,  

and with that capability comes a  whole lot of new possibilities.

Not only is the starship the  most powerful rocket ever made,  

it’s intended to be fully reusable.  With both the heavy booster and second  

stage being designed to land back on  earth to be refurbished and reused.

SpaceX have stated that the goal  of Starship is to serve as the  

primary transport method between  earth orbit, the moon and mars.

But is this truly their goal or is this simply a  

way to launch even more constellation  satellites into orbit around earth,

which is currently the largest driver of revenue  in the space industry, by a large margin.

Some points of design would suggest this ambition  is sincere. The use of methane as a fuel source is  

a huge departure from tradition in the rocket  industry. Methane sits in an awkward middle  

ground between the two most popular fuels. It  provides better performance than kerosene, but  

not as good as hydrogen. And it’s easier to store  than hydrogen, but not as easy as kerosene. Its  

benefits are only now becoming useful as SpaceX  works to unlock the magic of reusable rockets.

Methane serves as a particularly advantageous  fuel for the Starship vehicle, especially for its  

missions involving landing on Mars and returning  to Earth. Methane can be synthesized directly on  

Mars, facilitating the crucial refueling  process needed for the return journey.

The Martian atmosphere has an abundance of carbon  dioxide. Providing the key ingredient for the  

Sabatier process. An efficient method of methane  production. This chemical reaction combines carbon  

dioxide with hydrogen in the presence of a nickel  catalyst under h igh temperatures and pressures.

Carbon dioxide has the highest freezing point of  any gas in the Martian atmosphere. This allows us  

to extract carbon dioxide from the air by simply  cooling the air. In a process that is essentially  

the opposite of distillation. This also condenses  the carbon dioxide in a liquid at the same time.

The hydrogen used in the process is a  largest issue, which will require water  

deposits on mars to be found and mined.  These are obviously long term goals,  

but methane provides a more immediate benefit  in SpaceX’s ambitions for reusability.

The Raptor engines of the Starship  are the first liquid rocket engines  

to utilize a full-flow combustion cycle  in flight. The F1 engines used in the  

Apollo missions were powered by an  open cycle. So what does this mean?

Liquid propellants need to be  pumped at very high pressures  

to provide the thrusts necessary for  launch. This requires a lot of power.

In the Saturn V, a portion of the fuel and  oxidizer was redirected to burn through a turbine.  

This turbine then drove pumps that significantly  increased the pressure of the liquids.

The heat of combustion could easily melt these  turbines, and thus, to lower the temperatures  

involved, the fuel mixture is kept fuel  rich. Resulting in cooler combustion.

Fuel-rich mixtures however burn with A LOT of  soot. The dark cloud here above the Merlin’s  

engine nozzle is the sooty pre-burner turbine  exhaust. This exhaust does not contribute to  

thrust and is just thrown overboard. This is what  an open cycle is, and it’s a little wasteful.

The Raptor engines are closed  cycle. They don’t waste any fuel,  

but there are two large problems to overcome.  The heat of combustion melting the turbines and  

the potential of soot from unburnt  fuel clogging complex mechanisms.

These are critical concerns  for single use engines,  

but the Raptor engine needs to perform  reliably time after time after time.

Methane helps solve one of these problems.  Methane consists of a single carbon molecule,  

reducing the potential formation of  long carbon chain soot particles.

The Raptor engine runs ALL of its  fuel and oxidizer through pre-burners.

With the fuel turbopump running a  fuel rich mixture and the liquid  

oxygen turbopump running an oxygen rich mixture.

The excess fuel and oxygen from  either side then combine in the  

combustion chamber in their gaseous  state where combustion is completed.

However, that oxygen rich mixture in the  preburner could easily cause elevated combustion  

temperatures that could destroy the liquid oxygen  turbopump. So how does SpaceX get around that?

Conventional closed cycle engines only push  a small fraction of the fuel and oxidizer  

through the turbopumps. The Raptor Engine’s  full-flow cycle passes ALL of the fuel and  

oxidizer through the turbopumps. This amount of  mass flow means the temperature rise required  

to run the turbine is much lower. Reducing  the thermal loads on the turbine blades.

However, the oxygen-rich hot gas coming  out of the pre burner still needs special  

attention. SN8 showed what happens when  oxygen-rich gasses are allowed to interact  

with reactive materials. During its flight,  decreasing head pressure in the fuel tank  

shifted the combustion to an oxygen-rich  environment that reacted with copper,  

melting the engine. Flashy green copper  flames preceded the ship engulfed in flames.

SpaceX is casting its Raptor parts in  a specially developed Inconel alloy,  

a highly oxidation and heat resistant  nickel-chromium alloy to help combat this problem

These engines have proven their ability to  push this absolutely mammoth rocket to orbit,  

but there is plenty left to do  to fulfill SpaceX’s grand vision.

The gigantic booster still needs to land. The  super heavy booster of IFT-3 lit it’s engines  

for Starships first ever landing burn,  but it experienced a rapid unscheduled  

disassembly at 462 meters in altitude.  During its initial supersonic descent,  

things seemed pretty stable, but then as it relit  its engines while it flew by this altocumulus  

cloud layer, it appeared to be hit by some heavy  wind shear and was knocked out of stable flight.

The grid fins can be seen frantically trying to  

return to a stable position before  exploding at 462 meters in altitude.

Wind shear is to be expected, but it  appears the booster was traveling faster  

than planned and stability and control  is affected massively by velocity. With  

IFT-4 space X will likely work  to decrease velocity quicker.

However, unlike their Falcon counterparts, the  starships' heavy boosters will not have landing  

legs. Space x is instead planning to catch the  booster with mechanical arms, flying back to the  

launch pad that it originally launched from.  This removes the need for heavy landing legs,  

but also reduces the likelihood of the powerful  raptor engines destroying the landing pad on  

landing. Landing where it took off also has other  benefits. With all the necessary infrastructure to  

refuel and relaunch nearby, the turnaround  time for another launch could be reduced.

The next challenge in fulfilling  SpaceX’s ambition is developing  

full reusability for the second stage.  The second stage has 6 raptor engines,  

with three of them being adapted for use in  a vacuum with much larger engine nozzles.

These engines successfully boosted the second  stage to space, but could not relit because  

the second stage began to roll. If we stabilize  the footage of re-entry we really get a sense  

of how much it was rolling out of control,  and once it rolled onto its side it began  

to tumble end over end too, but despite  that it survived a surprisingly long time.

The bulk of starship’s thermal protective  system are tiles made out of silica fibers  

with a fused silica glass coating, made  in much the same way the space shuttles  

tiles were. Although there are likely  some minor changes in the formulation.

Especially as several tiles fell off once  again. This is likely a similar issue  

that the Space Shuttle solved by gluing its  tiles to a nomex strain isolation pad first,  

allowing the metal to flex and bend beneath the  tiles without transferring that movement to the  

tiles. However Starship has one massive advantage  over the Space Shuttle. It’s made out of steel,  

not aluminium. Steel has a much higher  operating temperature than the aluminium  

airframe of the Space Shuttle, and that’s  pretty evident as the Space Shuttle survived  

a surprisingly long time while rolling  and tumbling at hypersonic speeds.

Starship also has a lower ballistic  coefficient than the Space Shuttle.  

When flying on its belly with its  fuel tanks empty it has a large  

surface and low weight that drag can act on  quickly. That’s a low ballistic coefficient.

Whereas a dense aerodynamically optimized bullet  has a very high ballistic coefficient. The space  

shuttle was a fascinating design, but much of  its aerodynamics were influenced by the Air  

Force who demanded that it could fly 2000  kilometers laterally in order to return to  

its launch site after a single orbit. This  is not something the Starship will need.

I have no doubt in my mind that it can  survive re-entry if they can get these  

control issues solved, but hypersonic stability  and control is not an easy problem and we don’t  

have many ways to test solutions. This is  something SpaceX will need to iron out with  

more testing and thankfully they got some  incredible data and footage to work off of.

Once decelerated the Starship will  flip itself vertical using these  

massive forward and rear flaps  before performing a landing burn.

Once these problems are solved SpaceX could  have the most capable space launch system  

ever created on its hands and it has plans to  create multiple variants of the second stage.

It can be outfitted for crewed or  uncrewed journeys and can be adapted  

for carrying cargo or designed  specifically for lunar missions.

For missions that involve landing on  the moon or traveling in deep space,  

where atmospheric entry is not a concern, it  can be configured without fins and heat shields.

In order to transport even more cargo  deeper into space SpaceX has discussed  

plans to have one second stage variant  that is designed to act as an orbital  

propellant depot. This depot could  be filled with 9 missions to orbit,  

each carrying hundreds of tonnes of  propellant instead of their usual cargo.

However, the variant that will get the earliest  and most use is the one designed specifically to  

launch Starlink. SpaceX is gearing up to provide  larger versions of the Starlink satellites.

Up to now, all Starlink satellites have  been constrained by the capabilities of  

the Falcon system. The Starlink v1.5 satellites  are compact and weigh approximately 300 kilograms  

each.With their flat-panel design, 60  starlink satellites can fit into the  

Falcon 9’s 5.2-meter wide payload fairing,  maxing out its capacity to low earth orbit. 

SpaceX could achieve more with a larger payload  capability. In August of 2022, Starlink announced  

a partnership with T-Mobile to provide cell  network to their customers. Cell phone’s antenna  

are too weak to interact with the signals from  Starlinks current satellites. So, going forward,  

Starlink needs to provide stronger signals to  reliably provide a cell network in rural areas.

Starship will allow SpaceX to launch larger  variants of starlink with larger antenna  

providing stronger signals. Plans for gigantic  space telescopes have been proposed for the  

starship's large fairing too. The James Webb  Space Telescope’s engineering was massively  

complicated with the size constraints of the  incredibly reliable and capable Ariane 5.

Today’s test was just the first of 2024’s  and SpaceX has applied for an ambitious 9  

launches with the FAA, with each launch SpaceX  will get closer to completing their vision. A  

huge step forward in our ability to  launch massive objects into space.

There is still much to be tested and proven  but Space X is inching closer to having a  

fully reusable starship system that will  open up the doors for a new generation of  

communication satellites, and a new generation  of scientific discovery and space exploration.

Throughout this entire story I have tried  not to mention the man behind SpaceX,  

Elon Musk. That’s in part because the man has  become incredibly politically divisive. On one  

hand he’s helped develop and popularize critical  technologies that can help fight climate change,  

like electric batteries and electric vehicles.  Something people on the left largely support. On  

the other hand he’s very popular with the right  for his anti-regulation and anti-union support.

If you listen to either side you don’t  get a full picture of the news. There  

are three sides to every story. What you  think happened, what I think happened and  

what actually happened. Ideally we should all  be getting the news of all three perspectives,  

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