STARSHIP: ELON'S MEGA-ROCKET IS MEGA MOTIVATING
In the race for Multiplanetary travel between SpaceX’s Starship and Amazon's Blue Origin, who will be the father of colonizing MARS.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is changing the aerospace industry in the same way as Tesla has changed the cars industry. SpaceX’s Starship is a Mega-rocket. It’s the tallest & the most powerful super-heavy launch vehicle ever built.
Starship is Musk’s multi-billion dollar bet to carry both cargo and people to MARS. It is a giant rocket system that’s twice as powerful as the Saturn V that carried astronauts to the Moon.
Overview
Starship is 160 feet tall (without the booster) and 30 feet in diameter, with a propellant capacity of 1,200 metric tons of liquid methane {CH4} and liquid oxygen {O2}.
Payload, and crew depending on configuration, will occupy the top 3rd of the rocket, while the bottom 2-3rd will house the propellant and 6 Raptor engines, including 3 for flight and 3 for propulsion in space. At the top of the rocket there are 2 actuated (meaning you can control their movement) fins that will move to orient the rocket for re-entry and landing.
At the bottom, 2 large fins will also help produce drag, crucial for its controlled descent. Stainless steel has been used for its build and one half of its surface will be covered in glass tiles to take the brunt of the worst of the heat upon atmospheric entry.
The Starship will be mounted on top of Super-Heavy booster that will have 37 Raptor engines, however, and 6 landing legs for stability when it comes back down to be readied for re-use. It’ll be made entirely of stainless steel.
What will Starship be used for?
The Starship is being constructed for primarily 2 purposes; to enable the colonisation of MARS and to carry space payloads to ISS {International Space Station} To achieve this goal, a transport system has to be devised that reduces the costs involved by several orders of magnitude, while at the same time increasing the payload capacity in a similar manner.
With current technology at our disposal, something like the NASA SLS (still yet to fly), it would cost around $2 billion just to send 25 tons to Mars, with no method of returning this back to Earth. The Starship is intended to cost just $12 million to send 100 tons to the Martian surface, and then return back to Earth with 50 tons of payload. By using a fully reusable system that has cheap fuel, cheap launch costs, can be refuelled in orbit, and can synthesize new fuel on Mars, you totally change the way Mars exploration works.
Even if the Starship doesn’t fulfill all the requirements for Mars missions, it still represents a totally new generation of launch vehicles that redefines what can be launched into orbit and beyond.
When Will It Fly?
During the last few years, SpaceX has tested various prototypes of Starship at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The testing started in 2019 with a 39m-tall prototype called Starhopper. It flew to a height of 150m above the ground.
The first prototype Starship serial number (SN8) - flew to an altitude of 12.5km in Dec 2020. It belly-flopped back to Earth, giving the SpaceX team a valuable engineering data about the final part of the vehicle’s return from space.
However, SN8 approached the landing pad a little too fast and hard, causing it to crumple and explode. Three more test articles exploded before Starship SN15 achieved success with a soft landing in May 2021. SpaceX plans to launch Starship on Super Heavy for its first orbital test flight in 2022.
