What Makes SpaceX Starship So Awesome?

For those that regularly read our blog, you know that we are big fans of human achievement and the history of technological advancement. We love to think about how skilled trades over the centuries have been crucial to the march of humanity into the future. One of the most obvious examples in today’s world is the engineering marvel that is the SpaceX Starship. Our first blog was about the use of stainless steel in the rocket, and the welders who helped make the first successful sub-orbital launch possible earlier this year. Well, if you are us and are into this sort of thing, tonight is must-see-TV, as SpaceX will be attempting yet another test launch of their Starship rocket. Before we get into tonight’s test, and what makes it special, lets go over some basics.

We Launch Rockets All The Time, What Makes This One Different?

Starship is a fully reusable spacecraft which will revolutionize space exploration and transportation by reducing the cost to orbit by a factor of 100x. Imagine if the only way to fly cargo (or humans) in a plane, was to destroy the plane after each use? If that were the case, planes would be extremely rare and only utilized by the world’s largest governments. This has been the state of human spaceflight since it’s inception….. and Starship changes all of that. When perfected, Starship will be fully re-usable, and will only need to be re-filled with fuel (liquid oxygen and liquid methane) and cargo before taking off again.

What Is Starship?

Starship is what they call a “Two-Stage” system, meaning it is two separate vehicles stacked on top of each other.  The bottom half is the first stage, which they call “Super Heavy Booster”, and this provides the thrust needed to lift the second-stage “Starship” into orbit. The whole thing when fully stacked is about 400 feet tall, that is FIFTY THREE STORIES high. (For reference, the tallest skyscraper in our home town of Akron Ohio is only 331 feet)

The fully stacked Starship is the largest flying object ever created by humans, and over 2x as powerful as the Saturn V moon rocket used during the Apollo missions. And while those Apollo missions were sending a capsule the size of a box-truck, Starship has more internal storage volume than a Boeing 747.

How Does It Work?

So this is the revolutionary part, it doesn’t “land”, it gets CAUGHT by robot arms. The idea of a rocket taking off and then returning to the ground intact isn’t new, people have tried all different methods in the past, from parachutes, to water splash downs, to gliding onto a giant runway (like the space shuttle). These worked to some degree, but incurred massive costs to refurbish and re-use, if reusability was possible at all. SpaceX perfected the vertical landing of it’s smaller cousin years ago, but the problem here is size.  The larger and heavier the rocket, the larger and heavier the  landing legs would have to be. Heavy landing legs means less storage capacity to orbit. While the engineers were trying to figure out how to resolve this issue, Elon Musk asked…… “why don’t we move that mass to the ground site? Get rid of the legs and have the tower catch it instead?” And that’s exactly what they did. The first successful catch of the Super Heavy Booster was performed last month. The idea is to do this with the upper stage of Starship as well.

So What’s Next?

As mentioned above, a successful catch of the First Stage took place last month. During these recent tests, the second stage (Starship itself) reaches orbital velocity while in space, and then descends into the Indian Ocean on the other side of the planet. While SpaceX will likely try to catch the first stage again tonight, the focus of this test is the second stage and it’s descent to the Indian Ocean. In the two previous tests, the upper stage has gotten within a few feet of it’s intended drop site. However, there have been some issues with the control flaps holding up under the extreme heat of re-entry. The telemetry and on-board cameras show that they successfully hovered at the site before dropping into the ocean, but as it has been night time at those locations, it’s been tough to verify visually. This is the reason that the next test is taking place in the evening down in Texas, so that it will be around dawn on the other side of the planet when starship arrives.

When: Launch time is approximately 6pm EST (5pm local Texas time)
Where to watch: SpaceX website, or livestream via NasaSpaceFlight or Everyday Astronaut on Youtube
What To Watch For:

• Starship to hover above the ocean’s surface before falling into the water (1 hour after launch)
• Launch without blowing up the tower
• Stage Separation (3 minutes after launch)
• Super Heavy Booster being caught by the tower (7 minutes after launch)
• Starship to re-enter the atmosphere with minimal damage (47 minutes after launch)