The Future of Spaceflight: Starship

If you read the blog's title, you might have thought we were going to talk about a spacecraft from Star Wars. In reality, Starship is SpaceX's fully-reusable, two-stage, super heavy-lift launch vehicle. It will serve many purposes like space tourism, Earth to lunar transport, Mars colonization, multi-planetary transport, and intercontinental transport. All in all, Starship is the future of space exploration.

Starship Prototype at the
Boca Chica Testing Site

Starship started its development in 2005 and was codenamed (BFR). At this time, Starship was only an idea. However, in 2012, Elon Musk described what Starship would be and what it would do to the public. During this time, he referred to Starship as the "Mars Colonial Transport" (MCT). In 2014, SpaceX started to test engines for Starship. In 2018, Elon Musk showed the design of Starship to the public. After the announcement of Starship, testing occurred right away. These tests had multiple different vehicles and parts being tested. As of writing this article, the SN9 prototype is waiting at the launchpad preparing to be launched. I will go more in-depth into each prototype in a later blog and its purpose.

Size Comparison of Rockets

As mentioned earlier, Starship is a two-stage launch vehicle. The booster section of Starship is called the Super Heavy. The Super Heavy's main objective is to escape deep Earth's gravity well. It is 236 ft tall and has and is 9 ft in diameter. It has a liftoff mass of 8,110,000 lbs. At 16,000,000 pounds-force, Starship has almost twice the force that the Saturn V rockets had during the Apollo program. For more information about the Apollo program, check out my article titled "The Apollo Program And Its Importance." The Super Heavy will have a set of legs that will deploy so it can land itself. This way, production costs are low because the vehicle is reusable. The second part of Starship is called the Starship upper stage. The upper stage will function as a second stage to achieve orbital velocity. Still, it will also be used as a spacecraft. The Starship upper stage can do a variety of things, including:

• Spaceship (Will carry passengers or cargo to interplanetary destinations, to Low-Earth orbit, or Earth to Earth Spaceflight)

• Satellite delivery spacecraft (Will deliver satellites into orbit or handle the recovery of in-space spacecraft or debris)

• Tanker (Will carry fuel to deliver to other spacecraft in orbit)

• Lunar-surface-to-orbit transport (Will launch from the Moon and enter Earth's orbit before deorbiting itself)

  
  

Artists Rendering of Starship Upper Stage
Separating from the Super Heavy in LEO

Starship also has many characteristics that are unique to it, which include:

• Ability to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and land itself

• Rapid reusability

• Automated rendezvous and docking operations

• On-orbit propellant transfers

• Ability to reach the Moon and Mars

• Stainless steel structure

• Thermal protection system

• Methox (methane gas/oxygen gas) control system

• Ability to re-entering other planets' atmospheres

• Large-volume

• Flexible design

One of the coolest features that Starship has is the Starship Human Landing System (HLS). The HLS is a system contracted by NASA to help land astronauts back on the Moon during the Artemis program. I will talk about the Artemis program in a later post.

SpaceX intends to replace its Falcon 9 fleet with the Starship fleet after testing. I will talk about Starship testing and prototypes in a later blog that will be written after SpaceX's SN9 test flight, which will happen in the upcoming weeks. Elon Musk predicts that fueling Starship will cost $900,000 per flight, and the total launch costs could be as low as $2 million. Starship is one of the most innovative solutions to the problems of spaceflight. It will make history if the project succeeds. Maybe in the next 30 years, you will board Starship.

Starship Prototype SN8 Launching from Boca Chica Testing Facility on December 9, 2020

Sources:

Etherington, Darrell. “Elon Musk Says SpaceX's Starship Could Fly for as Little as $2 Million per Launch.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 6 Nov. 2019, techcrunch.com/2019/11/06/elon-musk-says-spacexs-starship-could-fly-for-as-little-as-2-million-per-launch/. 

“SpaceX Starship.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Dec. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship.