Elon Musk's Starship Update
Promises without details are a bad sign for SpaceX
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SpaceX is one of those companies we love to hype but that might actually go bankrupt. In terms of Elon Musk’s vision to colonize Mars and make humanity a multi-planetary species, nothing quite depends on it as much as his Starship model.
So what is Starship?
Starship is a fully-reusable and super heavy-lift launch vehicle in development by SpaceX. Both of its stages – Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft – use liquid oxygen and liquid methane as propellant.
Starship's main features are its very high payload mass capability and low potential operating cost.
You can Watch the Starship Update that went live recently here:
Musk said a Starship flight could cost less than $10 million, all in. The Starship system is composed of the Starship spacecraft itself on top of a Super Heavy booster. SpaceX is working towards making it rapidly and fully reusable so as to make launches to the Moon and to Mars feasible.
SpaceX is going big or going home. Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors, which are watching its progress with a mix of awe and horror.
Starship is monstrously big and 120 metres high.
Starship Animation
Starship is maybe our best possibility of getting to Mars before the Chinese. I think China will blow us out of the water in the end in terms of spaceship construction, because they are efficient with big projects like that. SpaceX here definitely is the first mover, well ahead of Blue Origin, that may never catch up at this point.
So how reusable is Starship? Musk said the booster will spend six minutes in the air over all, two upon ascent and four for its return trip. In the future, the system could be reused every six to eight hours for three launches a day.
Musk also talked about how in-orbit refilling — not "refueling," since the vehicle's Raptor engines use more liquid oxygen than fuel — is essential for long-duration flights.
Musk’s ambitious timeline for launching Starship, his dream rocket, out of a remote part of Texas depends right now on a pending decision from the Federal Aviation Administration that could add months or even years of delay. As usual Musk’s promises and reality on the ground, are two very different things.
“At this point, I am highly confident we will get to orbit this year,” he said in the first update in two years on the invention he acknowledged “does sound crazy.” - Elon Musk.
In its current iteration, it has 29 Raptor engines, but it could eventually have 33. Speaking of those engines, Raptor version 2 is a complete redesign of the first, costs half as much and needs fewer parts. The company is capable of manufacturing five to six a week at the moment, but it could apparently be capable of producing as many as seven by next month.
For the first time in 4.5 billion years, a creature living on Earth has the ability to do something about this threat of extinction by helping humanity to become a spacefaring species. I hope Elon Musk or the Chinese found a city on Mars soon, because it would provide us with an actual plan B.
America’s Dream of Mars Could be Fading
Elon Musk was scant on technical details about Starship at the event (a full 5 years after his stirring speech that gave us the vision for Starship initially). In December, 2021 Musk warned employees that SpaceX was at a risk of going bankrupt.
NASA and its major industry partners are simultaneously scrambling to complete their own moon vehicles though they seem to be working with outdated tech, are $Billions over budget and likely behind both SpaceX and the Chinese. It’s hard to take NASA seriously in the 2020s.
SpaceX has unquestionably come a long way since 2016, when Musk first revealed the full scope of his plans to build a launch system that could establish a self-sustaining settlement on Mars. Yet the Starship Update disappointed many, who hoped to hear more actual details. It’s clear Elon Musk has struggled to bring his dream to reality with this ambitious startup.
SpaceX will blow up these prototypes until one stays intact, until the company can confidently hurl a spaceship into orbit, loop it around Earth, and bring it back home. Until a Starship is safe for a human being, it’s still a speculative dream and an engineering problem that might be SpaceX’s mission critical do or die moment.
Aside from being able to carry hundreds of tons, the Starship could revolutionize space travel if SpaceX can truly make launches as affordable as Musk said it could. I think it’s clear that this is by far the hardest thing SpaceX has tried to do so far. The entire company really revolves around the success of Starship to keep Elon’s Mars dream alive.
SpaceX wants to launch the Starship from its Boca Chica, Texas facility called Starbase, where it's been building the rocket's prototype. It has yet to secure approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to do so.
There’s politics involved too for NASA, since if Starship succeeds, the value of the NASA launch vehicle will be seriously imperiled simply because it is not designed to fly nearly as often as Starship. The Chinese are likely already working in stealth to clone the capabilities of SpaceX in the early 2020s.
Thanks for reading!