Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd,
the Everyday Astronaut. As most of you probably know we're
witnessing the biggest, most powerful, most ambitious rocket ever built
come to life before our eyes. Yes, of course. We're talking
about SpaceX's Starship. This thing is the ultimate
challenge in aerospace engineering. It's a fully and rapidly reusable, super heavy lift launch vehicle
capable of taking around 150 metric tons to lower earth orbit. And yes, that is more payload than the Saturn V. And don't forget it does that
while being fully reusable, but Starship's ultimate purpose goes
way beyond just terrestrial orbital ambitions. Starship is the first vehicle really
designed to actually take human beings to Mars and bring them back
again in order to achieve this absolutely bonkers goal, SpaceX has had to employ a litany of
new technologies. Use new materials, develop the most advanced rocket
engines ever made and come up with some really wild ideas that have
never really been tried before and perhaps for a good reason. So today let's go over all of these new
technologies and compare it to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy to help
point out what things are new, what things are different and what
they've learned from the Falcon family that will apply to Starship in
order to really understand just how ambitious this project is, but we're not just going to be scratching
the surface here. Oh no. In fact, we're actually going to be taking you
inside the rockets and showing you basically every single part and going
over all the systems with a fine tooth comb so that you can
learn as much as possible. So that means there's a ton to cover. And because starships evolution is
finally slowing down just a little bit, this can be your definitive
guide to Starship for now. Let's get started, Now right off the top of
here before we get started. I just wanted to quick
point out our awesome Future
Martian Society T-shirt that I'm wearing that has lots of
awesome little nods to Starship. You can find out more at
everydayastronaut.com/shop. Okay. Watching Starship come to
life. Sure is addictive. The general public has never had access
to a rocket's development like this before. I just love watching all the
updates roll in from Elon Musk's Twitter, but also from Mary and the
NASAspaceflight crew SPadre, LabPadre, RGV, Ariel, and Austin Barnard. I mean every single day, there's
some awesome content out there. I don't really seem to recall a time when
any company started building a product before they really had a factory. And then they just started building
a factory around the product. I guess Boca Chica is just kind
of backwards like that. Now, right off the top here, I want to teach you guys one thing that's
confusing Starship is the name of both the entire rocket as a whole.
And also just the upper stage. They're both Starship, but Superheavy is the first stage or the
booster of the entire Starship system. So yes, it's confusing, but you'll hear me say Starship
kind of meaning the whole system, but I might also be meaning
just the upper stage. So just listen for context. We should also point out here that
Starship is a potential fleet of different vehicles. You might want to call it
the Starship launch system or SLS. Wait, that's a thing. Generally
speaking in today's video, we'll be talking about
a generic crew version, which we often see in the renders, but there's also a cargo version with
a cargo Bay that opens its jaws like an alligator and releases
massive, massive payloads. And there'll also be a tanker variant
that only carries some additional propellant as its payload in order to
refuel other star ships already in orbit. And we may someday see one way bound
Starships that are stripped down and only made to inject payloads
to the outer solar system. And there's also going to be
that Lunar Lander version, which will only stay in space
in the earth moon system. And won't have the large
flaps or heat shields, and will also have
additional landing engines, so they don't end up kicking up
too much lunar regolith. Well, and then don't forget about
the point to point version. That might be a different
iteration. That's just for Earth, to Earth transportation. There could be just a whole new
type of vehicle called Starship. And this is literally just
the beginning of that. So all this is to say Starship is
still a bit in its development phase, but it is truly solidifying and maturing
to the point where we can actually put all of this together for you,
but do note things might change. Okay? Okay. So this is going to be a
long video and like all my long videos, here's the timestamps which we also have
in the description and the YouTube play bar is broken up as well. There's also an article version
for easy reading and searching everydayastronaut.com Before we start, we might want to lay out what's the
same between the Falcon 9 and Starship, because that might be an easier
place to start. What's the same, uh, well, they're both rockets.
Uh, we can start there. Both rockets have two stages. They both run on super chilled liquid
fuels and have a reusable first stage with legs and grid fins. They're
both made by SpaceX. They probably have virtually the
same avionics and software, I think that's about it. Oh, they also have
a, they each have a bunch of engines. There we go. But I think that,
I think that's literally it, I guess it's no wonder they stopped
calling it the BFR or big Falcon rocket because Starship really has
almost no Falcon heritage anymore. Okay. Next, Where to begin, where to
begin? Well, for starters, quite literally the heart of each rocket
is its rocket engine or in this case, rocket engines because the Falcon 9, as the name suggests uses nine Merlin
1D engines on the first stage and a single vacuum optimized Merlin
called the M-Vac on the second stage, the Merlin engines are open cycle, meaning that they have a small baby
rocket engine called a gas generator that burns just a little bit
of fuel and a dash of Lox. And then that high energy
exhaust hits a turbine. And that turbine then spins
the main propellant pumps. The exhaust from that process is simply
dumped overboard like on the sea level Merlin, but on the vacuum Merlin, they actually route that exhaust gas
back into the nozzle to help provide a layer of cooler gas to keep the
nozzle extension from melting. That's still crazy to me, but SpaceX took everything to 11
when they decided to take on the most ambitious rocket engine ever made. They developed an engine
called the Raptor engine, which is a full flow staged
combustion cycle engine. The reason it's so complicated is all of
the exhaust gas that would normally be dumped overboard after
spinning the turbine is instead
routed back into the main combustion chamber. But not only that, there's two of those little rocket
engines and two turbines and two pumps. And then both of their exhausts are
pumped into the main combustion chamber. One of those is fuel rich and the other
is oxygen rich. One little note here, if an engine is closed cycle where
that exhaust gas is routed into the combustion chamber, we will call the
gas generator a preburner instead, since it's just pre burning the
fuel or the oxidizer or both. And it's then routed straight
into the combustion chamber, despite extremely hot gaseous oxygen and
wanting to turn every bit of the engine into soup, having the fuel and the oxygen arrive
in the combustion chamber as a hot gas adds a huge boost in efficiency,
or as Elon would say. [Elon] Certainly 98 and a half, hopefully 99% of theoretical
combustion efficiency. This is so if God himself came and
knitted together, the molecules 1% better, okay. Maybe one and a half
percent better. That's all, that's very high efficiency cause
[Tim] full flow [Elon] full flow staged combustion. Exactly. This engine is so advanced that there's
only ever been two other attempts at building one ever neither of those
engines would ever leave the test stand. And fly. [Tim screaming like a child] Yes!
Oh my God! It's actually flying!!! *pants hath been pooped*. And as of the making of this video,
the Raptor has powered four short hops, despite them never exceeding 150 meters. It is the only time in history of full
flow staged combustion cycle engine has been used to perform work, but
these hops were relatively simple. Only a single engine sometimes
offset from the center of the rocket, like the prototype serial number
five and serial number six, but three engines is next for Starship
for its first true flight planning to reach 15 kilometers to practice
its crazy landing sequence. From there on out, the number of Raptors Starship will
utilize will just keep on increasing. The orbital version of Starship will
have three sea level Raptors and three large vacuum optimized Raptors, which are currently in development
and beginning their testing, which is really exciting. The Superheavy booster will end
up with over two dozen engines, eventually getting up to
over 30 engines. Probably. Now this is all because of
their relatively small size
SpaceX can squeeze tons of these Raptor engines on the
bottom of the large rocket. And don't worry Starship
shouldn't suffer from N1 syndrome. People sometimes are quick to point out
how using so many engines on the first age is dumb because the Soviet Union's
N1 moon rocket developed in the 1960s failed on all four of
its launch attempts. Well, first off, don't forget the Falcon Heavy has had
a perfect flight record and that thing uses 27 engines. So clearly the number of
engines doesn't scare SpaceX, but also the N1 failed
for many reasons. Um, all of them really having very little
to do with the actual number of engines. In fact, having multiple engines is considered
an advantage for the Falcon nine and Falcon heavy because it allows
for engine out capability. This has proven useful on two flights
where an engine has shut down on ascent, but the mission was still successful. Something that fewer engined
rockets might not be able to do. While we're talking about engines.
We should mention the fuels. Each rocket runs on the Falcon. Nine runs on a rocket grade
kerosene known as RP-1, along with liquid oxygen. The combination is often
referred to as Kerolox. Starship and its Raptor engines
run on liquid methane and liquid oxygen, otherwise
known as methalox, liquid methane burns cleaner than RP-1
leaving behind virtually no soot in the engine. It also has the
potential to be more efficient, but it is less dense than RP-1 which
leads to slightly larger tanks by volume. One of the thing unique to SpaceX is
in the constant pursuit of performance, they began utilizing super chilled
propellants on the Falcon 9 in 2015 with their first
full thrust Falcon 9. This means that they chill the RP-1 and
the liquid oxygen more than any other operational rocket. SpaceX chill their RP-1 from pretty
much ambient temperature down about 30 degrees Celsius. So it ends
up being below zero burr, but now that's not nothing compared
to the liquid oxygen SpaceX chills, the liquid oxygen all the
way down to minus 207 degrees Celsius, which is only 12
degrees away from freezing solid. Although they likely gotten too far
into super chilling propellant for the Raptor engine. It is in the works, but by default liquid methane is
very close in temperature to liquid oxygen. It's boiling point is minus 161.5 degrees Celsius, and it becomes a solid at
minus 182 degrees Celsius. So we'll likely see space X chill there
methane down closer to minus 180 degrees Celsius as the engine develops. And as they continue to squeeze
performance out of that beast. Now, if you can get to know all about the full
flow staged combustion cycle and other cycles and why they use methane, be sure and watch my video all about the
Raptor engine so you can understand the cycle better and the
trade-offs of using methane. But there's more than just a fuel and
oxidizer tank inside each stage of these rockets. And here's where the Falcon 9 is more
complex than Starship because it has three additional consumables on
board stored inside smaller tanks. Inside Each oxygen tank of the
Falcon 9 is a set of composite overwrapped pressure vessels or
COPVs that house compressed helium. And when I say compressed
helium, I mean compressed, we're talking 380 plus
bar in these bottles, they use these to maintain constant
pressure in the propellant tanks of about three to four bar. So
as the fuel drains out, they put helium in its place, which is extremely un-dense or not dense. And that ends up filling the
void and maintain sufficient pressure. And it's inert so it's not explosive. Starship might eventually do
away with these almost entirely. The likely always needs some COPVs to
store helium to spin start the Raptors, but SpaceX will be utilizing something
called autogenous pressurization of the propellant tanks.
While the engines are running, they'll be pumping some higher pressure
fuel or oxidizer back into their respective tanks to
maintain proper pressure. The space shuttle did the same
thing, but once they're in space, they're going to maintain their pressure
by allowing some of the fuel to boil off and then release any
excess pressure. And of course, temperature and pressure are directly
related due to the laws of thermodynamics. So by releasing pressure, it also helps maintain their temperature
and they can store propellant in smaller tanks, which are
inside the main tanks and these are called header tanks. Since they're going to be
inside of another tank, the propellant will receive almost
no heat from the sun and therefore it shouldn't boil off, but there's
another reason for those header tanks. They're kind of reserved tanks in a
sense, mostly for the landing phase. We'll talk about this more in a minute, but Starship will do some
pretty intense maneuvers. And if it tried to light its
engines from a partially empty tank, it would suck up air bubbles,
which would destroy the engine. So these header tanks just provide a
source of propellant that's on tap, no matter the orientation
or G load of the rocket. But one interesting thing about Starship
is its tanks will be at a higher pressure overall than the Falcon 9. They'll maintain more like five or
six bar instead of three or four. Isn't it honestly super weird to think
that when a rocket like the Falcon 9 is fully fueled up and
pressurized for flight, there's more pressure inside of that
rocket than a car tire and Starship will have almost twice as much pressure
as that when it's pressed for flight. That's honestly just crazy to me. Another thing the Falcon 9 has that
Starship won't have is ignition fluid. The Falcon 9 uses what's known as TEA-TEB
or triethylaluminum - Triethylborane, which is a pyrophoric mixture.
This means it'll instantly combust. When it comes in contact with oxygen. As SpaceX gets the pumps
spinning up on the Falcon 9, they inject TEA-TEB into the combustion
chamber to initiate combustion while they begin to dump fuel and then get
it into a stable combustion state. This is important to be able to restart
the Merlin engines with an onboard starting fluid so they can relight
some of the engines two or three times during its reentry and landing
process. Now without TEA-TEB, the engines would fail to reignite. If you look closely before
any Merlin engine ignition, you might actually catch the green
flash from the TEA-TEB. And again, just like with helium, you can't exactly refill
your TEA-TEB bottles on Mars. So for Starship and Raptor engines, they're utilizing a spark ignition. I think this is quite literally
like a giant spark plug or basically a freaking arc welder that
begins the ignition process. But there's one more propellant
SpaceX uses on the Falcon 9 and that's cold gas or compressed nitrogen,
basically just compressed air. Since nitrogen is 78%
of the air we breathe. They utilize compressed nitrogen
for the cold gas thrusters on the interstage of Falcon 9, the part
between the first and second stage, there's two packs of four little thrusters
sitting way up there on top of the booster. These are there to help it flip around
and continue to point and guide the booster as it coasts before
reentry. And just like before, there's not as much nitrogen on Mars, but even more so SpaceX doesn't want
to have to carry around a separate propellant if they don't really have to. So instead Starship will actually utilize
brand new hot gas thrusters that are powered by gaseous,
methane and gaseous oxygen. We don't really know too much
about these new thrusters, but knowing SpaceX they'll
probably be named after a bird. So all in all the different fuels,
different cycle types, different sizes, and all other considerations leads to
pretty drastic upgrades in performance for the power plant of each rocket. SpaceX's Merlin engine reaches an
impressive amount of thrust at 845 kilonewtons at sea level and
981 kilonewtons in a vacuum, but the Raptor engine is currently
in its infancy and running at around 1,650 kilonewtons at sea level and
can achieve probably somewhere around 1800 kilonewtons in a vacuum, but they've already achieved just above
2000 kilonewtons of thrust on the stand. And that will be their operating
thrust relatively soon. And there's another more
powerful variant coming. Someday there's going to be a non
deep-throttling booster variant of Raptor that'll be on the outer ring
of the booster and they're
targeting closer to 3000 kilograms of thrust at sea level and
more like 3,200 kilograms of thrust in a vacuum. Wow. I mean, after all the Merlin has had every single
last drop of performance squeezed out of it after over a decade of continuously
developing the engine and the rafter is just in its
infancy. Next up efficiency. Now this is measured in specific
impulse or ISP, the higher, the number, the better kind of like the
gas mileage or fuel efficiency of a car. The Merlin is pretty darn efficient, achieving 282 seconds of
specific impulse at sea level and 311 seconds in a vacuum. But the Raptor engine is even
more efficient currently achieving 325 seconds at sea level and close to 350 seconds in a vacuum. A lot of this performance is due to
the chamber pressure inside the main combustion chamber, the
higher the chamber pressure, the more potential the rocket has to
turn that high pressure into higher thrust and better efficiency too. The Merlin achieves 116 bar
of pressure while the Raptor is operationally at
around 275 bar currently, but it's hit 330 bar on the test stand
and it will likely reach their goal of 350 bar operationally before
too long, knowing SpaceX. But at the end of the day, there is one metric where Merlin
currently outperforms the Raptor. That's thrust to weight ratio. The Merlin will be hard to beat because
it has the highest thrust to weight ratio of any liquid
fueled rocket engine ever. The Merlin engine has a nutty thrust
to weight ratio of around 200 to one. While the Raptor currently
is around 17 to 1, but increasing to 130 to one. And again, Elan thinks they can get it
to match the Merlin someday, but perhaps one metric
that's just as important, especially when you're cramming, dozens of engines inside of a
fixed area is thrust to engine footprint ratio. You may notice that the Raptor
isn't that much wider or take up that much more space than the Merlin. And especially when you factor in
the entire footprint of the engine, notice that the Merlin has that
large gas generator exhaust just sticking way off on the side of
the engine while the Raptor almost fits inside its own footprint. This stuff matters when you're
cramming tons of engines together. So when it's all said and done the first
stage of the Falcon 9 with its nine engines achieved 7.6 mega
Newtons of thrust Falcon Heavy, which is currently the most
powerful rocket flying gets 22.8 mega Newtons. And Starship's super heavy booster
will end up with ready for this? About three times the thrust of that at 65 mega Newtons, that's likely going
to be about the minimum thrust, we'll see for an
operational orbital version, but it'll probably increase when they
start utilizing more engines or those more powerful booster variants
on the outer ring. Okay. I know what you might
be thinking right now. Why didn't they just put the Raptor
engine and test it out on the Falcon 9? Could they, uh, technically, maybe yes. And it was kind of looked at for an
upper stage variant for a Falcon Heavy, but really by the time you do that,
it wouldn't be worth it at all, If you were to put, say, just a Raptor engine as an upper
stage for Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, you'd have to redesign the whole upper
stage because now it has to handle a lot higher loads because don't forget
it's over twice as powerful. The Merlin vacuum is already too powerful
and it has to throttle way down to be able to not smash all of its things
it's trying to put up into space. And of course you couldn't put nine Raptor
engines inside the same diameter of a Falcon 9 because they
wouldn't fit. So you couldn't, you could maybe do like three or four, but now you don't have a good
way to have a landing engine. Your forces are totally different. Your bulkheads are different because
of the different densities of fuel. All of this, it would basically, it
would be a totally different rocket. And if you're building a new rocket
anyway, why not go big? Well, they did that exact same
thing with the Falcon 1. People thought it was crazy they weren't
just upgrading their Falcon 1 and flying it more and that they were
going to be jumping to the Falcon 9. But in hindsight, it's a really good thing they didn't
sink one more dollar into the Falcon 1, and it's a good thing they moved on to a
bigger and better rocket, the Falcon 9. And now space X is doing
this all over again. And if you're starting over
with a totally fresh design, you might as well go
bigger. I mean a lot bigger. Okay, next they're sizes.
Starship is massive. Like really, really big.
Now don't get me wrong. The Falcon 9 is actually
quite a decent sized rocket, and it's really hard to appreciate just
how big it actually is until you're standing underneath it. But at nine meters wide compared
to the Falcon 9 is 3.7 meters wide, the Falcon nine is narrow enough to
be transported cross country by road. But Starship, not so much. Although it does get transported by road. It only does a little tiny bit on a
completely closed off highway in Boca, Chica, Texas, the Falcon 9 stands 70 meters tall
with its first age at 45 meters tall while the second stage and the
nose cone or fairing as we call it comprise the other 25 meters,
despite being pretty tall, the entire Falcon 9 will be able
to fit inside just the Superheavy booster. The Superheavy booster
will stand over 72 meters tall, likely closer to 75 meters tall. Then put the Starship upper stage on
top of the super heavy booster and the entire stack will stand 122 meters tall. That's over 10 meters taller
than the monster Saturn V. Yep. That's right. It'll be about
as tall as a 35 story building. In fact, it'll pretty much be exactly
as tall as the tallest skyscraper-esque condominiums on nearby South Padre
Island, the Sapphire South Padre, which stands 123 meters tall. And once you put Starship up
on its massive launch mount, it will be the tallest thing for
hundreds of kilometers. Yeah. Just wait until that thing takes off. I think it's going to melt a few brains
and probably break a few windows. Couple, this massive size
with their different engines, with different performance
figures and different fuels. And what it all means is Starship
can put a lot bigger and heavier things into orbit. The Falcon nine can take 22,800
kilograms into low earth orbit when it's expended or 15,600 kilograms, when reused like it does
for the Starlink missions. It can send 8,300 kilograms on
a geostationary transfer orbit, when expended or around
7,000 kilograms. When reused. Now let's drop in Falcon Heavy, which can take between 63,800
kilograms when fully expended and about 27,500 kilograms with two cores
returning to the launch site and one core landing on the drone ship. Falcon Heavy can even get
about 25,000 kilograms to geostationary transfer
orbit one fully expended, but it still gets about 9,500 kilograms
when doing the two core on land one core and the drone ship. But Starship will be able to take
over 150,000 kilograms to low-earth orbit. Yeah, that'll be more payload mass
than any rocket ever made, even beating out the Saturn V, which could only put
145,000 kilograms into low earth orbit. Starship can also put a solid 21,000
kilograms out to a geostationary transfer orbit despite having to lug its
own huge dry mass around there. So yes, it's lower than an
expendable Falcon Heavy, which is over a hundred million dollars. But if you expended a super heavy
booster, it would easily exceed that. But expending a Superheavy is just
simply not in the plans. Don't forget. Since the whole rocket is reusable, Starship has to take its heavy flaps
landing gear, the payload fairing, and all six engines with
it everywhere it goes. So instead of here's where Starship can
make up for that with orbital refueling. If Starship is refueled
with just one tanker, it can get that GTO payload
capacity right back up to 150,000 kilograms. And
if you refuel it enough, it can actually take 150,000 kilograms
all the way to the moon or Mars. That is game-changing. Another huge upgrade for Starship
is it's massive payload Bay, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy
shared the same fairing, which is about five meters wide and
14 meters tall with a total usable volume of 145 cubic meters. Although there is an extended version
coming soon that is taller and will get the volume closer to 200 cubic meters. But Starship's payload bay
is a whopping nine meters wide and 18 meters high with
a usable volume of around a thousand cubic meters. Yep. That's more pressurized volume
than a 747 and there's an extended payload version coming
soon that's 22 meters in height. Another big difference is what
these rockets are made out of. The Falcon 9 is made out of 2219
aluminum alloy and some carbon composite while Starship is made out of stainless
steel 304L and will eventually be made out of a SpaceX in-house
developed 30X stainless steel. Now aluminum is typically
the lighter option, but only really at cryogenic temperatures. But the reason for using stainless
steel on Starship is because it not only needs to handle low
cryogenic temperatures, but it also needs to handle
re-entry heat for both stages. Falcon 9 actually has some
heat shielding on the octoweb, which is the bottom of the booster
that holds all the engines. This keeps the extreme heat of
reentry from destroying the fuselage. Because of Starship's
stainless steel construction, they're hoping to not
require any additional heat
shielding on the Superheavy booster, but the upper stage of Starship will
need to employ additional heat shielding tiles along its windward side or
its belly when it's reentering from orbital velocity. Now we'll talk about
this a little bit more in a second, but had they gone with
a, another material, it would have required even
bigger and heavier heat shielding. Originally SpaceX wanted to
use carbon fiber for Starship, but maybe one of the biggest reasons they
switched to stainless steel is so they could rapidly prototype the
vehicle. They can construct, make changes to and iterate on a
stainless steel Starship with simple construction methods and
do it really cheap too. We're not really going to get into the
philosophy of this iterative and quick design building manufacturing and
prototyping process in this video because we've covered it very much in depth
in the SLS versus Starship video already, but maybe the most unique bit of hardware
are those giant flippity flappidiy finny Airbrake things on Starship, or as I call them Elonerons. Now, yes, these are something entirely new. They're a unique control scheme that
will help the vehicle maintain control while reentering belly first. These Elonerons will basically
be powered by some Tesla electric motors with a direct drive, despite requiring insane amounts
of torque geared the right way, that's something an electric
motor has plenty of. And they'll be powered by Tesla batteries
too, or at least derived from them. And for longer missions,
Starship will have solar panels. Now we don't have too
much info on that yet, but they'll definitely work
their way into designs, but this is all just a
giant iterative phase. SpaceX is making a huge
and powerful rocket, but what's it all for
forget the size of Starship. The economics of this rocket
is probably the biggest thing. Now we're not really going to get into
this pricing too much because we've talked about that a lot in other videos, but I just wanted to talk about price
kind of generally to help put into perspective how game-changing
Starship could be. And of course, only time will tell what the true
cost of everything actually will be. Despite being able to take almost 10
times as much payload into orbit as the Falcon 9 Starship should cost
less than the Falcon 9 to launch. In fact, because it's fully reusable, it should basically only be the
cost of fuel and personnel time. But we're talking about potentially
way less than a Falcon 9. SpaceX is hoping it will cost less to
launch than their Falcon 1 even. I mean, in fact, it very well might end up being
the cheapest ride to orbit period. No matter the
payload. In other words, it could be so cheap to launch an entire
Starship that you could put, just say, a smallsat or a couple of
cubesats or something tiny on it. And it might be cheaper than launching
on say an Electron rocket or some other smallsat launcher. And that my friends is why Starship is
truly revolutionary compared to even the Falcon 9. But in order
to fulfill that goal, Starship will have to be
reusable fully and rapidly reusable. So just how
exactly can it do that? What hardware is different,
that's going to make that. Dream happen? The coolest part, or at
least my favorite part reuse. After all there's nothing more exciting
than watching a rocket land in person, falling from the sky, igniting its engines at what feels
like the last possible second and landing a precise column of
flames and Starship is going to be taking this up a notch. After all the Falcon 9 has set a
new bar in the aerospace industry by propulsively landing the first stage
and reusing it as of the making of this video, nearly half of all Falcon 9s that
have ever flown have used a booster that's flown more than once. And what SpaceX developed for the Falcon
9 and the Falcon Heavy' booster is clearly working out great. And it's actually a very similar
method they'll use for the Super Heavy boosters. So let's follow the first stages and talk
about all the systems and the hardware in play and how it all
works. Of course, at liftoff, all engines will ignite on both
rockets. As soon as the computer senses, the engines are up and running
smoothly and at full thrust, it'll command the launchpad to let go. Both rockets will ascend mostly vertically
at first to get out of the thickest parts of the atmosphere as quickly as
possible. But shortly after takeoff, they'll begin to pitch over horizontally
in the direction of their desired orbit. By stage separation they'll pretty much
be entirely horizontal giving the upper stage as much horizontal velocity
as they can possibly spare. Let's assume both first stages are going
to be heading back to the launch site. Otherwise known as return
to launch site or RTLS. The Falcon 9 only can do
this for fairly lightweight, low earth orbit missions, but Superheavy will likely always
return to the launch site like the actual launch complex, not
a separate landing complex. In order to get back to the launch site, the boosters need to cancel out their
horizontal velocity as quickly as possible because at stage separation, they're traveling at
thousands of kilometers an
hour away from the launchpad. This is called the boost back burn. The Falcon 9 lights up three
of its nine Merlin engines, but Superheavy will likely light
up all of its center engines. Not only do they need to cancel
out the horizontal velocity, they need to keep burning until they've
actually completely reversed course heading backwards from the
original velocity and make
their ballistic trajectory end up at the landing site or just short
of the landing site for safety reasons. After the engines shut down, the boosters will be coasting
back to the launch site, seeing as they're well above a
hundred kilometers at this time, they have no air resistance to slow
them down. So during this period, the cold gas thrusters on the Falcon
9 home in and precisely target the landing site using little tiny puffs of
nitrogen Starship will use its high gas thrusters for any of these maneuvers.
But the idea is basically the same small, tiny impulses can help precisely
point and guide the booster back home. During this phase, they
will deploy the grid fins, although in the vacuum of space, they
obviously don't provide any control yet. So the boosters will follow
their ballistic trajectory
and eventually they'll both begin to experience more and
of the earth atmospheric pressure. The air in front of the booster will
heat up being compressed by the leading surface, due to the laws of
thermodynamics as air is compressed, it's heated up the air in the
bow shock compresses so much. It actually turns into a plasma. This plasma can be about half as
hot as the surface of the sun. Here's where the Falcon 9 does something
that's Superheavy is hoping to avoid. The Falcon 9 will again, light up three of its nine Merlin engines
to slow itself down just as it begins to really experience those
extreme atmospheric temperatures. This not only slows the booster down, but it also basically creates a
force field in front of the booster, providing a boundary of exhaust gas,
which is a lot cooler than the plasma. Without this step, the Falcon 9 booster would likely
not survive the re-entry process. After all SpaceX tried to recover the
Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 boosters using parachutes for the first few
flights, which kept failing. By the time the booster was
supposed to deploy the parachute, it was too late because it's hard
to deploy parachutes when you're in a million flaming pieces. But
again, as we mentioned before, this is something that stainless steel
should allow the Superheavy booster to forgo, which will save fuel and
thereby increase overall performance. Because of its much higher melting point, Superheavy is hoping to just grit its
teeth through this process and survive this brutal regimen. And I
think they can do it. I mean, after all Rocket Lab's Electron rocket
has survived this portion of flight that Peter Beck is calling the wall and
that rocket is made from carbon composite. So it's definitely possible. Although comparing these two
vehicles might not be too fair. From this point on the grid
fins have more and more control. Grid fins are basically just
hundreds of small fins stacked side by side. This allows them to be
tucked out of the Airstream on a scent, and then they're deployed into
an atmospheric cheese grater. When coming back down, people often think the grid fins are just
an air break or something to help keep the center of pressure
behind the center of mass. But really they steer just like
an all moving control surface, like the stabilators on
the tail of the F-16, the entire thing rotates around a
central point to induce control. For grid fins, they can move opposite pairs in unison
to provide pitch or yaw and they can all move opposite their pair for roll. The grid fins now steer really
hard and point the boosters back towards the landing site. They can even pitch in a way that creates
lift along the booster's fuselage and help it translate even further over. I should probably point out that all of
this is guided autonomously based on GPS and altitude and all of
the other measurements that
the rocket has to try and point itself at a precise target. So it's not like someone's sitting there
steering this thing by utilizing as much of the booster as to basically
glide it also allows the air to slow it down as much as possible, which requires less fuel for the final
landing burn. Now, unlike ascent, where the air is fighting
against the rocket here, the atmosphere is
helping to remove energy. So eventually the booster will line
itself up directly overhead of the landing site at the last possible moment,
the light up their engines. And in the case of the Falcon 9, this
has to be extremely precisely timed. The nearly empty Falcon 9 booster, even when only one of its nine Merlin
engines is running at its minimum. Throttle setting still has
too much thrust to just hover. So they have to perform, what's been called a hover slam
or a less astronaut friendly term, a suicide burn. This is where you light
up your engines as late as possible. So late, you don't have a second chance. And because of the high
thrust to weight ratio, they have to reach zero
velocity right at zero altitude. Otherwise the booster will end up
going right back up. Starships, Superheavy booster on the other hand
will land using only its inner engines. These are the only engines that can
gimbal and eventually they'll be the only ones that can deep throttle, which is
necessary for soft propulsive landings. The outer ring of engines will someday
be those booster variants of Raptor that are higher thrust, but they can't deep throttle and they're
fixed in place with no ability to g imbal. Super heavy could
probably technically hover, but you really don't want to do that. After all hovering is
just 100% a waste of fuel. All the fuel spend to hover is
literally getting you nowhere. It's best to do the
burn as late as you can. And with as much acceleration as
you can, the shorter, the burn, the more efficient, but the
good news is super heavy. Has the option to do a slower,
less efficient burn, if they, for some reason want it to, from here,
the Falcon nine lowers its landing legs, which are hydraulically pushed out
and then locked into place. Superheavy will probably not have to extend its
landing legs because they'll likely be fixed. At least that's what we know
right now. Once the rockets land, they of course shut down the engines
and begin to lower the tank pressures to something safe enough
for humans to approach. For the Falcon 9 once
it's clear to proceed, a crew will actually go out there and
pick it up by two cranes and lay it flat on its side on a trailer. From here, they'll take it back to a hanger where
they'll do a bit of checkouts and refurbishment. The Merlin engines often need a good check
over and potential clean outs because of that buildup of soot. The quickest turnaround to date is
about 50 days before it can be re flown, although that time is decreasing quickly. But this will all hopefully be
unnecessary someday for Superheavy, since the plan will eventually
be to just pick it back up and put it right back on the launchpad
and thanks to reusable nature of the Raptor engine and Methalox,
this might become a reality someday, or maybe it'll be similar to kicking
the tires like a jetliner before each flight doing a simple checkout
before reflying, hopefully. Now let's look at the upper stages
of the Falcon 9 and Starship. SpaceX is already pursuing reuse
beyond the first stage by catching and reusing the nose cone or
fairings on the Falcon 9. SpaceX has even reused the same
fairing three times already. And this is great considering that
they cost several millions of dollars. It just makes sense. They're wildly coyote scheme to
catch them has been paying off. And even when they miss a catch, simply fishing them out of the
water has proven worthwhile too. But despite all of these reuse efforts, the second stage itself
is always discarded. After the Falcon 9 deploys his payload
it either does a deorbit burn and discards the upper stage in a
pre-planned exclusion zone on earth, or it kicks itself out into
what's called a graveyard orbit. But here's where SpaceX is
going absolute next level with Starship. I know I've been saying
that a lot, but this is the hard part. Despite the upper stage being a
smaller portion of the rocket, it's substantially harder, maybe even an order of magnitude harder
to recover something going at orbital velocity compared to
recovering a suborbital stage. This is the biggest paradigm shift
that Starship is hoping to achieve the hardest and most
cumbersome problem is speed. Minimum orbital velocity is
around 28,000 kilometers an hour. Yes, literally about 10
times faster than a bullet. This means things that are up in orbit
are traveling eight kilometers or five miles each and every second. So the booster imparts a decent
amount of the sideways velocity, but a booster's maximum velocity is only
about one third to one quarter of the speed that the second stage reaches.
Now you might be thinking, Oh, well, three or four times faster. Why
is that any harder to return? Especially if it's smaller. A vehicle that's going 28,000
kilometers an hour needs to slow back down to pretty much zero kilometers
an hour to not smash into the ground. So that means all of that energy
needs to be removed from the vehicle somehow. And again, just like when the
atmosphere slowed the booster down, we can now use the atmosphere to
slow the upper stage down too. The problem is the temperature of the
compressive heating in the bow shock of a vehicle doesn't increase linearly
with speed. No, it's not like you. If you go twice as fast, the
temperature gets twice as high. That'd be child's play. It's not even the heating goes up by
velocity squared. So go twice as fast. And the heating is four times
as much. No, no, no, no, no. Re-entry heating goes up
by the cube of velocity. So go twice as fast, create
eight times as much heat. Ouch. So since the upper stage is traveling
at say four times faster than the first stage as it reenters, it can experience up to
64 times as much heat. That's why recovering the upper
stage is so stinking hard. Now you might be tempted to think, well, why don't you just slow
down before you enter? And that way you could get back down to
those same velocities and temperatures as the booster. Well, in order to slow back down using your
rocket engines in the frictionless environment of space, it would require exactly as much energy
as it did to get up to that speed in the first place. So that means you'd basically have
to have as big of a rocket on orbit, capable of slowing you down as
the one that you took off with, which would of course mean that the
rocket that would launch that rocket would need to be like 10 times bigger too. So the solution that SpaceX came up
with for this problem was to use as much of Starship as possible
to slow down in the atmosphere. So they will enter the atmosphere
belly first exposing as much cross section of the vehicle
into the windstream as possible. This is why SpaceX's, Starship
will reenter more like a skydiver. And it won't go in engines first, like the Falcon 9 or at a 40 degree
angle, like the space shuttle, it'll basically be slamming on
the brakes as much as possible, although they can pitch and kind of create
some lift to manage peak temperatures in general, it has to use as much surface area to
really just distribute that heat as much as possible and slow down as much as
they can. Now, in order to do this, it needs to be able to control
and maintain stability. That's exactly what those Ilan neurons
we talked about earlier are four. They change their drag to
control pitch yaw and roll. Reentering the atmosphere allows
the vehicle to exchange all of that insane amount of kinetic
energy it has for heat. Think of the atmosphere as a giant
brake pad, which does the same thing, a brake pad exchanges kinetic
energy through heat from friction. Only in this case, it's not air
friction that causes the heat, like we mentioned before, it's compression of the air and the
bow shock that heats up the vehicle and again, this is why they
went with stainless steel, so it can survive re-entry intact. Now
SpaceX has done something brilliant here. Something that the space
shuttle did not have. They made uniform heat shield
tiles. Since, you know, the whole Starship is basically just a
giant cylinder besides the nose where it tapers and those hinges and stuff
now make for way easier checkouts, easy production and easy manufacturing. Now we don't know a ton of
specifics about the heat shield, other than they're likely to be an
in-house of a material called Tufroc, which touts higher usability by being
able to handle high peak temperatures before ablating. Now there might be some hotspots that'll
ablate a little bit each launch but because they're uniform, they should be easy to swap out and
replace when they get low. And again, it's kind of just like a brake pad. Eventually these tiles will
be mechanically mounted
and likely done so by an automated robot for quick and easy
manufacturing and replacement, and these heat shields might be one
of the only things that really ever wears down and will require
maintenance on the entire rocket, at least in a perfect world. Okay. Okay. So Starship eventually gets slowed
down 10 times faster than a bullet to a relatively slow terminal velocity of
maybe a couple hundred kilometers an hour falling straight down now,
but still belly first. And here's the thing that's
going to be truly absolutely insane to see. Starship will still need to land
using its sea level Raptor engines. And as you might recall, those engines are on the
bottom of the rocket, which at this exact moment are facing
sideways, completely horizontally. Hmm. The solution to this, a wild daring and potentially hard
to nail down belly flop to tail down maneuver. This has been over, it will make the Falcon 9's landing
look like a walk in the park. It's a maneuver that would probably
make the best stunt pilots in the world, poop their pants. The first attempts at this will look a
little bit different than the eventual system, because the cold gas thrusters on
early prototypes aren't very powerful and can't aid too much in that flip
maneuver. But for the initial prototype, the rear Elonerons will tuck
in to aid in the rotation. And the three Raptors will light up
while going horizontally. However, they'll be at maximum tilt, pitching the rockets nose up as quickly
as they can, of course, in doing so. It's going to inject a heck of
a lot of horizontal velocity. So in order to negate that and land on
their target, it's going to need to, over-correct swinging back
over to the other side, canceling out the horizontal
before straightening out
and touching down softly. And they're about to try
this for the first time. And I'm sitting here wondering what's
going to make me just lose my mind more. If they stick that landing,
I think I'll lose my mind, but also if they just belly
flop and blow up well, regardless what the outcome,
it'll be spectacular. Eventually on more production
ready and advanced versions. When they get to those hot gas thrusters, this maneuver should be able to be done
completely by the thrusters and the Elonerons. Then it'd just be
a simple hover slam landing, just like a Falcon 9. This maneuver is extremely important
because when you're trying to land a vehicle this size on
Mars, there's no runway. There's no way you can
glide and land on wheels. You have to nail this maneuver. This has to be easy peasy here on earth
and done over and over again before we put humans on it and then
send them off to Mars. Now I should probably point out here. Another thing that we get
asked about quite a bit, and that's the landing
legs on Starship for now, the landing legs are pretty small and
tucked inside the skirt of Starship prototypes, but they'll eventually
evolve and be upgraded quite a bit. After all, when it comes to
landing on the moon or Mars, you may encounter some
uneven ground or boulders. So these legs will
someday be self leveling, which although we don't have too many
details about right now is probably one of the easiest technologies on
Starship. I mean, come on. If a camper can do it,
it can't be that hard. But there's one really big technology
that will debut on Starship that will be required to get humans to Mars. And that's on orbit refueling. Remember how we talked about how Starship
didn't really necessarily have a huge payload capacity to geostationary transfer
orbit because it has to lug around all of its dry mess. Well, Starship can make up for
that by refueling in orbit. If this vehicle really is rapidly reusable
and the Superheavy booster can just land and grab a Starship tanker
and launch again on the next orbit, this could be the most
important technology. By refueling Starship on orbit, it would have an astonishing
amount of Delta V and could easily get to the moon or
Mars with fuel to spare. But something like this has
never really been demonstrated, not at this scale and not with
cryogenic propellants But luckily SpaceX has even gotten NASA invested
in this effort for now it's a $53 million contract to study
transferring cryogenic oxygen between the header tanks and the main tanks. But eventually they'll hopefully be
interested in seeing Starship to Starship refueling too. But like I said,
at the top of this episode, there are some other variants
that we might see someday, like versions that are just
completely stripped down, maybe just a single or a few vacuum
optimized Raptors capable of taking huge payloads out to
the outer solar system. That would make sense because you're
not going to be retrieving that stage. And don't forget about the lunar Lander
version of Starship that we've talked about a little bit, that too is its own stripped down
version that will never have to reenter. So they are kind of
doing that a little bit, but even that vehicle will still
need to be refueled on orbit. So all said and done Starship takes
reuse up the next level potentially to Elon's ultimate goal of a rapidly
reusable orbital rocket, as he says, often, if you designed
an expendable jetliner, you'd get left out of the room. So Starship could truly usher
in a new era of Spaceflight. Starship is simply a massively
ambitious proposition, but there's few physical barriers, which would make it impossible
other than it's never been done. And like anything that's never been
done before the unknowns are unknown. I fully expect Starship to have some
stumbling blocks along the way and learn some valuable lessons too. They'll likely be many more
explosions along the path to orbit. And even once operational, I
mean, remember the Falcon 9, hasn't always been smooth sailing either. Nothing is when you're
pushing the boundaries either, but now the Falcon 9 is one of
the most reliable and most flown rockets. What used to be an experimental
landing is now expected and almost mundane. After all Elon has said in the past
that he hopes these landings become so routine that they're boring. And although I'm personally
not quite to that point, yet it is getting close. So to summarize Starship takes everything
SpaceX learned from the Falcon 9 and upgrades it into a brand new, super heavy lift rocket that's
rapidly and fully reusable. It's going to be huge, the biggest
and most powerful rocket ever made. They're utilizing methane that
burns clean and is efficient. They developed the Raptor engine, which
is a compact and efficient workhorse. They're scaling the vehicle up to a huge
degree so they can pursue full reuse without sacrificing performance and
in fact, increasing performance. And perhaps most importantly, they're trying out new landing techniques
that despite being absolutely bunkers by design should potentially solve the
problem surviving re-entry and land propulsively on a dime. We'll see
lots of star ships, Starship, tankers, Starship, people, carriers, Starship,
lunar version, Starship, cargo versions, et cetera, et cetera. And all of this is in pursuit
of getting human beings to Mars, which when you solve that, just so happens to make rockets a whole
lot more capable and a whole lot cheaper here on earth to Starship will truly usher
in a new era and that is not hyperbole. So what do you think, do you think Starship will
live up to its ambitions? Do you think SpaceX will actually
recover and reuse the entire rocket? Or do you think plans will change? Do you think this vehicle will actually
take humans to Mars or is it all just a giant pipe dream? Let me know your thoughts or if you
have any other questions in the comments below, but the good news is if you have questions
and you want to just dive into this more, I already have a ton of videos for you
that go even deeper into a bunch of these topics. In fact, I put together
a whole Starship playlist. Now that has videos like my
interview with Elon about Starship, SLS versus Starship, the Raptor engine, why Starhip won't have an abort system? Why are they using stainless
steel instead of carbon fiber? Why Starship will belly flop and a few
others links to that playlist and each individual video is in the
description below. Now, be sure you're subscribed and stick
around because I'll be interviewing Elon Musk again here very soon. And I'm going to be sure and ask about
all the upcoming changes in case we missed anything and also kind of follow
up on some of those things that I was a little bit vague about in this video, because we just don't
have those answers yet. So fingers crossed we don't get any huge
surprises and it doesn't immediately just date this video, please.
And also in the description, you're going to see links for
Caspar Stanley's awesome work, including his awesome rocket Explorer app. You guys have to check this out, it's
available on steam or coming really soon. It's kind of in the middle
as I'm shooting this, but you can check it out is an awesome
app that shows you different rockets and all these things. His renders are amazing and you definitely
have to be following him on Twitter because he has some of
the coolest content. Another quick shout out to Erc space on
Twitter at E R C X space who provided a few of those awesome videos too. And I also thanks to Corey
at sea bass 3d productions, and that's at C underscore
bass 3d on Twitter. Definitely follow his work too. I know there's sometimes huge gaps between
my videos because I want the quality to be the best they possibly can be. And I can only do that because of
the support of my Patreon supporters. If you want to help make what
I do possible head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut, there you'll gain access
to exclusive live streams. You'll gain early access to scripts
where you can give your input or ask questions about videos before they come
out and help make these videos better. But you can also gain access to our
exclusive subreddit and our exclusive discord channel, which is just
an awesome place to hang out. We have just the that's community
full of really fun people that are, we're all done learning together
constantly. I hang out there all the time. So if you want to join
our awesome community, head over to
patreon.com/everydayastronaut, thank you. And while you're online, you definitely need to check out our
web store everydayastronaut.com/shop where you'll find shirts like this
future Martian society shirts, which has a ton of nerdy
details. Like I talked about. This shirt is just jam packed. First off the side has the gravity and
the atmospheric composition of Mars, which I figured to be, you know,
since we're talking about Starship, which is going to Mars,
definitely a fitting shirt, but there's way more to it than that, because notice it says Arcadia
Planacia in the little logo, and then it has some coordinates. Those are the exact landing coordinates
of the proposed candidate A landing site for Starship. So this way you can just show off how
nerdy you are because you're wearing a shirt that might have the first place.
Humans are going to walk on Mars, the exact coordinates already
printed out there for you, but don't forget to check out all of our
other awesome stuff like the full flow stage combustion cycle shirt and
the brand new, super awesome hoodie. We also have things like key
chains and just tons of stuff. We're constantly making
upgrades to the shop. So head on over to
everydayastronaut.com/shop.
Thanks everybody. That's going to do it
for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut bringing space
down to earth for everyday people.
I hope you guys enjoy this video. I also hope it's not immediately outdated, but we *SHOULDN'T* see too many surprises with an upcoming website update. So this is a solid overview helping to understand all the new technologies and common questions you might have about Starship, well and the Falcon 9 / Heavy too! Hope you enjoy! Thanks /r/spacex, you guys are awesome!
Oh, don’t forget, we do have an article version for you as well!
As if the content of this video isn't already satisfying enough, the video is exactly 60 minutes long
[removed]
This was an amazing Video Tim. Hopefully someday I could meet up with you and give you a handshake and tell you how much you are an important part of my life.
An important point from the video is that with SpaceX using liquid oxygen and liquid methane they have to keep the oxygen tank pressurized at all times to avoid having the liquid methane freeze solid.
The methane tank sits on top of the oxygen tank, so the two tanks will have similar temperature. Now as /u/everydayastronaut points out, the freezing point of liquid methane is -182C while the boiling point of liquid oxygen is -183C, which means you cannot have liquid oxygen without also having solid methane. Unless that is, you pressurize the tanks: this increases the boiling point of liquid oxygen a lot more than it increases the freezing point of methane such that there is a temperature range where liquid oxygen and liquid methane co-exist.
Apparently Elon's goal is a "rabidly reusable rocket"!
The link is to a section of the video with that quote :-)
I always enjoy your deep diving, long form content, u/EverydayAstronaut. You do such great work of breaking things down for the masses. I do however wish that there was more ~10-15 minute content more frequently between the long form uploads.
If my only complaint is more content from you, you must be doing something right!
Tbh, I was going to say in the comments that this is Everyday Astronaut’s video, but then I read your username. Lol
I just saw this video... Ans this is amazing ! I'm French, so I couldn't understand everything, but I think that the name of the Starship will be the famous soon. And I cross my finger to travel in the Starship one day 🤞🏻