Starship Upgrades REVEALED! Major Upgrades Incoming.

even more new information about starship's next steps have been shared by spacex's CEO Elon Musk and they all lead to the same conclusion the Starship you can see right now could look much different in the future each upgrade has the potential to send the program Down A New Path so let's try and make sense of it all [Music] [Applause] egon's many recent comments about Starship on Twitter all have a common denominator Starship is going to be continually upgraded at some point the general rule is we don't really know when these upgrades will come online but judging by his comments it seems they might be close so what are those comments you may ask well just a few weeks ago Elon mentioned in a Twitter space that Starship would feature hot staging and more recently that this hot staging would feature the three innermost engines on the booster running at 50 thrust while it occurs just a few days ago he also hinted at adding an extra three Raptor vacuum engines or artifacts on Starship for a total of 42 on the full stack you know that number from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy then he went on to say that by upgrading Raptor's thrust by 20 they could get a total liftoff thrust of 9 000 tons and therefore deliver 200 tons to a quote useful orbit according to him this will allow SpaceX to put one Mega ton of layout into orbit by flying 50 Rockets every three days or in support of colonizing Mars quite an ambitious goal so what does all of this mean let's start with hot staging the term is very self-explanatory it means that the engines on the upper stage in our case Starship start while it is still attached to the lower stage in our case super heavy in most cases this also occurs when the lower stage engines are still running either fully or partially this means the lower stage gets blasted with the exhaust of the upper stage engines hence it being called hot staging we can see this kind of staging on other Rockets such as soyuz or proton and as many have pointed out on Twitter the Soviets failed Moon rocket the N1 as well according to Elon this change will be introduced on the next flight with booster 9 and ship 25. the top of the booster will gain a structure that will let the exhaust from the engine's Escape we're adding an extension to the booster is almost all vent essentially so that allows the the upstage engine room to go through the the sort of evented extension of the booster and not just blow itself up the top of the booster will also receive shielding to protect it from the ship engine exhaust after all super heavy needs to be rapidly reused unlike soyuz or proton with hot staging Egon claims Starship can gain a 10 payload upgrade let's say in this case roughly 10 Improvement in paler drill bit if you if you basically just never stop thrusting this claim has made some people in the community somewhat skeptical how is it possible that this single change can increase the payload capacity to orbit by 10 percent that's pretty much an increase of one whole Falcon 9. there are multiple possibilities perhaps the previous method the one that would have had the entire vehicle spin to separate the stages through inertia was just too inefficient one of the key characteristics of hot staging is that there is no energy loss from shutting down the engines every second that the engines are not running the rocket is just being slowed down by gravity and air resistance so it loses performance with this never stop thrusting way of flying the rocket Starship is always accelerating one way or another and therefore it can gain a substantial amount of performance you can also avoid having to re-stabilize the ship after separation which could have meant less performance with the spin staging method there's also a potential Advantage as well with the booster recovery since the booster's innermost three engines are not going to be shut down during staging just like Elon mentioned then they could be used to flip the booster and turn that into the beginning of the boosters boost back burn during the flip some or all of the other inner engines would ignite and the booster would start flying back to the launch site this could save a small amount of mass by removing one or two composite overwrapped pressure vessels or copvs from the booster these copvs are mainly used to restart the inner 13 engines of the booster however with the innermost three engines not needing to re-light for a boost back burn SpaceX could save a few tons and complexity by removing this no longer needed Hardware so what do you think is this 10 payload upgrade credible let's continue with the next upgrade putting three extra Raptor vacuum engines on the ship has been something Egon has talked about on multiple occasions you also have multiple meta prints of raptors firing over at shop.nasaspacefright.com this time he was a bit more subtle with a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quote three more engines for the meaning of life the extra three engines could allow the ship to be stretched and carry more preparing while keeping roughly the same thrust this translates into more payloads to orbit alternatively you could keep the ship the same size but extend the propellant tanks into the payload Bay and the nose cone off the ship to turn it into a tanker Starship the three extra engines would still help to increase the payload capacity to orbit but this time the payload would just be extra preparing for refueling all of this ties in with the most recent upgrades Elon has been talking about an increase to the Raptor's thrust he said that it looks like we can increase Raptor's thrust by 20 to reach 9 000 tons of force at sea level if we look at the numbers what this means is that each engine would have to produce around 272 tons of thrust this would sound unrealistic if it wasn't for the fact that SpaceX has already tested Raptor engines at similar thrust levels just two months ago Egon announced on Twitter that the company had fired what he called a raptor V3 engine that had produced 269 tons of thrust at a 350 bar chamber pressure so it seems like Elon is implying that this Raptor upgrade will be the Raptor V3 engine if SpaceX wants to keep Starship at its 1.5 thrust to weight ratio that means it can be as heavy as 6 000 tons of liftoff given it will be able to produce 9 000 tons of thrust in case you were wondering yes Egon also tweeted about this as well there are some people that are wondering how it's possible to increase the payload performance by 33 when the added propagand is less than 20 after all a common explanation for the rocket equation the one that explains finds the performance available for a rocket depending on its payload mass is that the more propellant you add the extra repellent you need in order to keep burning your engine and push that added preparance this equation correctly explains the nature of this relationship between the performance of a rocket and the mass of the propellant as an exponential relationship however it is only valid for a single stage and despite several failed attempts there are no single stage to orbit Rockets as of yet apart from Kerbal Space Program every orbital rocket built so far has relied on staging and this event pretty much resets the whole equation the booster imparts a certain impulse which in rocketry is named Delta V and then the ship imparts its own Delta V the sum of these does not equal what you would get from just considering the whole rocket as a single stage and doing the same calculation adding less than 20 percent more propellant depending on how it is shared between the booster and ship can definitely change substantially the Delta V produced by each stage and therefore its performance there are other considerations to take into account but that would be a completely different video you can dare us to make it in the comments down below going back to timelines it seems that given the fact that Raptor version 3 is now under development it might be implemented on vehicles in about a year or so similar to how it went with raptor 2. what is less clear is when we might see a ship with six arvak engines after all despite Elon talking about this for the past two years we haven't seen any ship after Dome configured in this way taking this into account this feature could still be a long way to go but we'll keep watching okay these upgrades are cool but are they really necessary at all we see your comments a lot of people wondered shouldn't SpaceX just focus on making Starship reliable in the first place we've seen the outcome of the first flight Raptors failing concrete flying everywhere the ship didn't even get to fire its own engines why are they even caring about upgrading it when it clearly isn't working at all right now well there's a Counterpoint to be made on this why wait the best moment to introduce major changes is precisely when the program is still in its prototype phase if SpaceX waited for too long any failures associated with these upgrades could occur on important flights like say customer flights or worse but regardless of what you may think whether they should wait to make these upgrades or not they're still really great upgrades and they can help a lot to spacex's Future projects so one way or another they're probably going to be developed anyways we can have a look at how Falcon 9 upgrades went to see that this is really not that different major revisions of the Falcon 9 design were introduced very early in its flight history the Falcon 9V 1.1 was introduced on the sixth Flight of the rocket and the Falcon 9V 1.2 was introduced on the 20th Flight of the rocket for reference Falcon 9 is currently well past its 230th flight just like Starships changes will be useful to spacex's Future projects these changes on Falcon 9 were also useful for the projects and programs SpaceX was working on at the time Falcon 9V 1.1 allowed the company to fly more paygo to the ISS with dragon it also was able to carry a meaningful amount of payload to high energy orbits like geosynchronous transfer orbits something they couldn't do with the original Falcon 9 V 1.0 then when Falcon 9V 1.2 was introduced it allowed SpaceX to perform those high energy missions whilst also recovering the first stage of the rocket something that we've later seen as crucial to the success of Falcon 9. the development upgrades from Falcon 9V 1.0 to the Falcon 9V 1.2 block 5 the one currently flying also allowed SpaceX to learn what was necessary to human rate the rocket these upgrades often involve failures a lot of them occurred during Landing but there was also one on the launch pad and with a customer payload on board however SpaceX was able to learn from that and since then and it has flown more than 200 missions with Falcon Rockets without failure so for Starship all of this is pretty much the same it is currently under contract with NASA to provide transportation of NASA astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface of the Moon this is what's normally called the Starship human Landing system or Starship HRS under this architecture the Starship has would use a Depot in low earth orbit to refuel before carrying on to Loon orbit the more payload Starship can carry into orbit the more propellant the tankers will be able to carry to the Starship Depot to later fill up hls this would in turn reduce the number of launches needed and therefore risk time and cost also if you can put more payload into orbit per launch you can also get more payload to Mars more quickly and more affordably this is arguably spacex's major goal after all you shouldn't be surprised about the nature of these upgrades either for Falcon 9 the rocket stages were stretched and the Merlin engine was upgraded multiple times doing so with Starship just feels like a natural continuation of what SpaceX does what's clear is that Starship is still an ever-evolving rocket with multiple design upgrades soon to be debuted and that will make these flights even more exciting to watch whatever SpaceX plans for in the future you come back we'll be covering it here all as it happens thanks for watching and goodbye

Channel: NASASpaceflight

Views: 61,221

Keywords: SpaceX, Starship, Elon Musk, Hot Staging, Raptor Vacuum Engines, Thrust Upgrade, Payload Capacity, Booster Recovery, Mars Colonization, Space Travel, spacex news, elon musk, spacex news today, starship spacex update, spacex update, starship spacex test, spacex starship, spacex today, starship launch, starship spacex, space x, Elon Musk's Tweets, Twitter Revelations, spacex starship animation, starship launch pad, spacex orbital launch, spacex today news

Id: hukjMVIecdU

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023