The Real Reason SpaceX Developed The Starship!

the SpaceX Starship is kind of like one gigantic shining embodiment of Elon musk's entire vision for the future of SpaceX one rocket to rule them all Starship is the means to reaching elon's ultimate goal of establishing a self-sustaining human Colony on the planet Mars everything that SpaceX has done up until this point has been a build up to Starship and now that it's finally arrived Starship will be at the heart of everything that SpaceX will be doing moving forward developing a spacecraft on this scale has been an epic task and we've seen a lot of design iterations come and go over the years that finally rendered out the Starship that we know today every aspect of this rocket is intentional functional and has its own reason for being developed the way that it was thank you the goal of landing on Mars was the first and only thing that Elon Musk had on his mind when he originally founded the company SpaceX but Elon wasn't envisioning Martian cities and massive fleets of spaceships his original idea was fairly simple Elon thought that it would be really cool to land a greenhouse full of seeds on Mars that would transmit back images as the plants grew amid the backdrop of a red desert Wasteland and by showing the world this vision of sustaining life on a lifeless Alien Planet something never seen before maybe people would be inspired about the potential of human space exploration again the Mars Oasis was more about philanthropy than Science and Technology Elon wasn't thinking so much about starting his own company the idea was that if more people got excited about space then maybe that would reignite the American curiosity for exploration and help NASA to gain more funding and return to the Glory Days of the Apollo program this was 2001 and Elon had about 175 million dollars burning a hole in his pocket after selling his ownership in PayPal so he went out in search of a rocket this is where things got complicated Elon quickly discovered that even his Paypal Fortune which in 2001 was a lot of money couldn't buy him what he wanted even the cheapest U.S launch vehicle Boeing's Delta II rocket cost 65 million dollars per flight and Elon wanted to have enough cash on hand to pay for two missions just in case the first one failed so he couldn't make the budget work from there Elon ended up in Russia trying to purchase denuked intercontinental ballistic missiles but negotiations ended with the Russians spitting on elon's shoes and sending him home still with no Rockets this is the point in the timeline where SpaceX is really born Elon realized he was wrong it wasn't that people had lost interest in space exploration it was that the practice had become too difficult and just way too damn expensive in a 2014 interview at the Khan Academy Elon said I thought there wasn't enough will but there actually was plenty of will if people thought there was a way so then I decided okay well I need to work on the way let's fast forward through the first decade of SpaceX history to the real birth of the Starship in 2016 Elon unveiled to the world his solution to the problem he had discovered so many years before a way for people to finally explore outer space the interplanetary transport system looks pretty familiar right this is where you've got to give credit to the SpaceX Engineers they came pretty close to nailing it the first time around the standout feature of the its was its incredible size and power at 122 meters in height and an epic 12 meters in diameter this flying skyscraper made of carbon fiber would lift off with the power of 42 methane burning Raptor engines making a total of 13 000 metric tons of thrust and accelerating the giant rocket to seven times the speed of sound as it left Earth's atmosphere after separation the upper stage spaceship would use nine Raptor engines 6 vacuum optimized and 3C level to achieve low earth orbit with a total cargo capacity of 450 metric tons the its booster would then re-enter the atmosphere the same as a falcon 9 and perform a return to launch site with a propulsive landing from here the booster could be instantly refitted to its launch Mount topped with a new upper stage tanker ship and reflown again in orbit the tanker would then link up with the spaceship to transfer propellant it would take five trips of the tanker to fill up the spacecraft's tanks before it makes its departure for Mars landing on Mars would start with a fiery entry through the atmosphere using the spaceship's lifting body as an air brake the final de-acceleration would come from the trio of sea level Raptor engines before landing propulsively on Deployable legs while on Mars The first explorers would use in-situ resources to manage manufacture new methane Fuel and oxygen for their own return trip pulling carbon dioxide from the immersion atmosphere and extracting water from below the surface and then they simply Blast Off from Mars and return home according to SpaceX calculations they could drive the cost down exponentially by making their three major Hardware components all fully reusable with 1 000 lifetime launches of the booster 100 Missions of the tanker and 12 round trips per spaceship over an operational life of over 25 years the production of the three Hardware components would cost 560 million dollars but factoring in the Target reuse numbers propellant cost maintenance in between flights the total cost per Mars flight comes down to 62 million equaling out to a cost per ton of cargo to Mars at just one hundred and forty thousand dollars comparing to elon's 65 million dollar Greenhouse launch 15 years prior this was a total rewrite to the economy of space travel this was pure science fiction brought in to the real world now SpaceX did get it mostly right the first time around but this is not the type of company that ever settles on One Design they are constantly iterating so by 2017 there was a slightly updated rocket concept with a much more fitting title the bfr which obviously stands for big rocket but was later clarified to mean big Falcon rocket as in a bigger version of the existing Falcon 9 booster anyway in this redesign the rocket actually shrank a bit and lost some power now down to a mere 9 meters wide 106 meters tall and sporting just 31 Raptor engines the upper spaceship also had a lower engine count down to six Raptors providing a much reduced payload capacity of 150 metric tons to low earth orbit this is much closer to starship's present day form but why did Elon feel the need to scale down his giant Mars rocket basically SpaceX identified that there was not enough money to fund a dedicated interplanetary transport ship it was a super cool idea it was just lacking in practicality so by downsizing the launch system just a bit SpaceX theorized that they could use this bfr to do everything that the company needed to do from satellite launches to International Space Station resupply flights to crude missions landing on the moon and Mars and by doing so SpaceX would consolidate all of the resources that are used for Falcon 9 Falcon heavy and the Dragon capsule to be applied to this one system and this would be greatly helped out by the fact that Falcon 9 became so incredibly reliably reusable to the point where they hardly even need to build new Falcon boosters and anymore SpaceX has already stopped building new crew dragons because the existing Fleet is perfectly serviceable and reliable as is for 2018 Elon presented another redesign of the bfr this time the most significant change being to the exterior design the overall length had grown slightly back up to 118 meters tall but most obviously the spaceship now had wings the original lifting body design of the its now became a trio of gigantic fins that looked like something straight out of a comic book or a Flash Gordon film and there were even a pair of fins on the nose of the ship as well Elon stressed that these new additions did more than just look cool these were extremely functional the three rear structures would actually become fixed Landing legs with the two side fins being fitted with actuators that allow them to control the aerodynamics of the ship as it enters the atmosphere back one is just for show because the ship only belly flops through the sky and never flies horizontally so that's really just a landing leg dressed up as a fin for symmetry the two small front fins are actuated as well allowing the ship to both increase and decrease the amount of drag occurring at all four corners this way the ship can control its own descent in the same way as a skydiver uses their arms and legs to steer as they fall now let's fast forward from there to elon's 2022 presentation because this was the first update to feature a real functional gigantic rocket live and in person no renderings this time around SpaceX had actually built this thing the change in the name from bfr to Starship was twofold one the joke was the f word wasn't exactly appropriate for a legitimate spacecraft That was supposed to fly us astronauts to the moon and two just calling this a big Falcon was actually a colossal muscle understatement this was something entirely different some obvious changes had been made from the Sci-Fi cartoon images of the second bfr to the real-life Starship and super heavy booster prototype obviously the triple fin design had been sacrificed in favor of four low profile Arrow flaps two at the base of the ship and two at the nose by this point Elon had committed to a new idea for the launch tower that would add two large arm mechanisms that would work like Chopsticks to catch both stages of the rocket on their return so any ship that was only going to Earth orbit and back would not require Landing legs at all meaning that the third fin was no longer a necessary component it was also apparent just how much more shiny the real-life Starship was in comparison to its previous Concept Designs originally SpaceX had intended to make the its and bfr from a carbon composite material in order to achieve the lowest possible dry Mass for the rocket but they quickly found that there were more negatives than positives for the lightweight material it was very expensive nearly impossible to manufacture on the size and scale that Starship demanded and carbon fiber is very sensitive to heat which would require a much more robust heat shield for protection on re-entry by making Starship from solid rings of welded stainless steel SpaceX got a rocket shell that was Stronger cheaper easier to build and much more heat resistant which means that they could get away with a much lighter heat shield which in turn made the ultimate weight difference between carbon composite and stainless steel negligible and it was in this iteration that elon's gigantic rocket finally lifted off from the earth and flew it may not have reached space on the first attempt but it did put on one hell of a show to think that it took only about seven years to go from an outrageous science fiction fantasy to the largest and most powerful flying machine ever tested that's an accomplishment that SpaceX is do a lot of credit for so what was the real reason that brought them here it's a three-fold answer thing number one Elon wanted to make it possible for humans to become multi-planetary all we need is the will to explore if SpaceX can provide the way that became the its but that wasn't enough because thing number two SpaceX needed versatility there wasn't enough money in the world to justify a dedicated Earth to Mars transport ship but if SpaceX put all of their eggs in one basket and made the ultimate multitasker the one rocket that ruled them all then money would be no obstacle that became the bfr then thing number three SpaceX needed to actually make this happen in real life that meant it needed to become deeply practical and affordable and simple to manufacture and this became the Starship and SpaceX is nowhere near done with this rocket the Starship is in a constant state of development right now and more than likely that's the way that it's always going to be that's the cool thing about the future there's always an opportunity to make it better don't forget to give this video a thumbs up today if you liked it that is so important for getting our content out to more people if you enjoy the content then you'd probably also enjoy our Weekly Newsletter so sign up the link down below at theteslaspace.com a huge thank you to all of our patreon supporters who are listed on the screen now you help us make the best content we can and we really appreciate it thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: The Tesla Space

Views: 309,954

Keywords: starship, spacex, starship rocket, spacex its, spacex bfr, spacex starship, bfr rocket, its rocket, evolution of the starship, starship spacex, elon musk

Id: nPUsYjiLG_Y

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023