The SpaceX Starship: Elon Musk's Gateway to Mars

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9 meters or 30 feet taller than the saturn v the rocket that sent american astronauts the moon and the current record hold of a height once it's finished starship's massive construction will be the least of its record-setting feats with the power and thrust to carry both crews and equipment into various transfer orbits and the toughness and durability to do it over and over again starship will play an essential role in giving humanity a toe hold beyond earth elon musk first hinted at his plans for starship in 2005 at a conference for students for the exploration and development of space at the university of illinois urbana champaign this was still two weeks before the first launch of falcon 1 with falcons 5 and 9 still only in development but musk was making it clear that those were not the end of his ambitions when a student pointed out that spacex's test stand in texas was capable of handling over 16 million newtons of thrust or 3.5 million pounds five times that expected from falcon 9. musk revealed his idea for the merlin 2 rocket engine which would be a scaled-up version of the merlin engines used in the falcons series he suggested multiple merlin 2s could power his envisioned bfr rocket be standing for big are standing for rocket and f well you could figure that one out yourself at the time musk didn't seem to have it figured out much further than that who would fund the rocket and who would buy it still seems a bit up in the air but one thing was clear musk definitely had his eye on mars in 2012 spacex revealed more concrete plans in the form of the mars colony transport or mct a space flight system consisting of reusable rockets and transport vehicles to take humans to the red planet and set up a permanent colony spacex engine development team head tom mueller gave more details in 2014 by explaining that the spacecraft would use the new raptor class engines potentially even 27 of them to tank the 100 metric ton that's 220 000 pounds of crew and cargo to mars after the conceptualization of mct it went through a bit of an identity crisis first musk decided to rename it interplanetary transport system or its in 2016 because mars wasn't the only goal however later in a reddit ama he revealed he didn't really like that name either and was still using bfr internally finally musk just made bfr official albeit with a small tweak now would stand for big falcon rocket instead of the more expletive previous nickname unless you thought the f stood for falcon before it didn't it it stood for the carbon fiber rock it would be designed for both earth orbit luna and mars missions spacex began testing raptor engine burn and eventually had plans to start manufacturing the bfr in los angeles in 2018. the plan was then to transport it by barge through the panama canal to the launch site at the kennedy space center in cape canaveral florida then at the end of 2018 musk announced one more name change bfr would now be starship not only that the rocket would be stainless steel instead of carbon fiber something musk claimed would cut costs while not actually adding weight due to steel's increased strengths at cryogenic temperatures later in january of 2019 spacex decided to move manufacturing from the port of los angeles to poke chica texas where construction and testing have continued to this day [Music] starship technically refers to the upper spacecraft which sits on top of the lower super-heavy booster that holds the raptor engines that launch the vehicle into space once it reaches the needed velocity starship will detach from the super-heavy booster which will return to earth and land vertically by being caught by a giant mechanical arm making it reusable starship will then be capable of docking with tanker ships to refuel and prepare for lunar or interplanetary missions when fully stacked and fueled starship isn't just taller than the saturn v it's heavier too weighing in at around 5000 metric tons over 11 million pounds saturn 5 weighed a mere 6.2 million pounds the raptor engines themselves are constructed of sae 304l stainless steel an alloy containing large amounts of chromium and nickel they can reach internal temperatures of up to 300 bar that's roughly 4400 psi more than a hundred times the pressure in most car tires this is thanks to their groundbreaking full-flow stage combustion cycle in a traditional open cycle rocket engine turbo pumps are spun by what are basically mini rocket engines called pre-burners to keep fuel and oxygen moving into the combustion chamber this is the design used by the merlin engines on spacex's falcon rockets however since these turbo pumps must use fuel themselves they cost the engine efficiency moreover since they're made of complex mechanical parts the turbo pumps can melt meaning the fuel must be burned less than optimal temperatures by increasing the ratio to fuel rich or oxygen rich either way you'll be wasting some of your propellant to solve these problems rocket scientists came up with the closed cycle which returns the exhaust and unused propellant from the turbo pump back into the engine but this isn't as easy as it sounds it's rocket science after all if you turn the turbo pump fuel rich traditional carbon-based rock fuel produces soot in a process called coking and if you return that to the engine it's just gonna gunk it all up meanwhile if you run the turbo pump oxygen ridge the superheated oxygen will quickly corrode the metal of your engine the soviets actually conquered this problem by developing a new alloy that could withstand an oxygen-rich mixture while the americans opted to run their turbo pumps fuel rich but with a different non-carbon-based fuel hydrogen this eliminated the coking problem but demanded an elaborate sealing system for the hydrogen that requires regular maintenance and rebuilding not suitable to spacex's plans for reusability the raptor engine's full flow design basically combines the two approaches by having two turbo pumps one running fuel rich and the other running oxygen rich this doesn't just eliminate wasted propellant it also means that both the oxygen and the fuel are traveling through a turbo pump before reaching the combustion chamber allowing for better combustion and higher temperatures in the engine plus the mixture in either turbo pump is highly oxygen or fuel rich meaning they run at lower temperatures this increases their lives significantly musk has even stated he has plans to get a thousand uses out of each raptor engine although two other rockets have been designed with full flow engines neither has ever left the launch pad with the success of the raptor engines in the starhopper test vehicle it makes them the first to accomplish this spacex had to develop an entirely new steel alloy to withstand the corrosive environment in the oxygen-rich turbo pump this is called sx500 along with being oxidation resistant it can maintain pressures of up to 800 bar or 12 000 psi the equivalent of a column of water eight kilometers high as for the fuel rich turbo pump and its coking problem spacex also broke ground by deciding to use methane fuel in their raptor engines making them the first rocket engines to do so on top of allowing for the full flow design methane also burns efficiently is inexpensive and could be produced by colonists on mars to allow for refueling for return trips this makes it an ideal fuel for starship with the tin of a design a raptor engine produces around 2 million newtons of thrust or about 500 000 pounds super heavy booster will potentially have 35 of the engines to launch starship meaning a total of nearly 70 million newtons of thrust or upwards of 16 million pounds this is roughly the power generated by 170 hoover dams or double that of the saturn v rocket then when it detaches starship itself will have six of its own raptor engines to insert itself into orbit the raptor engines contribute to starship's economic viability as well long term spacex wants to manufacture the engines for about 2 million us dollars apiece and hopes to be able to reuse them 50 times before they require refurbishment for reference the merlin rockets cost about a million dollars a piece and can only be reused ten times in other words a raptor would cost about forty thousand dollars per launch versus a hundred thousand dollars for the merlin and how about the f1 rocket engine used on the saturn v rocket thirty million dollars single use still though this isn't even the economic metric musk and spacex like to use instead they prefer to look at what they call the thrust to dollar ratio basically how much power the engine is getting for the cost of manufacturing roughly a thousand dollars per kilo newton the raptor engine is said to be the thriftiest engine ever made about 10 percent less expensive than the merlin and less than a quarter of the cost of the f1 altogether musk has stated that he believes he can get the cost per launch for starship down to 2 million spacex has taken things slow with starship in order to test and ensure the feasibility of every aspect of the spacecraft's design the first step was to test the raptor engine using the star hopper module the ship whose only purpose was to test the engines launched in july 2019 and hopped about 20 meters or 65 feet into the sky it really jumped in its final test the next month reaching 150 meters as 500 feet after that spacex ran tests with several sn designated prototypes until the first full starship sn8 began testing in 2020. however this was still only the upper starship spacecraft without the super heavy booster after several unsuccessful static tests that involved damaged the launch pad sna finally took off for the first time in december 2020. it reached an altitude of 12.5 kilometers or about 8 miles then belly flopped and attempted to use its fins to land vertically but a fuel supply problem caused it to crash into the landing pad and explode sn9 suffered a similar fate in fact it wasn't until sn15 in may 2021 that the first starship prototype launched performed the same maneuvers and landed vertically successfully on the launch pad in july 2021 spacex started with the super heavy booster prototypes with super heavy bn3 performing a static test with three engines super heavy bn4 was then the first capable of attaching to a starship spacecraft eventually mated with sn20 to create ship one the first orbital test of starship is currently awaiting faa approval which they're hoping to receive at the end of february the proposed flight trajectory will see the vehicle launch from starbase in bogotica after which the super-heavy booster will detach and land in the ocean 30 kilometers or about 20 miles from the texas coast the starship spacecraft itself will continue in orbit before finally landing 100 kilometers or 60 miles south of hawaii's coast the list of proposed uses for starship seems to never stop growing at the moment the most financially viable purposes seem to be those in earth's orbit even though starship will be capable of a lot more this includes transporting gear and equipment for nasa launching military satellites and even cleaning up space debris perhaps more lucrative spacex can use starship for their own business purposes by launching styling satellites it's estimated that a single starship launch could place 400 stalling satellites in orbit versus 60 for a falcon 9. arguably cooler applications include carrying telescopes and robotic landers to the moon or the outer reaches of the solar system for example it's been proposed that starship could carry a probe to the moons of jupiter and a telescope to neptune's moon triton to study exoplanets additionally a starship would be capable of carrying heavy dribbling equipment that could be used to extract rock samples from the moon or other bodies in the solar system interestingly there are even proposals to use starship and non-space applications for instance spacex ceo gwynne shotwell has argued that the earth to earth application could be competitive with business class air travel this is the idea that a starship spacecraft could launch from one spaceport on earth with passengers and then land in another spacex claims it could fly from new york to shanghai in 39 minutes the us's military space force has also discussed using starship to transport military equipment and personnel in a similar way space tourism is of course another profitable and likely future application in september 2018 japanese billionaire yosakum mizawa announced his dear moon project in which he plans to take a crew of eight civilians in addition to himself and one or two professional astronauts on a six-day trip around the moon in 2023 using starship the civilian crew will consist of artists though as of yet no one has been confirmed of course the primary and most lofty goal for starship is human exploration of other bodies in the solar system by 2025 nasa wants to land humans on the moon again through its artemis program and it plans on doing so in starship this particular starship model will be called starship hls human landing system and is somewhat different from the standard design because it won't have to re-enter the earth's atmosphere and therefore doesn't need heat shields or the flaps used by other starships to adjust to wind force rather it's designed to transport astronauts from orbit to the practically atmosphereless lunar surface and back after launching into low earth orbit multiple starship tankers will refuel it then it will go on to meet nasa's orion spacecraft the crew will move on to starship which will transport them down to the moon for several days and then take them back up altogether nasa is paying spacex 2.89 billion dollars for starship hls however spacex and elon musk's real goal for starship is the colonization of mars to ensure the long-term survival of the human species musk has stated 2024 as the first uncrewed mission in 2026 for the first crude mission though skeptics doubt a crude mission is feasible before 2029. while the colony would obviously involve a small group of people at first mark has expressed the long-term objective of a million-person city the reusability and economic affordability of starship would be fundamental to this because musk was quoted as saying excluding organic growth if you could take a hundred people at a time you would need ten thousand trips to get to a million people but you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people in fact your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high it would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip so more like a hundred thousand trips that's a lot of ships launching repeatedly making the 80 to 150-day trip between the earth and mars so if you think you might like to retire in a martian metropolis there might just be room for you make sure you start saving though as musk has pegged starship ticket prices at two hundred thousand dollars [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 210,646

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Id: 4N-5PBg2jQg

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/HenriJayy]

Outdated-ass renders

6:10: The engines can reach internal temperatures of up to 300 bar

HAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

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No thanks.

[u/shinyhuntergabe]

I'm really not too big of a fan of his channels to be honest. The guy behind the scripts (not sure if it's him but I assume not) often make blatant errors which I notice on topics I'm not even too well read about. Though it's been quite a while since I last watched* one of his videos so this might have changed. Will give it a watch!

[u/UrbanArcologist]

infomercials + youtube had a baby

https://www.darkpatterns.org/

[u/CrossbowMarty]

Pity the animation for moon landing was some lame-ass old Artemis one and not Starship at all.

[u/holyrooster_]

This guy makes to many videos for them to be really high quality.