SpaceX Plans Orbital Flight Of Starship In A few Months
Aiming for 20km flight in Oct & orbit attempt shortly thereafter. Starship update will be on Sept 28th, anniversary of SpaceX reaching orbit. Starship Mk 1 will be fully assembled by that time.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 28, 2019
We are witnessing what NASA should have been – NACA.
If Elon pulls this off a lot of congressmen and senators are going to need to light a splif on the Joe Rogan show. SLS mafia up in smoke.
Utilizing Elon math and adding the projected time frame by a factor of two we are talking about a suborbital hop before the end of December.
#ElonProveMeWrong
As bright as the Starlink birds were at night Starship should look…impressive ?
What a day that will be! Yes, the space policy “experts” will have to start noticing the Gorilla in the room once the walls start shaking. ?
The little mouse-sized mammals scurrying around the dinosaurs’ feet are rapidly evolving into King Kong (or King Elon)! Might be on the verge of a true “DC-3 of the New Space Age”!
Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!
I will be happy if it is just a Ford Tri-Motor.?
Professor: I wonder how history will regard Mr. Musk, centuries in the future. Will he be lionized, as, say, Balboa, down in Panama? Or what about shorter term: the next 50 or 100 years? I suppose tis will depend to me extent on his on-going success. But truthfully he’s already seen the Pacific Ocean (mixing my explorers, I know).
Imagining life in the future, or past, fascinates me: imagine Galileo riding shotgun, for instance, as I made my way to the beach (an activity that might require some explanation). Can one even imagine the conversation?
I frequently overlook what’s actually happening in the sciences while at the same time lamenting the century of my own birth.
Sorry for the long answer, but I am a professor ?
I think you are using the wrong examples, maybe because everyone has been conditioned to think of space flight as being about science & exploration and not as a new source of wealth for humanity.
What I expect is that Elon Musk will be seen much as we see Robert Fulton, Samuel Morse, Robert Stephenson and Thomas Edison, as someone whose inventions changed the world, opened new frontiers for economic development and as a result brought wealth and prosperity to it. Each of these individuals created technical innovations that created a cascade effect that changed the world radically forever. Elon Musk’s rockets, electric vehicles and energy inventions have the potential to change today’s world as much as the Steamship, Telegraph, Steam Railroad, Electricity, Phonograph and Movies did yesterday’s world.
Anyone with determination, courage and vision is able to sail across an ocean or scale a mountain and folks have been doing so for thousands of years leaving behind tales of adventure but little else. By contrast real genius is needed to harness the forces of nature for the benefit of humanity. The folks like Elon Musk who expand the resource base available to humanity are the real heroes of history in my opinion.
In terms of being in the wrong century, the solution is to start creating the century you want to live in. One thing that is desperately needed now that Elon Musk is providing the rockets will be the technology to actually create space settlements. Not the bulky and fantastic O’Neill type, but ones that could be built with existing technology.
A key part of that technology will be the identification and development of the techniques and plants/insects needed for both landscaping, raw materials and food. But very little work is being done in this area and none systematically.
You indicated I believe that you are in landscaping. You might start thinking of what plant/insects will be needed to supply the gardens in those dome habitats, gardens that will be essential to both the mental welling being of the inhabitants and that will supplement the agricultural systems. Then think about the place for such technologies on Earth. For example low maintenance indoor gardens for large buildings, especially ones where it is really too cold/hot to be outside.
I will give you one example of some low hanging fruit. Bees are essential to pollination of many plants, but I don’t see the domestic honey bee making it into space. Their colonies are too large requiring too large a forging area, they only pollinate a limited range of plants, because of inbreeding for honey they are very sensitive to environmental stress, and their stings make it difficult to live with in a closed environment. But there is an alternative.
The Mayan Bee has been semi-domesticated by the Mayans for only about 1500 years and is still semi-wild so it’s more genetically diverse than the honey bee. It lives in small colonies of only a couple hundred so it doesn’t need a large forging area. It is known to pollinate twice as many species as the honey bee. It’s honey is said, by those that have tasted it, (I haven’t) to be better than that of the domestic bee. And best of all, it’s in a different family being one of the stingless bees. Yes, it is unable to sting! All these make it an ideal candidate as the Bee that will accompany humanity to the stars. But its numbers in Central America are declining and only a few hundred Mayan beekeepers are left. It would be an excellent project to rescue it and adapt it first to the needs of the emerging vertical farming industry in the West and then for space settlements.
There are other examples of overlooked low hanging fruit for space settlements with near term spinoffs for the terrestrial economy.
(reading my reply, I see that I’ve gone on and on…)
Actually, I DID want a longish reply, and thanks.
This phrase caught my attention right away:
Rather than fighting over pieces of the pie, make the pie bigger.
I’ve frequently made the point that Mr. Musk’s rocket efforts involve no new tech; he’s able to look at a pile of parts that together make a very serviceable spaceship, yes. But Mr. Musk sees something else, doesn’t he?
Those of us having spent a lifetime thinking about design recognize this as something quite advanced. It is a vision that the rest of us madly seek.
Here’s where my own train of thought goes a bot off the rails here in assessing the design process of Mr. Musk, or indeed Mr. Jobs:
When I earned my degree in Landscape Architecture, the Master’s program was in fact the terminal degree; a dissertation was therefore part of the requirements. Any grad student will immediately recognize the difference between dissertation and thesis.
And I mention this because, while much is known and understood about design, and design process, much remains to be explore. Several of my compatriots recognized an opportunity when they saw it, producing fine pieces on the nature of design, and the efficacy of attempting to regularize it.
I mention this because many schools produce fine Landscape Architects (and, nowadays, PhD programs are available). After 40 years in the design business I feel qualified to assess the work produced, most of which is seemingly stellar but completely inferior whenever Mr. Musk is in the room.
What is to be made of this? Good question. I suppose that any field contains individuals able to leap over the rest of us as we comparatively plod on. But Mr. Musk is a particularly excellent, and particularly annoying (!), example.
Coming back to your point, if I may rephrase it- history is peppered with folks possessing a skewed vision: “what if we cool the fuel a few degrees?’, he likely wondered. Nothing new here, and if the engineers in the neighborhood object to my example the point is still apt. Simple, existing tech, assembled in a slightly different way, and now your pizza is extra large!
Exactly, Robert Fulton wasn’t the first to try to power a boat by steam by many years, but he was the first to make it work well enough to haul passengers and freight successfully. Similarly researchers spent years working on electric lighting and the theory was simple but only Thomas Edison was stubborn enough to make it work by doing thousands of experiments on how to make a practical light bulb. And when James Watt was asked to fix a Newcomb Steam Engine he saw a way to make it much more efficient. Elon Musk is in that category, and he may blow up a lot of rockets in the process, but in the end he will create a TSTO RLV that will open space up to settlement.
I’m sure you recall a television show from a few years ago called ‘Connections? On looking it up, the show, hosted by James Burke, now 82, started in 1978…a few years ago…
Not relate to our discussion, at least directly. But I appreciated the expanded point of view; the effort to locate an event in the stream of time. Your comment elsewhere about WWII similarly reminded me of the production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Yes, an excellent series on how both progress and innovation are linked. Dr. Steven Johnson also had a good series called along similar lines – “How We Got to Now”
https://www.imdb.com/title/…
A Starship 20 kilometer flight this year and a Starship orbital flight next year should force NASA and the government to completely revamp their space program. If sooner, so much the better!
If they pull off both by years end heads will detonate from DC to Houston. Can’t wait ?
I want heads to explode in Decatur and Huntsville AL instead… and wherever Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby is at the time.
Even though his dates are usually wildly optimistic, I admire that he’s pushing hard on timelines – something that NASA was good at in the 1960’s.
Depends upon if he can get FAA approval. Look how much trouble he had just with the Hopper test. Best to keep SpaceX grounded until NASA can get SLS caught up! :o)
All the SpaceX doubters that have been so prominent in recent years are suspiciously quiet…
They’ll just keep dragging the goalposts. They always do.
Just happened to me .. A guy said SpaceX isn’t discounting for reusablity and I pointed out the 18% discount from 62 to 50 million for a used 1st stage.. he immediately moved the goal posts and said that was not much a discount when you are talking about launching billion dollar sats.. just more BS.
True, especially as Elon Musk is not basing his price on costs, but on just being low enough to undercut the competition in true free market fashion.
SpaceX is not selling a made-to-order rocket and launch … it’s selling a service = Delivery of Customer Payload to Specified Orbit. That distinction is lost on too many.
Yes, and in the near future I expect he will expand his service based business model to include providing standardize satellites for common space activities that anyone will be able to purchase at fraction of the customize satellites available now.
I’m not. He’s been setting ambitious dates since day one. Nothing wrong with that though.
Does that mean they will have a Super Heavy / BFR prototype ready? Musk has said that Starship by itself can “technically” do SSTO, but wouldn’t be reusable:
The pacing is likely the production rate of the Raptor. He will need around 40 for the Super Heavy/Starship combo for an orbital flight.
Doesn’t he means suborbital? A 100Km hop? It looks like he was talking about the fully operational one, maybe the stripped down prototype can do a suborbital, with little reentry protection required and maybe they’re willing to sacrifice one (they have two!!!) for the optics of a orbital flight in 2020, prior than SLS, or even for studying reentry aspects.
Assuming they won’t be carrying any payload on the initial Starship orbital test flights, the Super Heavy prototype could be shorter with less fuel and fewer engines than the eventual production version. Musk said in the past that they are building Starship first because it is the much harder one to do, Super Heavy should be easier. Considering how fast they have built the Starship test vehicles it probably wouldn’t take them that long to build a prototype Super Heavy.
I’m wondering, if the Starship prototype won’t be carrying any payload, and if the production Starship design could not serve as a SSTO due to insufficient margin, whether they would be able to put extra fuel and oxygen tanks in the payload bay of the prototype so that it would have enough extra fuel to break orbit, reenter, and land. It would not be useful as a cargo launching vehicle, but would be useful for testing launch and landing.
Bonus points if they put in a seat and just enough life support to give someone one heck of a fun ride. A “Roadster” version of the Starship before you come out with the practical “S” version, if you will. Triple bonus points if they can squeeze in four seats, a mating adapter, and just enough cargo room to match the Crew Dragon.
That was when Starship was said to have 1,100t of propellants. The more recent LC-39A EA showed Starship having 1,500t of propellants.
But… this is Starship Mk1. Will it have any payload interface, or payload capability at all? What about the transpiration cooling? And whatever else is needed to reuse and relaunch?
And of course, crew rating?
Patience. The first one is just the prototype. Then the satellite launcher will follow. Then he will probably do the tanker version and test orbital fueling with a satellite launcher version with many flights on it. And only then, with numerous flights as experience, he will put it all together into the deep space crew version. He is using a software approach of code, test, debug and code some more instead of the NASA approach of one test flight and then add astronauts. He wants his vehicles to be safe, robust and reliable.
Agreed. I fully expect Starship to go through several design iterations. Every iteration will provide experience and data which will help them make the next iteration even better. We saw this with Falcon 9, so Starship should be no different.
I agree. But some responses here seem to me to be expecting payload and crew to orbit soon, whereas I figure 2-3 years, optimistically.
There’s really no reason (yet) to see this as an SLS-killer.
The satellite version will be able to lift 150 ton payloads to orbit in a year or so, probably before the first SLS launch. And it will do so at a fraction of the cost of a SLS launch. Remember, Elon Musk has several thousand Starlink satellites to put into orbit.
If a version of Starship puts 150 tons of payload into orbit by the end of 2020, I shall buy you a beer.
SpaceX says commercial launches in 2021, and they were talking to at least 3 customers as of June.
20t to GEO, 100t+ to LEO, and they expect prices to drop below today’s $50m for a re-flown F9.
https://spacenews.com/space…
Transpiration cooling has been dropped, I believe.
A bit ambitious.
If you don’t set ambitious deadlines, the work being done simply expands to fill the time that’s available (people figure they have the time, so they do more analysis, do more tests, and etc.). But in the end, there really isn’t any substitute for flight testing, especially on a reusable vehicle where testing can be incremental and keep reusing the same test articles (excepting for an accident). So design a little, analyze a little, build a little, test a little, and fly a little. Don’t overdo any one step. And expect that when problems happen, you’ll have to revisit prior steps (i.e. iterative approach).
The problem with non-ambitious deadlines is that the unexpected will still happen. Then when something goes wrong, the deadline slides to the right over and over. Just look at how the SLS milestones (like first flight) keep sliding to the right. It’s amazing how many years the first flight of SLS has been sliding to the right about a year every year.
Of course.
Being the first private company to put something into orbit was ambitious.
Finding a way to descend and land on rocket power was ambitious.
Landing a first stage back at the Cape was ambitious.
Landing a first stage on a barge was ambitious.
Re-using a first stage once, then twice, was ambitious.
Ambition is a great thing.
You forget one, perhaps because it just happened Tuesday at about the same time the Starhopper was flying. Sending a supply capsule into space for the third time and successfully recovering it, was ambitious.
I think the difference between NASA and Space X; Space X actually has their people doing the job. NASA has evolved to become a contract management organization in which many; maybe most of the people in human space have never done anything but oversee contractors. In many cases the NASA people have less experience and are less knowledgeable than the contractors. The contractors’ job is to make money; make the most money they can over the longest period of time they can draw something out. Their job is not to get the job done.
I agree completely. However, don’t think that the contractors are any more knowledgeable than the NASA people. They aren’t. Its really a case of the blind leading the blind. If you wonder why NASA has not gotten anything done in the last 20 years, and at great expense, now you know.
If this pace can be continued without major RUDs, we may be able to say within a year “Game Over, Senator Shelby.”
Looks like Super Heavy/Starship might be getting a bigger sibling in a few years. But then dreamers are always looking beyond their current ventures. 🙂
https://www.businessinsider…
Elon Musk is already dreaming of a monster ‘next-generation’ Starship. If built, the rocket’s body would be wider than an NBA basketball court.
“He revealed part of his grand plan on Wednesday when a Twitter user asked about a 39-foot-wide (12 meters) version of Starship. Musk replied that a “next-gen” version of Starship would probably be double that diameter: a width of 18 meters, or nearly 60 feet.”