SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has hinted that he will continue the tradition of hosting an annual Starship update event later this year, likely presenting the progress the company has made in the past 12 months at its rocket factory. from South Texas.
Starting in Guadalajara, Mexico, at the September 2016 International Astronautics Congress (IAC), Musk has presented a detailed update on the status of SpaceX’s next-generation spacecraft launch vehicle in September or October for the past several months. four years. Formerly known as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) and Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), Starship is effectively a continuation of the unprecedented progress that SpaceX has made with Falcon 9 and heavy reuse.
SpaceX has managed to reliably reuse Falcon boosters more than 5 times and is on track to replicate that with payload fairings, but Musk has concluded that the Falcon family, despite being some of the largest operational rockets in existence. , is too small to feasibly recover and reuse the second orbital stage. With Starship, SpaceX wants to take a slightly different approach.
While it is also a two-stage rocket, Starship will have a magnitude more thrust than Falcon 9 and twice The Saturn V momentum, the largest liquid rocket ever successfully launched. More importantly, both Starship stages are designed to be easily and quickly reusable, while completely eliminating deployable payload fairings. Theoretically, once fully optimized, Starship and the Super Heavy Booster should be able to place 150 metric tons (~ 330,000 lb) of payload in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in a single launch.
Of course, that will be a huge challenge, arguably the most ambitious project in the history of commercial spaceflight, and SpaceX has a long way to go before it can get close. In addition to the great publicity and excitement it generates, offering detailed explanations of exactly how SpaceX is progressing towards those goals and how Starship’s design is evolving is probably the main reason why Musk has chosen to continue making annual presentations.
SpaceX is likely years away from routine and fully reusable Starship releases, but that doesn’t mean that Not Progress has been made. In the past ~ 10 months, SpaceX has successfully flown Starhopper at 150 meters (500 feet), destroying Starship Mk1; built, tested, and destroyed the SN1, SN3, SN4 spacecraft and four independent test tanks; and expanded its presence in South Texas from almost nothing to a large semi-permanent factory.
In addition to Starship’s production and testing, SpaceX has evolved the state-of-the-art Raptor engine from a relatively rough prototype to an engine capable of operating outside of what thermodynamics will allow. According to Musk, a vacuum-optimized variant of the existing Raptor engine may already be gearing up for its first test fires in McGregor, Texas. Meanwhile, SpaceX won its first contract with NASA’s spacecraft a few weeks ago, cementing the rocket’s ambitious stature relative to other more traditional next-generation rockets from Blue Origin and the United Launch Alliance (ULA).
All in all, there is an extraordinary amount of tangible progress for the Starship update that Musk says is slated for September. Hopefully, the 2020 presentation will line up with the Starship test program, just like the 2019 event with Starhopper, just a few months after ambitious flight tests.
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