Elon Musk is very close to saying, “go” for the launch of his massive Starship. This rocket and spacecraft are the billionaire’s dream of getting a lot of people and cargo to space, then to the Moon and ultimately to Mars. The first launch window is Monday morning!
The last hurdle for the SpaceX team was overcome last week when the Federal Aviation Administration issued a license for launch from the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. More on that license in a bit.
First, Musk is driven by his belief that humans need to be a multi-planetary species to, “preserve the light of consciousness.” That belief has driven him to lower the cost to get to space. That meant the development of reusable rockets. As Musk has said, “you wouldn’t throw away a jetliner after one flight,” so why throw away a rocket? SpaceX accomplished reusability with its Falcon-9 rocket. The company then strapped together three of those rockets to make the Falcon Heavy to carry even more weight to orbit.
But even after the first successful flight of the Falcon Heavy and deployment of Musk’s old Tesla Roadster on an orbit that passes by Mars, the SpaceX boss was moving onto to his massive Starship.
Starship is a two-stage vehicle. The Super-Heavy booster is the first stage that will push the Starship into orbit. SpaceX’s operational plan for the booster is that it would return to the launch site to land, actually captured by a couple robotic arms, and be readied for re-flight. Starship is the spacecraft that would carry astronauts and cargo to the Moon and beyond.
That is not what you will see on this first test launch. Instead, the booster will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico rather than return to the launch site. The Starship will not actually reach orbit either. It will be traveling fast enough to reach orbit but before getting all the way around Earth, SpaceX will bring the Starship down off the coast of Hawaii. Both stages will be lost in this near-orbit test.
Musk tweeted that there is a possibility this may not work. “Success maybe, excitement guaranteed!” The Starship testing program has seen its share of mishaps with rockets blowing up during fueling, a Starship exploding as it tried to land after a high-altitude test. SpaceX and its leader say these failures can be critical to improvement of systems.
The statistics for the rocket system are impressive. The two stages reach 400 feet into the air, about 36 stories high. The booster is powered by 33 engines. The Falcon-9 uses nine of the same type of engines. It will be the largest rocket ever developed to fly to space.
There are other firsts. This is the first launch of a massive rocket from the coast of Texas. Most launches are in Florida and California and head out over the ocean. Starship will fly over the Gulf of Mexico and some of the oil rigs that occupy it.
“If you also factor in the population centers on three sides of Boca Chica, and high value assets in the Gulf of Mexico Starship will have to carefully overfly, it creates a myriad of complications with licensing,” said Eric Ingram who worked in the FAA Office of Commercial Space and is now CEO of the space company Scout.
Ingram worked on licensing when he was at the FAA. The office evaluates requests for space launches and the impact on the public and property. Operators must meet policy guidelines, provide sufficient insurance, and meet environmental considerations. There is also a national security review. Safety is the overriding factor.
Ingram points out that the vehicle and the launch site are, as a whole, “unproven,” so the FAA had quite a bit of work to do. “The fact that they were able to license the launch in general is impressive, and the fact they were able to do it in a relatively short period of time is incredible.”
Even in issuing the license an FAA official acknowledged that a mishap is a, “realistic possibility.”
NASA has a lot riding on the Starship. It selected SpaceX and the Starship to be the lander for the Artemis mission to return Americans to the Moon.
Elon Musk now has his license and his rocket ready. The question for the first launch tomorrow could be weather. Stay tuned.
You are not wrong and I should have pointed out that the Raptor 2's have significantly more thrust. I was not going to touch full-flow staged combustion.
Excellent piece. I have a hard time tolerating Musk, but it cannot be denied that his Space project is stunning in its scope and his ability to keep it advancing relatively rapidly. He clearly has assembled some of the greatest engineering minds in the world!