SpaceX isn’t racing to get its giant Starship rocket to orbit for the first time.
That landmark orbital test flight will likely involve Booster 7 and Ship 24, prototype vehicles that were stacked together last week atop the orbital launch pad at Starbase, SpaceX’s South Texas facility.
SpaceX has already performed a number of tests on Booster 7 and Ship 24, but more await the Starship duo before they can take flight — and the company plans to check the remaining boxes in a decidedly measured fashion.
“We are proceeding very carefully. If there is a RUD on the pad, Starship progress will be set back by ~6 months,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday (opens in new tab) (Oct. 16), using his preferred euphemism for an explosion. (RUD is short for “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”)
Video:SpaceX ignites multiple engines on Starship Super Heavy for 1st time
The Starship vehicle that was stacked on Oct. 11 is slated to fly the program’s first-ever orbital test flight, perhaps as early as November. (Image credit: SpaceX via Twitter)
SpaceX has already performed brief “static fire” tests with both Ship 24 and Booster 7, firing up their Raptor engines while keeping the vehicles anchored to the ground. In fact, the company has ignited all six of Ship 24’s Raptors simultaneously.
But Booster 7’s static fires have involved just a handful of the vehicle’s 33 Raptors at once. And none of its ignitions have occurred while Ship 24 sat atop it.
The coming weeks are likely to see a variety of tests that feature the full Starship stack. Fueling trials will pave the way for increasingly ambitious static fires, which will likely culminate in a full 33-engine firing of Booster 7, as NASASpaceflight.com noted (opens in new tab).
The coming orbital test flight will send Ship 24 around Earth once, wrapping up with a splashdown off the Hawaiian island of Kauai. (Booster 7 will come down shortly after liftoff, making its own waves in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast.)
Elon Musk has expressed confidence that the mission could launch as soon as next month. But SpaceX isn’t beholden to such an aggressive schedule, as Sunday’s tweet makes clear.
Though Starship is still in development, a number of customers have already signed up to use the enormous vehicle. Starship will be the first crewed lander for NASA’s Artemis program of moon exploration, for example. And the company has lined up two private Starship missions around the moon, the second of which was just announced last week.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)or onFacebook (opens in new tab).
For the first time in more than six months, SpaceX has stacked both stages of its next-generation Starship rocket, creating the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever fully assembled.
It’s not the first time. SpaceX has conducted three other ‘full-stack’ Starship demonstrations: once in August 2021 and again in February and March 2022. But earlier this year, SpaceX (or at least CEO Elon Musk) decided to give up on the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster prototypes that had supported all three of those prior tests and, at one point, been considered a candidate for the rocket’s first orbital launch attempt. Booster 4 and Ship 20 were consigned to a retirement yard by June 2022.
By then, SpaceX had already begun testing the new favorites for Starship’s orbital launch debut: Super Heavy Booster 7 (B7) and Starship 24 (S24). Almost exactly six months after the start of that busy period of testing, both prototypes recently reached the point where SpaceX was confident enough in their progress to combine the two for the most challenging phase of Starship testing yet.
After an aborted predawn attempt on October 11th, SpaceX technicians worked out some mystery kinks in crucial infrastructure located at Starship’s first (nearly) finished orbital launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas. As part of a cart-before-horse gamble made by CEO Elon Musk that has seen SpaceX entirely remove legs from all recent Starship and Super Heavy prototypes in the hope that it will one day be able to catch the building-sized rocket stages out of mid-air, the company has built a launch tower ~145 meters (~475 ft) tall and outfitted it with three giant robotic arms. Two of those arms are identical and linked together, forming a sort of claw that could one day close around hovering rockets to preclude the need for landing legs. A simpler third arm swings in and out to connect Starship’s upper stage to the launch pad’s power, propellant, and gas supplies.
The ‘chopsticks,’ as they’re known, have another even more important purpose: assembling Starship rockets at the launch pad. Thanks to their sturdy connection to a tower with a foundation sunk deep into the Boca Chica wetlands and a design that forgoes a hanging hook or jig for giant arms, they are far less sensitive to winds than the immense crane otherwise required to stack Starship on top of Super Heavy. Sitting a stone’s throw from the Gulf of Mexico, storms and high winds are not exactly uncommon.
Around sunset on October 11th, SpaceX had better luck on its third attempt and was able to move the arms into place under Ship 24. Weighing 100 tons or more (~220,000+ lb) and measuring nine meters (~30 ft) wide and ~50 meters (~165 ft) tall, the Starship was then slowly lifted about 80 meters (~250 ft) off the ground, translated over to Booster 7, and lowered on top of the 69-meter-tall (~225 ft) first stage. After about two more hours of robotically tweaking their positions, the two Starship stages were finally secured together. With the arms still attached to Ship 24, SpaceX workers were able to approach the rocket and prepare to connect the swing arm’s quick-disconnect umbilical to Starship.
Ship 24 and Booster 7 have both completed several major tests to date. (SpaceX)
Since they began qualification testing in April and May 2022, Booster 7 and Ship 24 have each completed several cryogenic proof tests, eight ‘spin-primes’ of some or all of their Raptor engines, and several static fires of those same engines. Most recently, Ship 24 ignited all six of its Raptors, but the seemingly successful September 8th test was followed by more than a month of apparent repairs. Booster 7 last completed a static fire that ignited a record seven of its 33 Raptor engines – offering an idea of how much further SpaceX still has to go to finish testing the Super Heavy.
According to CEO Elon Musk, Booster 7 and Ship 24 will attempt Starship’s first full-stack wet dress rehearsal (WDR) once all is in order. The prototypes will be simultaneously loaded with around 5000 tons (~11M lb) of liquid oxygen and methane propellant and then run through a launch countdown. Diverging just before ignition and liftoff, a WDR is meant to be more or less identical to a launch attempt.
Booster 7 now returns to high bay for robustness upgrades & booster 8 moves to pad for testing.
Next big test is probably full stack wet dress rehearsal, then 33 engine firing in a few weeks.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 19, 2022
If the wet dress rehearsal goes to plan, SpaceX will then attempt to simultaneously ignite all 33 of the Raptor engines installed on Super Heavy B7, almost certainly making it the most powerful liquid rocket ever tested. Even if all 33 engines never reach more than 60% of their maximum thrust of 230 tons (~510,000 lbf), they will likely break the Soviet N-1 rocket’s record of 4500 tons of thrust (~10M lbf) at sea level. It would also be the most rocket engines ever simultaneously ignited on one vehicle. SpaceX will be pushing the envelope by several measures, and success is far from guaranteed.
It’s unclear if SpaceX will immediately attempt a full wet dress rehearsal or 33-engine static fire. Based on the history of Ship 24 and Booster 7 testing, it would be a departure from the norm if the company doesn’t slowly build up to both major milestones with smaller tests in the interim. At minimum, assuming WDR testing is completed without major issue, SpaceX will likely attempt at least one or more interim static fires with fewer than 33 engines before attempting the first full test.
If both milestones (a full WDR and 33-engine static fire) are completed without significant issue, there’s a chance that SpaceX could move directly into preparations for Starship’s first orbital launch attempt without unstacking the rocket. In the likelier scenario that some issues arise and some repairs are required, the path will be more circuitous but should still end in an orbital launch attempt late this year or early next.
SpaceX’s Super Heavy Booster 7 recently completed a 7 engine static fire test at Starbase.Photo: SpaceX
SpaceX is moving ahead with plans to upgrade a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which will serve as a backup to the Kennedy Space Center pad the company currently uses to launch cargo and crews to space.
During a press briefing last week, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president for build and flight reliability, said that the company is preparing for the upgrades needed for Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) to prepare it for upcoming cargo and crew launches, Space News reported. SpaceX is currently under a commercial crew contract with NASA to shuttle crew and cargo to the International Space Station with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.
“We’ve already started the work to begin the preparations for pad 40. We’ve ordered some hardware, put some contracts into place,” Gerstenmaier said during the briefing. At first, the company will only launch cargo missions from SLC-40, but it plans to add crew missions later. “It gives us some flexibility to move some things off 39A, which helps us balance launches off both pads,” Gerstenmaier added.
SLC-40 has been under lease to SpaceX from the United States Air Force since 2007; the Air Force previously used the launch pad at Cape Canaveral to launch its Titan III and IV rockets, which it did from 1965 to 2005. SpaceX is leasing Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and it uses the facility to launch crew and cargo missions to the ISS. The private space company is also working towards the inaugural launch of its super heavy-lift Starship rocket from its launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, with company CEO Elon Musk recently claiming that it could fly as early as November.
The company eventually plans to launch the megarocket from Kennedy Space Center. NASA selected Starship to land humans on the Moon by late 2025 as part of the space agency’s Artemis 3 mission. To that end, SpaceX is building a massive Starship launch tower a few hundred feet away from pad 39A’s launch tower. The massive 1,000-foot-tall (300-meter) launch tower is nearing completion, with its sixth and seventh sections added this summer. But the thought of having Starship anywhere near pad 39A is apparently making NASA a bit nervous, particularly when it comes to SpaceX’s ongoing commercial crew obligations.
G/O Media may get a commission
For you see, SpaceX has a history of its prototype rockets exploding on the pad. In 2016, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its Cape Canaveral launch pad, resulting in significant damage that took more than a year to repair. Other shenanigans at the launch pad include an eight second static fire test of a Starship prototype that ended in a brush fire, in an incident from last month.
As Reuters reported in June, NASA officials told SpaceX that a Starship explosion near LC-39A could cut off the space agency’s only means of launching astronauts to the ISS, hence its desire for a backup launch pad. Accordingly, SpaceX will upgrade the pad at Cape Canaveral, but Gerstenmaier says the company won’t bring Starship to Kennedy until it’s ready for prime time. Starship is currently undergoing tests in Boca Chica in advance of the megarocket’s first orbital test. “Our intent is to bring Starship to 39A after we have a reliable vehicle. We’ll do a series of tests in Boca [Chica] to makes sure the vehicle is ready to go. When we think we have a good and reliable vehicle, we’ll bring it to 39A,” Gerstenmaier said during the briefing.
Starship is a fully reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle designed to carry supplies and passengers to Earth orbit, the Moon, and possibly even further destinations like Mars. That’s all fine and well, but NASA is probably right to be a bit wary about having this rocket on its property.
More: SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Tower in Florida Is Taking Shape
NASA built a new mega-rocket for the next lunar astronaut era, and it’s about to launch for the first time as soon as Tuesday.
The Space Launch System (SLS) is 17 years and an estimated $50 billion in the making. It’s designed to fly astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, when astronauts conducted the last moonwalk of the Apollo era.
The Space Launch System (SLS) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 17, 2022.
NASA/Kim Shiflett
Now NASA is kicking off a new program, called Artemis, to build a space station orbiting the moon and set up a permanent human presence on the surface of the lunar south pole. Eventually, the agency wants to mine resources there to send astronauts to Mars.
This first mission, called Artemis I, is a test flight that will carry no astronauts. The rocket is set to scream through the Florida skies and push its Orion spaceship into a path around the moon and back. If that goes well, NASA aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface again in 2025.
NASA needs a powerful rocket to carry out such a long-distance mission. The current iteration of SLS, called Block 1, stands taller than the Statue of Liberty at 322 feet, about 30 stories.
To understand just how large that is, and just how much power it takes to fly to the moon, let’s compare it to other astronaut-flying rockets.
SLS is huge, but it’s small for a moon rocket
Let’s start small. The rocket that carried Jeff Bezos to the edge of space in July 2021, called New Shepard, stands about as tall as a five-story building. It doesn’t pack big enough engines, or large enough quantities of fuel, to push itself into Earth’s orbit.
Blue Origin
Instead, New Shepard skims the edge of the atmosphere in the three minutes between when it stops climbing and when it starts falling. Then it descends back to Earth, for a total flight time of 11 minutes. That’s why it’s called a suborbital rocket.
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard suborbital rocket launches toward space in 2016.
Blue Origin
Then there are orbital rockets, like Russia’s Soyuz and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which generate enough thrust to push spaceships full of humans and cargo into orbit around the Earth, where they can dock at the International Space Station.
A Soyuz rocket arrive at the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, September 28, 2009.
NASA/Bill Ingalls
Clocking in anywhere from 150 to 250 feet, these workhorses are probably what you’re picturing when you think of a standard rocket.
People look up at a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, October 7, 2012.
NASA
Lunar rockets like the Saturn V, which powered the Artemis program, are about another 100 feet taller. They need the extra thrust to push their spaceships past Earth’s orbit toward the moon.
A Saturn V rocket launches an Apollo mission toward space.
NASA
SLS has white rocket boosters installed on the sides of its core stage, which burn solid fuel for extra firepower.
SLS in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on September 20, 2021.
NASA/Frank Michaux
Right now, SLS is smaller than its past and future lunar-grade counterparts. But future iterations of the rocket are expected to tower 365 feet.
Technicians stack the SLS core stage at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 12, 2021.
NASA/Cory Huston
If Artemis I goes well, the next SLS mission will send an Orion spaceship around the moon with astronauts on board. The following mission, according to NASA’s plan, will see Orion dock to a SpaceX Starship in lunar orbit. Two astronauts will board the new vessel, and Starship will land them on the moon’s south pole.
Elon Musk stands before a Starship prototype stacked atop a Super Heavy booster prototype in Boca Chica, Texas on February 10, 2022.
SpaceX
Starship and its Super Heavy booster are still in development and testing at SpaceX facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. It’s unclear when they will launch to orbit for the first time — a critical test flight before the rocket can fly humans or land on the moon.
SpaceX’s Starship stacked atop its Super Heavy booster at the company’s facility near Boca Chica, Texas on February 10, 2022.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Starship-Super Heavy is slated to be the largest rocket ever built.
Brush fires appeared shortly after the Starship static fire test on Thursday, September 8, 2022.Screenshot: NASASpaceflight
SpaceX performed a static fire test of a prototype Starship rocket on Thursday, in which all six raptor engines were engaged. The eight-second test appeared to go well, save for the problematic brush fire that ensued.
Starship prototype 24 is currently undergoing tests at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. SpaceX is preparing the upper stage for an upcoming orbital test of the fully integrated Starship system. During yesterday’s static fire test shortly after 5:30 p.m. ET, the six Raptor engines created a monstrous roar and kicked up a tremendous amount of smoke and dust. After the material settled and the Starship launch pad reemerged, it became clear that several patches of grass in the area were burning.
SpaceX Static Fires Starship 24 and Grass Fire Ensues, Plus Booster 7 Spin Prime
Video of the scene, as captured by NASASpaceflight (the static fire test starts at 5:35:00 in the video above), showed an unusually tall fire near the rocket, and wider angles revealed brush fires several hundred feet from the stand. Superheated debris from the test even reached a SpaceX dumpster, setting its contents on fire, according to Teslarati. The fires, which affected a protected habitat, required fire crews to come in and fight the flames.
A zoomed-in view of fires near the test stand. Screenshot: NASASpaceflight
A prior test on August 9 saw only two of prototype 24’s Raptor engines put into action, in what was a subdued version of Thursday’s full-scale test. During the previous day, on August 8, SpaceX performed a limited static fire test of a Starship booster prototype, moving the company closer to an actual orbital launch. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk envisions the fully stacked two-stage Starship rocket as a platform for delivering humans and cargo to orbit, the Moon, and Mars.
G/O Media may get a commission
Teslarati estimates that Thursday’s six-engine test produced 1,380 tons of thrust, the most ever for a test done at Starbase. And at eight seconds, it was also one of the longest static fire tests done at a Starship test stand.
With great power comes great responsibility, however, and SpaceX is not rising to the challenge; the company, as Teslarati points out, is clearly not taking the necessary precautions to prevent fires near the launch pad and is instead relying on an inadequate spray nozzle and high-temperature concrete:
Most likely, eight long seconds of blast-furnace conditions melted the top layer of surrounding concrete and shot a hailstorm of tiny superheated globules in almost every direction. Indeed, in almost every direction there was something readily able to burn, a fire started. In several locations to the south and west, brush caught fire and began to burn unusually aggressively, quickly growing into walls of flames that sped across the terrain. To the east, debris even made it into a SpaceX dumpster, the contents of which easily caught fire and burned for hours.
Eventually, around [10:00 p.m. EDT], firefighters were able to approach the safed launch pad and rocket, but the main fire had already spread south, out of reach. Instead, they started controlled burns near SpaceX’s roadblock, hoping to clear brush and prevent the fire (however unlikely) from proceeding towards SpaceX’s Starbase factory and Boca Chica Village homes and residents.
More serious precautionary measures, such as a water deluge system, would likely prevent this sort of thing from happening. Instead, the tremendous force, heat, and burn length is annihilating the concrete beneath the rocket, resulting in the spread of superheated debris.
The fire crews had no problem dousing the flames, but the fires did affect an environmentally sensitive area that’s home to threatened wildlife. In June, the Federal Aviation Administration completed its environmental assessment of SpaceX’s proposed site expansion at Boca Chica, saying the company can proceed with its plans, but that it must complete around 75 environmental mitigation actions.
Of these actions, SpaceX must implement wildfire prevention measures and also use spray water to suppress dust and air pollution. Given what happened yesterday, these evidently remain unchecked items on SpaceX’s to-do list. Not cool, Elon. Not cool.
More: SpaceX Signs Deal With NASA to Provide 5 More Crewed Trips to the ISS.
SpaceX has successfully ignited all six engines on its latest Starship prototype, taking a significant step towards ensuring that the upper stage will be ready for the rocket’s first orbital launch attempt.
Unfortunately, the same successful static fire of a Starship upper stage – potentially producing almost twice as much thrust as the booster of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket – scattered superheated debris hundreds of meters away, igniting a major brush fire. It’s not the first major fire caused by Starship activities in South Texas, and it likely won’t be the last.
Starship S24 completed its first successful static fire on August 9th, igniting two Raptor engines. Several unsuccessful attempts to test more engines followed throughout the rest of the month, and SpaceX ultimately decided to replace one of Starship S24’s three Raptor Vacuum engines in early September before trying again. After workers installed the new engine and buttoned up Ship 24, the stars eventually aligned on September 8th.
Kicking off the test, SpaceX pumped several hundred tons of liquid oxygen (LOx) and a much smaller quantity of liquid methane (LCH4) fuel into Ship 24 in about 90 minutes, producing a crisp layer of frost wherever the cryogenic liquids touched the skin of the rocket’s uninsulated steel tanks. No frost formed on Starship’s upper methane tank, implying that SpaceX only loaded methane fuel into internal ‘header’ tanks meant to store propellant for landings. The hundreds of tons of liquid oxygen, then, were likely meant as ballast, reducing the maximum stress Starship could exert on the test stand holding it to the ground.
That potential stress is substantial. Outfitted with upgraded Raptor 2 engines, Starship S24 could have produced up to 1380 tons (~3M lbf) thrust when it ignited all six for the first time at 4:30 pm CDT. On top of smashing the record for most thrust produced during a Starbase rocket test, Ship 24’s engines burned for almost 8 seconds, making it one of the longest static fires ever performed on a Starship test stand.
Several brush fires were visible almost immediately after clouds of dust and steam cleared. More likely than not, the combination of the extreme force, heat, and burn duration likely obliterated the almost entirely unprotected concrete surface below Ship 24. Despite continuous evidence that all Starship static fire operations would be easier and safer with the systems, SpaceX still refuses to install serious water deluge or flame deflector systems at Starbase’s test stands and launch pads.
Instead, under its steel Starship test stands, SpaceX relies on a single middling deluge spray nozzle and high-temperature concrete (likely martyte) that probably wouldn’t pass muster for a rocket ten times less powerful than Starship. In multiple instances, Starships have shattered that feeble martyte layer, creating high-velocity ceramic shards that damage their undersides or Raptor engines, requiring repairs and creating risky situations. With essentially no attempt at all to tame the high-speed several-thousand-degree Raptor exhaust, static fire tests at Starbase thus almost always start small grass fires and cause minor damage, but those fires rarely spread.
It appears that September 8th’s accidental brush fire burned at least several dozen acres. (NASASpaceflight)
Ship 24’s first six-engine test was not so lucky, although the Starship made it through seemingly unscathed. Most likely, eight long seconds of blast-furnace conditions melted the top layer of surrounding concrete and shot a hailstorm of tiny superheated globules in almost every direction. Indeed, in almost every direction there was something readily able to burn, a fire started. In several locations to the south and west, brush caught fire and began to burn unusually aggressively, quickly growing into walls of flames that sped across the terrain. To the east, debris even made it into a SpaceX dumpster, the contents of which easily caught fire and burned for hours.
Eventually, around 9pm CDT, firefighters were able to approach the safed launch pad and rocket, but the main fire had already spread south, out of reach. Instead, they started controlled burns near SpaceX’s roadblock, hoping to clear brush and prevent the fire (however unlikely) from proceeding towards SpaceX’s Starbase factory and Boca Chica Village homes and residents.
The nature of the estuary-like terrain and wetlands means that it’s very easy to stop fires at choke points, so the fire likely never posed any real threat to Boca Chica residents, SpaceX employees, or onlookers. It was also unlikely to damage SpaceX’s launch facilities or return to damage Starship S24 from the start, as both of are surrounded by a combination of concrete aprons, empty dirt fields, and a highway.
Still, the “brush” burned by the fire is a protected habitat located in a State Park and Wildlife Refuge. While fire is a natural and often necessary element of many habitats, including some of those in Boca Chica, this is the second major brush fire caused by Starship testing since 2019, which may be less than desirable. At a minimum, fighting fires around Starbase generally requires firefighters to walk or even drive on protected wetlands and salt flats, the impact of which could ultimately be as bad for wildlife and habitats as the fire itself.
SpaceX’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA), which fully greenlit the company’s existing Starbase Texas facilities and launch plans earlier this year, only discusses fire [PDF] a handful of times. Repairing and preventing future damage to wetlands, however, comes up dozens of times and is the subject of numerous conditions SpaceX must meet before the FAA will grant Starship an orbital launch license.
Ultimately, given that the FAA approved that PEA in full awareness of a 2019 brush fire caused by Starhopper (an early Starship prototype) that may have been as bad or worse than 2022’s, there’s a chance that it will play a small role in the ongoing launch licensing process, but the odds of it being a showstopper are close to zero. Still, it would likely benefit SpaceX at least as much as the surrounding Boca Chica wilderness if it can implement changes that prevent major brush fires from becoming a regular ‘accidental’ occurrence.
SpaceX Starship prototype ignites six engines, starts major brush fire
SpaceX fired up the engines of its space-bound Starship prototype Thursday afternoon (Sept. 8) in a dramatic test that also set some of the surrounding landscape ablaze.
All six of the Raptor engines on SpaceX‘s Ship 24 vehicle blazed briefly Thursday at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT) at Starbase, the company’s South Texas facility. The “static fire” test marked another step toward launch for Ship 24, which is slated to conduct the Starship program’s first-ever orbital test flight in the coming months.
The static fire lasted just a few seconds, but flames burned at Starbase for a while afterward. The test sparked a grass fire that brought the local fire department out as a safety precaution, as a livestream by NASASpaceflight.com (opens in new tab) showed. (Rocket Ranch Boca Chica (opens in new tab) also captured footage of today’s static fire, which you can see in the video above.)
Related: SpaceX fires up Starship Super Heavy booster again in long engine test
Ship 24 completes 6-engine static fire test at Starbase pic.twitter.com/y7IiAGL3LASeptember 8, 2022
See more
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation deep-space transportation system, which the company is developing to take people and payloads to the moon, Mars and beyond. The vehicle is composed of two fully reusable elements, both of which are powered by Raptor engines: a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft called Starship.
SpaceX is gearing up for the landmark Starship orbital flight, which will involve Ship 24 and a Super Heavy known as Booster 7. The company has been testing both vehicles at Starbase over the past month or so, performing static fires and other work.
On Aug. 31, for example, SpaceX lit up three of Booster 7’s 33 Raptors, in the first-ever Super Heavy static fire to engage multiple engines. (NASASpaceflight footage suggested that just two of the three Raptors fired properly, however.)
And Ship 24 ignited two of its six Raptors on Aug. 9.
SpaceX’s Ship 24 Starship prototype performs a six-engine static fire test at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas on Sept. 8, 2022. (Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said Starship has the potential to unlock the heavens, making Mars colonization and other bold exploration feats economically feasible.
He’s not the only one to see promise in the giant vehicle. For example, NASA selected Starship as the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration. If all goes according to plan, a Starship will put NASA astronauts down near the lunar south pole in 2025 or 2026.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)or onFacebook (opens in new tab).
LAUREL, Md. — A SpaceX Starship that will land on the moon an on uncrewed test flight may only be a “skeleton” of the version of that will carry people on the Artemis 3 mission, NASA says.
In a presentation at the annual meeting of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) here Aug. 23, Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager of the Human Landing System (HLS) program, said the Starship that performs that uncrewed landing demo mission won’t necessarily be identical to the vehicle that is used to transport astronauts to and from the surface of the moon on Artemis 3 as soon as 2025.
“For the uncrewed demo, the goal is to have a safe landing,” she said. “The uncrewed demo is not necessarily planned to be the same Starship that you see for the crewed demo. It’s going to be a skeleton because it just has to land. It does not have to take back off.”
“Clearly we want it to,” she added, referring to a takeoff, “but the requirements are for it to land.”
That uncrewed landing, scheduled for no earlier than 2024, is a key test ahead of the crewed Artemis 3 mission. Watson-Morgan said that the uncrewed landing will take place in the south polar regions of the moon, but no decisions have been made on a landing site, including whether it will be one of the 13 regions NASA announced Aug. 19 would be considered for the Artemis 3 mission. One factor in choosing a landing site, she said, was to “preserve science in the future” by not disrupting any Artemis 3 landing sites.
There will be an opportunity to do science on the uncrewed demo landing. That includes flying a suite of sensors and imagers “and potentially one payload,” she said, but didn’t specify what kinds of sensors or payloads might fly. The types of payloads NASA were interested in flying include those “that don’t require a tremendous amount of upkeep.”
However, she and others said they want to maximize the performance that Starship offers on lunar landings, with the potential to carry large payloads. While the original HLS competition had a requirement to carry only 100 kilograms of cargo to the surface and back in addition to two astronauts, said Logan Kennedy, HLS surface lead at NASA, the later “sustained” missions will increase that to 182 kilograms to the surface and 160 kilograms back, with a goal of 1,000 kilograms down and back.
“We’re going to leverage all that we can on this mission to try and take up and down as much as we can, using the size of their system,” Watson-Morgan said.
She said SpaceX has been a “fantastic partner” on HLS so far, with close cooperation between the company and the agency. SpaceX has been involved in the Artemis 3 landing site selection process to ensure potential landing regions are compatible with Starship. NASA, in turn, has its personnel, including astronauts, visiting SpaceX facilities for reviews and hardware tests.
That includes one of the unique attributes of Starship, the elevator required to go from the crew cabin to the surface. “It’s a very tall lander. It doesn’t look like the traditional landers that we’ve all seen in the past, so it can be hard to reconcile that mentally,” Watson-Morgan said.
She assured scientists at the meeting that the elevator design was robust, saying it was “multi-fault-tolerant” and designed for operating in lunar conditions. In his presentation, Kennedy showed images of a full-scale mockup of the elevator that SpaceX built for “crew-in-the-loop” tests, including ones where astronauts wore simulated spacesuits to test the ability to get in and out of the elevator.
Some aspects of the overall Starship lunar landing architecture, though, remain unclear. The concept of operations for the lander involves SpaceX launching a Starship into low Earth orbit that will serve as a fuel depot, which is filled by subsequent Starship launches that serve as tankers. The lunar lander Starship will then launch, fill its tanks at the depot, and head to lunar orbit.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX, though, have said exactly how many launches will be required for a single Starship lunar landing mission, an issue of contention during protests of the SpaceX HLS award last year by Blue Origin. “How many? However many is needed. That is how many we’ll launch,” Watson-Morgan said.
NASA’s requirements for HLS missions end once the astronauts are returned to Orion. “We don’t tell them to do anything with it,” Kennedy said of the fate of the Starship lander after returning astronauts from the lunar surface. “That’s going to be up to SpaceX.”
NASA is not requiring SpaceX to demonstrate that its Starship Human Landing System can take off from the lunar surface before using it for the Artemis III mission and the test vehicle will be a “skeleton” of the actual lander. NASA selected SpaceX to build the lander for Artemis III preceded by an uncrewed test flight, but the head of NASA’s HLS program said today the demo does not include liftoff. She also stressed that Starship is still in the design and development phase with many challenges ahead, not ready to go as some seem to believe.
SpaceX’s two-stage Starship space transportation system stacked for the first time, August 6, 2021, Boca Chica, TX. The silver first stage is called Super Heavy, and the second stage, covered in black thermal protection tiles, is Starship, a name also used to refer to the two of them together. Credit: SpaceX
Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager of the HLS program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, spoke to NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group this morning along with other NASA officials about the recent selection of 13 regions at the lunar South Pole for the Artemis III landing.
Artemis III will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo program. NASA currently expects the landing in late 2025, a little over three years from now.
SpaceX has been developing Starship for several years. Five test flights of prototypes of the second stage to an altitude of about 10 kilometers took place between December 2020 and May 2021. The first four ended in flames, but the fifth succeeded. The much larger first stage has not flown yet although “fit checks” of the fully assembled vehicle have taken place at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, TX test facility.
SpaceX founder and Chief Engineer Elon Musk tweeted yesterday that launching Starship to orbit is one of his two main goals this year.
SpaceX plans to use Starship for many purposes — launching satellites into Earth orbit as well as people and cargo to the Moon and Mars. The name Starship is used both for the entire vehicle and just for the second stage.
It is the second stage that will go to the Moon.
Starship is not designed to fly directly to the Moon like NASA’s Space Launch System, however. Instead, the first stage puts it only in Earth orbit. To go further, it must fill up with propellant at a yet-to-be-built orbiting fuel depot. Other Starships are needed to deliver propellant to the depot.
Watson-Morgan described the Concept of Operations for Starship’s Artemis III mission, starting with launch of the fuel depot, then a number of “propellant aggregation” launches to fill up the depot, then launch of the Starship that will go to Moon.
Her slide shows four propellant aggregation launches, but that is not a firm number. “How many? However many is needed, that’s how many will launch,” she said.
Source: NASA
SpaceX and NASA are working together to demonstrate cryogenic fluid management in orbit and “we still have a lot of challenges to overcome.”
“You could … maybe get a feeling that their [SpaceX’s] system is ready to go. And it’s not yet. We’re in design and development. … We’re still developing. We’re still changing. And we’re gonna get smarter and then we’re gonna have an incredible launch and we’re gonna have an incredible landing.” Lisa Watson-Morgan
That landing of two NASA astronauts on Artemis III will be preceded by an uncrewed test planned in 2024, but she explained NASA is only requiring that SpaceX demonstrate a safe landing. Not liftoff.
“The uncrewed demo is not necessarily planned to be the same Starship that you see for the crewed demo. It’s going to be a skeleton because it just has to land. It does not have to lift back off, just for clarity. So clearly we want it to, but the requirements are for it to land.” Lisa Watson-Morgan
SpaceX illustration of its Starship lunar lander. Note the astronaut at the bottom of the lander for scale.
The discussion took place in the context of scientific investigations that can be conducted on the Artemis III mission. Working with SpaceX and a select group of scientists, NASA has chosen 13 regions at the Moon’s South Pole where the landing could occur. NASA is now seeking input from the broader lunar science community to narrow the list.
Many factors are at play, especially the lighting conditions, which are quite different than at the six Apollo landing sites that were closer to the equator. The South Pole is of great scientific interest and its permanently shadowed regions are thought to contain water ice that could be used to support human outposts and other purposes.
Shown here is a rendering of 13 candidate landing regions for Artemis III. Each region is approximately 9.3 by 9.3 miles (15 by 15 kilometers). A landing site is a location within those regions with an approximate 328-foot (100-meter) radius. Credits: NASA
One of the scientists in the audience expressed concern about whether the crew actually will be able to get down to and back from the surface to do science. Starship is very tall and has an elevator to get up and down.
Watson-Morgan offered assurances it will work. The elevator is multi-fault tolerant, she said, and NASA and SpaceX are working together hand-in-hand to test it, including with crews.
Logan Kennedy, HLS Surface Lead at Marshall, showed two slides of the progress being made. The second slide shows what it will look like when people set foot on the Moon next time, he said.
He also expressed confidence in the elevator. One concern is lunar dust, which sticks to everything and could foul the mechanisms. The elevator is designed to operate in that environment, he insisted, with a lot of conservatism built into the models because less is known about the lunar soil — regolith — at the South Pole than the Apollo sites.
The first orbital test flight of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle won’t get off the ground in August.
SpaceX is targeting a six-month window that opens on Sept. 1 for the highly anticipated mission, according to a radio-spectrum license application (opens in new tab) that the company filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
That license was granted on Wednesday (Aug. 10), according to the Twitter account FCC Space Licenses (opens in new tab), which keeps tabs on such things. But this approval is not the final regulatory hurdle that Starship must clear on the way to the launch pad.
Photos:SpaceX lifts huge Super Heavy rocket onto launch stand
“Reminder, this is not the same as a launch license. It is a specific radio license for the test vehicles and does not indicate a change in status. Please do not make a YouTube video or write a 20,000 [word article] about this,” FCC Space Licenses, which is not a U.S. government account, wrote in another Wednesday tweet (opens in new tab). (This article is only about 400 words long, so hopefully it’s still in bounds.)
SpaceX apparently still hasn’t received a launch license for the Starship orbital test flight, which will lift off from the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas. Launch licenses are the purview of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which recently wrapped up a lengthy environmental assessment of Starship activities at the site.
Starship consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship. Both elements are designed to be fully reusable, and both will be powered by SpaceX’s next-generation Raptor engines — 33 for Super Heavy and six for Starship.
The duo that will fly the coming orbital mission are Booster 7 and Ship 24. SpaceX has begun prepping both prototypes for the task; for example, the company conducted “static fire” engine tests with both vehicles on Tuesday (Aug. 9) at Starbase.
Booster 7 lit just one of its 33 engines on Tuesday, and Ship 24 fired up two of its six Raptors. So a lot of work remains before SpaceX clears the duo for an orbital flight — meaning it was never likely that the mission would lift off in August, even if all the paperwork were already in order.
There is a high-profile launch scheduled for this month, however: NASA is currently targeting Aug. 29 for the liftoff of Artemis 1, the first mission in its Artemis program of moon exploration. Artemis 1 will use a Space Launch System rocket to send an uncrewed Orion capsule on a roughly six-week mission to lunar orbit and back.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)or onFacebook (opens in new tab).
