> The fully integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle will be approximately 400 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.
For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top.
It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.
I've walked along the length of the rocket at NASA in Houston. It's massive and to think it took all that power to get that tiny capsule to the moon with a few men. Pretty amazing...
The Starship is designed to carry 100 people. SpaceX will be able to send more people to the moon in one mission than all the moon landings ever sent. Wow...
I live on a partly forested hill that towers about 250 ft over the river valley where the railway is. When I go to the railway station and wait for a train, the hill is really dominant on the near horizon.
And whenever I realize that the full Starship + SuperHeavy stack is going to be much taller than that hill, I am just speechless. That is one big freaking rocket, one big trampoline for mankind, so to say.
Yes it is. Starship, the part that will end up in orbit is longer than the truss section, which is the longest section of the ISS and has the solar panels on it. At the crash sight of SN8 watching the people walk around the wreckage, it gave a good indication of scale.
An interesting thing here is SpaceX are building TWO launchpads. Which will definitely help prevent delays if an when there is an AMOS-6 [1] or Orb-3 [2] type explosion that destroys the launchpad.
It may also help for rapidly testing orbital refueling in 2022, though the plan is to do orbital refueling with 1 launch pad, 1 Super Heavy and 2 Starships (1 standard, 1 refueler) with 1 hour turnaround times between launches (and 5-6 launches) before Starship is ready to depart for the journey to Mars.
Got lost in a rabbit hole after reading this news. Most incredible thing to me was that due to the reusability the per launch costs may end up being $2M (vs $185 million in 1969–1971 dollars - $1.23 billion in 2019 value for the Saturn V).
Note that the $2M is to launch a fully loaded (100 tons of payload) Starship into low earth orbit (LEO). Launching it further, such as to the Moon or Mars, requires refueling while in-orbit. I've seen estimates from Musk that it would take 6-7 launches of a tanker variant of Starship to deliver enough fuel to fill an empty Starship (it could be stockpiled in an orbital depot ahead of the main payload launch). So the total launch cost might be more like $15M for a fully-loaded ship. Which is still crazy cheap compared to SLS ($2B/launch), and Falcon 9 costs $15M just to get 13 tons into LEO.
The FAA recently updated this page as part of the new Environmental Assessment at Boca Chica which is required before SpaceX can be approved for orbital flights.
Their current approval is good for testing (vertical) flights of Starship and Superheavy, but does not currently permit orbital flight from Boca Chica as I understand it.
They are currently in a public comment period thru Jan 22.
Is there not piped water? Is it just another eco friendly sounding thing to put in the plan? Is it to hedge against newspaper headlines saying how much water spacex is wasting?
Desalination has to be more expensive than piped water (both financially and environmentally).
"There are no shops or restaurants or amenities of any kind around, including municipal water pipes; Cameron County regularly trucks in gallons of water, which is stored in outdoor tanks."
Take a gander at Google earth, Boca Chica is far enough away from Brownsville that I doubt it has municipal water or would ever be serviced. Salt water and steel don’t mix well so I’d assume they want to stop trucking it in.
Not, there is not. All water is currently delivered, and the nearest municipal water is over 15 miles away.
Arranging for a water pipeline would not be cheap, but moreover would take a lot of time. Desalinization plant is plug and play; pipe is going to require a lot of bureaucracy besides a pretty fair capital investment.
Desalination uses a lot of energy, so if energy is cheap, then so is desalination.
Both solar and wind power have gotten incredibly cheap (~ $15/MW), and more importantly will continue to get much cheaper over the next decade. Boca Chica has lots of wind & sun.
Desalination can also handle the variability of wind & solar quite well: just use water from a big water tank when both wind & solar aren't available. Expensive batteries not required. And to a first approximation it's always windy in Boca Chica, so not much storage is required anyways.
OTOH, piping water from Brownsville to Boca Chica is probably a 9 figure project.
Boca Chica is a relatively isolated location wedged between the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico itself. Texas is a big place, and if you want fresh water you might just have to make it yourself.
Even for orbital launches on the production Falcon 9, schedules are subject to change due to technical glitches or just bad weather. Test launches are subject to both, with technical glitches being nearly part of the plan. For starship launches, there's a nearby town where residents usually get something like 24 hours' notice of an attempt, in case they want to be elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen.
Often, tests aren't announced until just before they happen. Musk's twitter seems to be the primary source for this kind of information from SpaceX. Otherwise, some unofficial/fan sources[0] have pretty good information.
While it will be fun to see humans on Mars, the really interesting stuff is further out. Where large lifters like this will really shine is in allowing automated mining factories to be sent to various space rocks in order to allow further, larger projects to be built in place. Musk has been piggybacking technologies to fund future projects — I don't see Mars as an endpoint for his vision, and Mars will be a cash sink instead of a cash generator for some time to come. Look for the next moneymaking (and project-fostering) step.
I find it a little weird that FAA handles space stuff. I think they should coordinate, but basically they are for aircraft. There should be a FSA that handles space traffic.
There's really just not enough commercial space traffic yet to warrant its own agency.
I think that's becoming less true with LEO megaconstellations of satellites, but it's still probably too low volume for now to warrant an entirely separate federal agency.
Rockets into space have to transit through the airspace used by regular aircraft, so it kind of makes sense that it would be handled by one agency rather than having two agencies that have to coordinate with each other.
What are the odds of Starship working? It seems really complex.
And that last phase where the ship flips vertical from the bellyflop, looks insane for human passengers inside. How many G’s is that maneuver pulling?
SN8 appears 90% successful, but I’m wondering if that remaining 10% is the killer.
As they say: You spend 10% of your time, solving 90% of your problem. And then you spend 90% of your time, solving the last 10% of your problem.
Between high speed re-entry, and thermal protections, I wonder how well the Starship design was modeled, to handle hypersonic re-entry speeds. It appears to be a very large spacecraft that’s re-entering the atmosphere at very high speeds.
If it succeeds, then maybe it’ll open up space travel and make it cheaper. If not, then well, nice try. Back to the drawing board.
But maybe, we’ll see results soon enough, with SN9.
[+] [-] mabbo|5 years ago|reply
For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top.
It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.
[+] [-] gibolt|5 years ago|reply
The ability to lift that into orbit (minus most fuel and booster) with both halves still able to land is an insane feat.
[+] [-] hourislate|5 years ago|reply
The Starship is designed to carry 100 people. SpaceX will be able to send more people to the moon in one mission than all the moon landings ever sent. Wow...
[+] [-] _lbaq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doomlaser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] divbzero|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-r... "Largest rocket"
[+] [-] inglor_cz|5 years ago|reply
And whenever I realize that the full Starship + SuperHeavy stack is going to be much taller than that hill, I am just speechless. That is one big freaking rocket, one big trampoline for mankind, so to say.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnord77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someperson|5 years ago|reply
It may also help for rapidly testing orbital refueling in 2022, though the plan is to do orbital refueling with 1 launch pad, 1 Super Heavy and 2 Starships (1 standard, 1 refueler) with 1 hour turnaround times between launches (and 5-6 launches) before Starship is ready to depart for the journey to Mars.
[1] https://youtu.be/_BgJEXQkjNQ?t=71
[2] https://youtu.be/aL5eddt-iAo?t=52
[+] [-] thelittleone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangoldin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maccam94|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lemonspat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaroth|5 years ago|reply
Their current approval is good for testing (vertical) flights of Starship and Superheavy, but does not currently permit orbital flight from Boca Chica as I understand it.
They are currently in a public comment period thru Jan 22.
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
Is there not piped water? Is it just another eco friendly sounding thing to put in the plan? Is it to hedge against newspaper headlines saying how much water spacex is wasting?
Desalination has to be more expensive than piped water (both financially and environmentally).
[+] [-] kristofferR|5 years ago|reply
"There are no shops or restaurants or amenities of any kind around, including municipal water pipes; Cameron County regularly trucks in gallons of water, which is stored in outdoor tanks."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/space-x-...
The whole piece is worth a read btw, great article.
[+] [-] throwaway316943|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
The bubble wall tech will probably be a big enough problem to sort out once they try to build them.
[+] [-] mabbo|5 years ago|reply
During launches, they need to spray water- a lot of it. Using salt water would probably be problematic. Lots of residue left over.
[+] [-] colechristensen|5 years ago|reply
I would guess that it is driven by a real need for water and a hedge against environmental assessment difficulties.
[+] [-] jccooper|5 years ago|reply
Not, there is not. All water is currently delivered, and the nearest municipal water is over 15 miles away.
Arranging for a water pipeline would not be cheap, but moreover would take a lot of time. Desalinization plant is plug and play; pipe is going to require a lot of bureaucracy besides a pretty fair capital investment.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|5 years ago|reply
Both solar and wind power have gotten incredibly cheap (~ $15/MW), and more importantly will continue to get much cheaper over the next decade. Boca Chica has lots of wind & sun.
Desalination can also handle the variability of wind & solar quite well: just use water from a big water tank when both wind & solar aren't available. Expensive batteries not required. And to a first approximation it's always windy in Boca Chica, so not much storage is required anyways.
OTOH, piping water from Brownsville to Boca Chica is probably a 9 figure project.
[+] [-] ipnon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adinb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redis_mlc|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] grishka|5 years ago|reply
Indeed.
[+] [-] trsohmers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skolos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umeshunni|5 years ago|reply
https://reddit.com/r/SpaceX/w/launches/manifest?utm_source=s...
[+] [-] rst|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] penagwin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dint|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suyash|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flenserboy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graderjs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncallaway|5 years ago|reply
I think that's becoming less true with LEO megaconstellations of satellites, but it's still probably too low volume for now to warrant an entirely separate federal agency.
[+] [-] elihu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mulmen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackrock|5 years ago|reply
And that last phase where the ship flips vertical from the bellyflop, looks insane for human passengers inside. How many G’s is that maneuver pulling?
SN8 appears 90% successful, but I’m wondering if that remaining 10% is the killer.
As they say: You spend 10% of your time, solving 90% of your problem. And then you spend 90% of your time, solving the last 10% of your problem.
Between high speed re-entry, and thermal protections, I wonder how well the Starship design was modeled, to handle hypersonic re-entry speeds. It appears to be a very large spacecraft that’s re-entering the atmosphere at very high speeds.
If it succeeds, then maybe it’ll open up space travel and make it cheaper. If not, then well, nice try. Back to the drawing board.
But maybe, we’ll see results soon enough, with SN9.
[+] [-] peter303|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DarthGhandi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasteddie31003|5 years ago|reply
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