How SpaceX's Starship Is Quickly Becoming the World's Leading Spaceship.
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It’s no surprise that SpaceX is, yet again, up to something new. Though the company has had its misfortunes in the past, namely the explosion of Starship briefly after it landed safely, Elon Musk is determined to ever-improve its rockets and eventually meet his goal of sending humans to Mars. The company’s latest project has been completing a prototype of the largest rocket booster ever built, testing it at the launch pad. This is the first true Super Heavy booster prototype for Starship, a fully reusable, two-stage-to-orbit super heavy-lift launch vehicle that eventually aims to carry passengers (perhaps to the moon and even Mars!). Unsurprisingly, the rocket booster prototype is extraordinarily heavy; it is expected to weigh six times more than a fully fueled Falcon 9. Eventually, the rocket will have 32 Raptor engines attached, more than any other rocket, and it will have over twice the thrust of NASA’s Saturn V Moon rocket, which remains the most powerful rocket successfully flown yet. After Booster 3, the largest rocket booster so far, was built (and “very hard to build” according to Musk), it will undergo a cryogenic proof test to replace gaseous nitrogen with a supercooled liquid, simulating the thermal and mechanical stress of the cold liquid oxygen and methane propellant. Basically, the Super Heavy has to be tested to make sure it is structurally sound, and its tanks are pressurized to nominal flight pressures.
So, what exactly is Starship? In short, it’s a fully reusable transport system that can carry up to 100 passengers to Mars. It’s an integral step in Musk and SpaceX’s founding goal of making human civilization multi-planetary. In part, this is to avoid the possibility of extinction or devastation by threats such as climate change or an asteroid collision, which have become more and more of a reality in recent decades – essentially, this would spread our eggs in many baskets. Crucially, it being ‘reusable’ means that Starship can take multiple trips, carrying hundreds of individuals to the Red Planet. Rather than having its principal hardware elements discarded in the sea or burned up in space, they are recovered and can be reused after some refurbishment. This reduces the cost of the project, which is already astronomical and increases efficiency. The spacecraft itself, Starship, requires the previously mentioned Super Heavy rocket to launch.
In addition to Starship, SpaceX is also rolling out 12,000 Starlink satellites to provide broadband internet service across the world and to combat ‘space junk’ in lower orbits. Already, it has launched approximately 1,737 satellites. This time around, SpaceX is planning on ensuring that the satellites hover at a lower altitude, enabling them to provide even faster broadband service with lower latency. However, this was objected to by numerous competing firms such as ViaSat, OneWeb and Amazon, arguing that it could interfere with other satellite networks and increase the risk of colliding with orbiting spacecraft or debris. Eventually, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sided with SpaceX, believing that the Starlink constellation could have a beneficial impact on reducing orbital debris while not causing major interference issues, and the request to deploy the satellites was approved. In a tweet, Musk added the atmosphere “automatically clears the lower altitude within a few years, so space junk cannot accumulate” – citing that as one of the key reasons for moving Starlink from a roughly 1100km orbit to a 550 km one. Essentially, at lower altitudes, satellites that fails will not linger in space and become “space junk” as atmospheric drag will quickly pull them back toward Earth’s atmosphere where they will burn upon re-entry.
Beyond sending Starship to Mars, which is the long-term goal, Musk has also suggested that the spacecraft could be turned into a “new giant telescope” with a higher resolution than the Hubble, which is now facing glitches due to its age. As of now, many factors are still uncertain, such as whether Starship will even be able to launch successfully and re-enter orbit, much less stay in space as a stable platform, like NASA’s Hubble. The indicators are looking good, with Booster 3 even recently weathering a thunderstorm with lightning. Aside from this, the Starship can enable possibilities such as capturing and repairing satellites in orbit. The sheer size of the telescope is larger than Hubble but still smaller than the Herschel Space Observatory or the James Webb Space Telescope, but it can send telescopes to the latter, if SpaceX is inclined to.
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