I think the plan is to soft land the first one at least into the ocean.
Yeah, the booster will (ideally) soft-land in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship will make about 3/4 of an orbit and soft-land near Barking Sands missile range in Kauai (where my own payload blew up!).
The booster I’m not too worried about; they have lots of experience with Falcon 9 landings, and being larger and more robust should make the whole problem easier. It’s future landings on the “chopsticks” that will be butt-clenching.
The Starship has to re-enter, though, and they don’t seem to have worked out all the bugs from their thermal system. Tiles still fall off pretty regularly. Maybe the vehicle can withstand a few missing tiles–I hope so–but we’ll see. And while we’ve seen that they have reasonable subsonic descent control via the flaps, it’s not clear how well that will work in the hypersonic regime.
So I’m not sure about the likelihood of the Starship succeeding at a soft landing, but if they manage it it’ll be a heck of a success. Hopefully they can at least reenter near Kauai since that’s where the monitoring equipment will be.
This is the last major hurdle for Starship to pass: does the reentry thermal protection system work? This single issue is what has bedeviled proposed reusable systems since the dawn of the space age. Weight gains of the orbital stage can reduce payload fraction to zero. The Space Shuttle was undone in large part by its fragile tiles. If this works (or with some iteration can be made to work), then all the major elements will be proven and the rest will be meeting cost, reliability and turnaround time goals.
One issue is jurisdiction. I had a chat with a friend of mine that works in a state agency that oversees oil approvals, and she stated that basically one agency will get tasked with handling the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) stuff, and which agency depends on the circumstances. Here, it’s the FAA–which is a little weird to me, but that’s the way things work, I guess. But the Feds, FAA or otherwise, aren’t going to bother with approving a new Wal-Mart.
It’s definitely a balancing act. I don’t want to impede economic progress. I also think biodiversity is important not just for the sake of maintaining a healthy planet but also because of its own inherent value. Finding the right balance is important.
To be honest, I think it would be an environmental benefit if SpaceX were allowed to grow enough that the beaches, dunes, etc. had to be closed. They were allowing off-roading and ATVing on the dunes up until recently, which must have ripped things to shreds. The actual launches won’t cause any significant damage to the area, but keeping a wide exclusion zone will be a huge benefit to wildlife.
Speaking more generally, though the token donations are cute, what does help is maintaining habitat space for wildlife. Human activities aren’t all that bad in their own right. A huge, sprawling suburban tract is far worse for the wildlife than the same area with a polluting factory in the middle and the rest staying undeveloped. I’d like if more mitigations were designed with that in mind.
It’s the FAA because Congress said it was.
In other words, the existing civilian spaceflight regulatory agency (NASA) wasn’t going to be flexible enough to encourage the growth of commercial spaceflight, so the FAA was given the job, with a restriction that they couldn’t immediately start piling on regulations until commercial spaceflight as an industry had a chance to outgrow its startup (the “learning period”).
The majority of the mitigations are fine, but the unrelated stuff like forcing them to write a history paper and provide satellite services strikes me as governmental overreach and almost bribery. “Hey, want a launch license? You’ll need to let us wet our beaks a little.”
The FAA has no right to demand services unrelated to safety or the environmental impact of launches. Demanding that they take part in historical renovation not related to their activities or help environmental issues they didn’t cause as a condition of licensure is over the line, imo.
It’s fairly small ball and I’m sure SpaceX will comply, but I don’t like the precedent it might set for startups and others without the deep pockets of Musk.
Five launches per year is not nearly enough if they want to take their testing all the way through to on-orbit refueling. They’ll either have to negotiate more flights eventually, or move some of their testing elsewhere. And NASA has already raised concern about potential damage to pad 39A at the Caoe in the case if a Starship failure, so I’m not sure they’d be hapoy with a lot of test flying out of there.
I’m not sure how true it is, but “people” have said that the list of mitigations was essentially provided by SpaceX. There’s certainly some degree of wheel-greasing here, but from SpaceX’s perspective it’s far cheaper to donate $5k/yr to the ocelots than to prove to the FAA’s satisfaction that they aren’t actually impacting them. So they may well have suggested that when the alternative might have been more delays. Plus, come on:
I don’t think the Cape will have a problem with frequent launches once SpaceX proves they can at least not destroy the pad. If they need lots of iterations to solve second-stage reentry or on-orbit refueling, I don’t think there’ll be a problem with a high flight count at the Cape.
A nice article in Science about the scientific promise of Starship:
https://www.science.org/content/article/space-scientists-ready-starship-biggest-rocket-ever
Nothing very surprising to anyone following Starship closely or thinking about its consequences, but a good introduction to the potential.
It does express some views identical to what I’ve said here and in other threads. For instance:
Some astronomers also have Starship in their eyes. “There’s no way to talk about it without resorting to cliches, but ‘best rocket engine ever,’ probably, by most metrics,” says David Rubin, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He wonders how much simpler the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might have been if its 6.5-meter-wide segmented mirror hadn’t had to fold up to fit on its rocket. Engineers could have built a monolithic mirror and launched it as is within the 9-meter-wide Starship fairing, which encloses a volume about half as big as a hot air balloon.
There is also the “traditional” view, which ignores the possibility of engineering things to be cheaper in the first place:
As another reality check for the dreamers, Lionnet points out that discounted rides will only reduce the cost of missions by so much. For major scientific projects, Lionnet says, launch costs are usually between just 5% and 10% of the total price tag. For JWST, the fraction was even smaller. The typical cost for a ride on an Ariane 5 rocket, JWST’s launcher, is about $175 million, just 2% of the mission’s total price tag. “A complex telescope will still be a complex telescope,” Lionnet says.
The latter view seems to come from a certain lack of imagination. Which may stem from cultural views and political reality:
In Handmer’s view, the problem is partly cultural: NASA engineers try to get everything right on the first try, at all costs—the vastly expensive, long-delayed JWST being a prime example. “It’s kind of like a medieval cathedral,” he says, of such flagship missions. To exploit Starship’s immense capacity, Handmer estimates NASA will need to make 100 times as much stuff for a fraction of the usual cost. It will need to be a fast-fashion factory, not a boutique. But having worked at JPL, Handmer isn’t necessarily hopeful that will happen. “It was just not set up to mass-produce anything,” he says.
I’m glad there are a number of people in positions of influence that are thinking about the potential, though it’s disappointing that we’ll likely have to see Starship fly for several years before we see designs that truly make use of it.
Worth watching the Super Heavy launch as it was utterly stunning last night - probably one of the most spectacular launches I’ve ever seen. You could really see the details of the boosters in the sky lit by the evening sun. NASA Spaceflight seemed to get the best shots but you might be annoyed by the fanboying commentary.
That was very cool. Thanks for the link.
Another fantastic closeup here:
And an amazing view of a shockwave on booster return:
Hypothetical here, but if the blast radius of a fully fueled SS/SH stack extends into South Padre Island, what will happen? Will they need to evacuate part of the island? Forbid the launch? Reduce fuel load and only fully test at the Cape? I watched SN8 fly from there a couple of years ago and it was rather populated with large condos/hotels on that side of the island.
@nate: By my estimation, the launch facility is about six miles from the north end of South Padre island. The maximum size of the explosion would be somewhat smaller than the blast in Beirut a few years ago, which was 2.7 kt, and caused a zone of damage about 3km in radius. Starship can hold 3.6 kt of fuel, but the 2.7 kt explosion in Beirut was from Ammonium Nitrate, a high explosive. A lot of energy in a rocket explosion is going to be a fireball, not a shock wave. There will be a shock wave, but I don’t believe it would be nearly as large as 2.7 kt of Ampho.
I suppose if there was an initial explosion that blew apart the fuel to optimally mix into a fuel-air bomb you might get a huge shockwave, and it would probably travel farther than the one in Beirut because of the lack of built-up infrastructure in the area. But still… energy dissipates with the square of distance, so…
At worst, I expect a detonation of a fully fueled Starship/booster might rattle windows on South Padre island, but I don’t think there would be much damage, if any.
I’m pretty sure the environmental impact study they just passed would have looked at the effect of a dertonation on any nearby population.
There are a few long poles remaining before a Starship launch, and a wet dress rehearsal was one of them, so it’s good sign that we’re getting close. A full 33-engine static fire is probably the next big one. March might not be crazy after all.
How confident are we in a 33 engine fire? I know SpaceX has done 9 repeatedly with Falcon Heavy. 33 seems like a pretty heavy lift (ha!).
I guess technically we don’t know for sure. There was this interaction:
Does “good guess” mean that’s what’s going to happen? We’ll see. But the cryotest + WDR is pretty much on schedule, so the 33-engine static fire would be next. I feel like they pretty much have to for full confidence. They’ve gotten rid of static fires for Falcon 9, just depending on the fact that in an actual launch, the hold-down clamps don’t release until they verify that all 9 engines are lit and working, but they only switched to that after many successful launches.
Will there be a written report on the TPS work, and will it have a cover sheet?
Somehow I don’t think Elon goes around the office with a mug of coffee going yeeeeeaaaahhh… I’m going to need you to come in tomorrow… about niiiiiine. Oh, and I almost forgot. I’m going to need you to come in Suuunday, too. M’kaaaaay? Instead, he just fires you if you aren’t there.
Just to be clear, TPS actually means “thermal protection system” here. That is, the black hexagonal tiles on the upper stage. The booster stage doesn’t go as fast and the bare stainless steel can withstand the heating. But like the Space Shuttle tiles or the heat shield at the base of various capsules (like Crew Dragon), a little extra is needed for reentering from orbit.
I’d say the TPS is probably the single biggest risk factor here. Building a system that’s low mass enough to not impact payload too much, while also being reliable and reusable, is not an easy problem. The Shuttle system was mostly functional but fragile and expensive to repair after each flight. Starship will have to do better if it’s to succeed at second-stage reusability.
A big difference with Starship is shape. On the shuttle, almost every tile had to be a unique shape. On Starship, most of the tiles are identical, or identical within a few different groups of tiles. That makes a huge difference in manufacturing, installation and repair.
However, the fact that they’ve been trying different attachment techniques for a year and the tiles still seem to fall off with mild jostling is a worry. Attachment of the tiles seems quite difficult, and we haven’t see yet what happens during the force of a launch. I think the difficulty comes from the fact that they are designing the system for mass manufacturing, so there needs to be an automated way to install the tiles.
in terms of first launch risk, though, it’s not as big a deal. If Starship launches, attains orbit, then burns up on re-entry because of a tile issue the mission will still be considered a rousing success. Tile issues can be fixed. My big worry would be something going wrong that speaks to the overall design: POGO, exhaust instability with 33 engines firing, inadequate pad design causing destruction when all engines are throttled up, acoustic forces damaging the rocket, issues with huge fuel tanks, inabiity to make orbit because it’s too heavy, whatever. Some kind of show-stopper that requires a rethink of the design. That would set them back months to years.
Second biggest risk is a RUD on the pad, destroying their gigantic, complex launch system. That’d set them back another year, probably.
But if the thing clears the pad and the booster successfully separates and starts to return, that would be a success. It proves out the booster design. If it soft-lands in the water or back at the pad, it’s a great success. A giant booster could launch a different rocket if Starship was flawed. If Starship attains orbit with the expected amount of fuel left, then we are in a new era even if it burns up on re-entry, because we know that problem can eventually be solved.