But China hopes for the closest thing.
What’s neat is the gain you get from vector math. Ignoring atmosphere for the moment, if you aim your 5 g rocket at 11.5° over level, then you get 1 g in the vertical direction–enough to resist gravity–and still have 4.9 g in the horizontal direction! So it’s generally beneficial to fly as horizontally as possible and use the bare minimum to not fall to the ground.
Of course, atmosphere exists. So rockets spend the first part of their flight going almost vertical just to get out of the soup. Luckily, at that part of the flight the rocket has the most fuel, and thus the least acceleration, and so the vector gains are not as extreme as they’d otherwise be.
It’s been exactly 20 years since this issue of Aviation Week:
The rare exception to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
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Tiny SpaceX can’t do it.
Huge SpaceX, though, yeah, they can definitely rock Boeing.
I would imagine that once the rocket is traveling somewhat horizontally the atmosphere contributes some lift as well.
The atmosphere dissipates quite rapidly. Half of the atmosphere is under 18,000 ft. At 36,000, you have only 1/4 of the atmosphere lett. Max-Q for Starship is around 45,000 ft, and Starship at that point is still about 60-70 degrees from horizontal.
Probably not. The thing doesn’t have aerodynamic lifting surfaces. And for structural reasons you really want to keep the axis of motion (and therefore the axis of the relative wind of the passing atmosphere) aligned with the long axis of the stack.
One could aim the nose up a bit versus the velocity vector, but that’s going to be less efficient in propulsion, impose structural sideloads on the stack, and long thin cylinders are really shitty inefficient lifting bodies so the gain to be made is real small.
I can’t say for sure they don’t, but if they do IMO the net result is not going to be greatly in excess of a rounding error.
They actually do make use of lift for the landing segment. The grid fins can adjust the angle of attack to some degree, and it meaningfully improves performance (particularly for return-to-launch-site).
I suspect that it’s negligible for ascent, though. The booster still has a great deal of mass on its way up through the atmosphere; on the way down, it’s almost empty of propellant.
For a visualization, imagine tossing an empty soda can vs. a full one. The latter travels on a nice parabola–the former, not so much. That’s pretty close to the actual difference in mass, too.
ETA: Aside from the grid fins, the Super Heavy booster also has some rather large chines. I still suspect that it’s negligible for ascent, but they’ll probably have a fairly significant effect in increasing landing efficiency.
This rocket is pretty big (at Starbase now)
Went to Starbase as a part of my Texas eclipse trip. Pretty neat. Since it’s a public highway and beach, you can get quite close to the rocket (as long as they aren’t doing a launch or test):
It’s easy to visit: start in Brownsville and go down Hwy 4. Plenty of places to park along the highway since it has various historical markers as well. And it’s legal to drive on the beach.
Obviously, don’t do anything dumb like crossing private property lines or messing with the guards. But it’s all pretty chill. The closest point you can get to the launch mount is on this flat, crusty area to the southwest with some property line markers. Nice unobstructed view, too.
Ars Technica had an article recently about their latest plans, which include building multiple Starships (upper stage) a day. Would seem ridiculous if they weren’t in the middle of building a giant factory site. It’s hard to get a sense of the size in this shot (it’s highly foreshortened), but check out how the beams fade away in the distance:
It’s something like 800 feet long.
Anyway, it’s all coming along nicely. Boca Chica isn’t such a bad site after all. It’s actually closer to Brownsville than I’d thought, and Brownsville is also larger than I’d thought. I suspect it’s also helpful being an oil-focused port city, with local expertise in heavy construction. So getting large structures built in Boca Chica is not such a hard problem.
Building multiple starships at the same time over some time period, or multiple starships per day?? which you seem to imply. I’m assuming the former.
Multiple per day. IIRC, 1000 per year is the target. Note that this is just the upper stage, not the booster. But the booster can be reused about every 10 minutes, whereas the Starships will not.
In fact, for Mars colonization efforts, the Starships should be thought of as expendable. They mostly aren’t coming back–they’re more useful there for scrap material. Some will come back to return people, but if the colony is growing, that number will be far fewer than the number that go out. A lot will be cargo ships that also don’t come back.
1000 a year sounds like a lot, but it’s pretty small compared to lots of other industrial efforts. A Starship is maybe 60x the weight of a car, and way less than 60x as complicated… but 60,000 cars a year is not a top seller.
Any plans to “wet lab” the Starships that land on Mars into habitable modules, at least at the beginning?
A distinct possibility. They showed this image in the presentation:
The horizontal cylinders are clearly sourced from the Starships. Though uncertain what the purpose is (housing, etc.).
It’s just concept art at this point, of course… but they’re at least thinking about this.
SpaceX also showed off this slo-mo video recently:
The engine is in an “overexpanded” state, due to having a vacuum nozzle but firing under sea level conditions. You can see the exhaust get pressed in after it exits. It’s also an unstable condition that can damage the nozzle.
The video is of the Raptor shutting down, and you can see that the transient effects can get pretty violent. Neat imagery, though.
So all these pics you’ve posted are your own work from public locations, not the work of Tesla PR folks on the inside of the fence?
If so, cool beyond awesome.
SpaceX PR, but I knew what you meant 
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But yeah, all pics snapped from my cell phone from public locations. Right on the edge, mind you–but I stayed on the legal side of the line:
For a bit of the feel for how close it is to the public beach:
One thing I do find kinda funny is the number of hacked-together camera platforms in the area (for YouTube streaming). Random Starlink antenna connected to one of them:
It’s all kinda just sitting out in the open. Seems like it would be a theft target, but I guess it is being monitored in real-time…
How are Starship’s tiles an improvement on the Shuttle’s tiles? The Shuttle’s fragile tiles were a major contributor to the Shuttle being a hanger queen and ultimately a failure point that destroyed a Shuttle and crew. Originally Starship’s tiles were going to be a glasslike ceramic with active cooling via water vapor but I gather that plan was scrapped.
The YouTube channel Breaking Taps had a nice video on the subject, but for some reason they made the video private. ITAR violation? Dunno.
Starship uses TUFI (toughened unipiece fibrous insulation) vs. the Shuttle’s RCG (reaction cured glass). They are similar in many respects but the Starship tiles have more large fibers, which makes them a little heavier but should be substantially tougher (like a fibrous composite material).
Hackaday does have an article with screengrabs from the video and some information:
A poster on the SpaceXLounge subreddit that claims to be a Space Shuttle tile engineer (and seemly has the post history to back up that claim) said this on the video:
Thanks for an excellent video presenting details of those rigidized ceramic fiber tiles.
The secret to the thermal insulating performance of the Shuttle tiles and the tiles on Starship is the silica fibers, the high purity (high transmission) glass and the fiber diameter (1 to 2 microns). The physics behind the tiles’ thermal performance is called Mie Scattering.
At the peak operating temperature of the Shuttle tiles (2400F, 1316C, 1589K), blackbody thermal radiation from the hot black top surface (the reaction cured glass) is penetrating the tile. The tile is 90 to 95% empty space consisting of fibers and voids. At that temperature, the peak wavelength of that blackbody thermal radiation spectrum is ~2 microns. When the silica fiber diameter is 2 microns, the fibers are “tuned” to the thermal radiation wavelength inside the tile, and the fibers strongly backscatter the blackbody radiation.
Mie Scattering is described by a backscattering coefficient and an absorption coefficient. For the Shuttle tiles, the backscattering coefficient is 300 to 500 times larger than the absorption coefficient. That’s why those lightweight, highly porous tiles are such excellent thermal insulation and are exactly what the Shuttle and Starship require. Using the Mie Scattering data, the thickness of the Orbiter tiles is adjusted to keep the temperature of the aluminum hull of the Orbiter to less than 350F during the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) from low earth orbit (LEO) with about 15% margin on that hull temperature.
Side note: My lab at McDonnell Douglas developed and tested different types of rigidized ceramic fiber tiles during the space shuttle conceptual design phase (1969-71). We measured the Mie Scattering absorption and backscattering coefficients of dozens of different tile formulations at the high temperature and high vacuum conditions of reentry to quickly sort through those candidate samples to find the one with the largest backscattering coefficient and smallest absorption coefficient. We worked with NASA, with Rockwell (the Orbiter prime contractor), and with Lockheed (the shuttle tile subcontractor) during the preliminary design phase of the shuttle (1972-73) to characterize thermal radiative properties of the tile formulations that were then being developed for the Orbiter.