Me: Can we get Starship?
China: We have Starship at home.
Google Chinese to English:
COSMOLEAP
From the earth to deep space,
from the present to the future
Great voyage jump
COSMOLEAP
Rocket science will never be easy. But existence proofs have a way of spurring on your competition.
Whether that be the 2nd and subsequent agencies to build atomic weapons, 2nd and subsequent to build practically reusable rocket engines or stages, 2nd and subsequent to build practically landable (not just splashable) boosters, or even 2nd and subsequent to build chopsticks-style landings on the takeoff pad.
COSMOLEAP is an IPO / angel investor magnet now, albeit with Chinese characteristics. In 10-15 years? Who’s to say?
China must be acutely chagrined that SpaceX is landing boosters while China is still crashing them down on people’s heads.
SpaceX is only by luck not crashing things down on people’s heads yet. Twice people have discovered sizable chunks of SpaceX degree that survived reentry. I’m wondering when they’ll get their first kill.
All aerospace safety is, to some extent, “by luck”.
You’re talking specifically about the Dragon trunk, a few chunks of which have come down on people’s property. It’s not exactly fit as a children’s toy, but it’s not remotely in the same league as a Chinese booster with a few tons of residual nitrogen tetroxide.
Apparently the modeling by both SpaceX and NASA was insufficient–they thought it would burn up completely but it didn’t. Right now the trunk is jettisoned in a way that it could come down anywhere within its orbital track. With some small modifications to the flight plan, they can probably ensure that it comes down over the ocean. Or maybe they’ll be able to change the construction so that it does actually burn up completely.
Some pieces from the ISS also slammed into a guy’s house recently. Small events like this happen. There’s a difference between that and how China willfully ignores where their boosters land.
The fact that they’re chagrined puts them in a better position than most other legacy aerospace companies, who are still somewhat in denial about reusability. Ariane 6 is losing even European payloads to Falcon 9. Maybe that will finally embarrass them enough to try something else.
Indeed. In a way it’s almost respectable that they copy so blatantly. SpaceX provided the existence proof, and someone else may as well just go for the same route. It’s arguably to their detriment that Western companies aren’t so shameless.
Two thoughts.
- I had not heard of that bit with ISS. Not disputing you, but do you have a cite where I might read more? I wasn’t aware ISS was jettisoning parts to reenter later. Unless this was some long-dead booster component from an ISS assembly mission that finally came down.
- “Big planet little house” is perfectly reasonable hazard mitigation planning. It buys a lot of "9"s for very little money.
- “Big ocean little boat” costs a bit more, but you get a decent increment of "9"s for it.
Patents, dear boy, patents. Or at least I bet that’s got a lot to do with it. If a first mover can throw a big enough patent minefield out behind them as they advance into uncharted territory, it can really slow the progress of competitors even as the leader is showing them the way
That way being right through our minefield. Bwa ha ha. For enough money we’ll sell you a map (read “license our tech to you”).
The Chinese of course have a different view:
Patents? Patents?! Our judges don’ care you got no steenkin’ patents.
Yep:
It was a fairly routine upgrade of a battery pack back in 2021. Just dumb luck that it actually landed back in Florida.
Yeah. It’s not a completely trivial change–you need to put the trunk on one suborbital trajectory and the capsule itself on a different one (so they have no chance of collision). But it should be possible.
A link from NASA themselves in case you don’t quite trust Universe Today:
Thanks. No trustworthiness issues here.
That’s brings up an an interesting tradeoff. That whole pallet of rather dense metals massed 2600kg. And looks to have been a carrier with 9 or 12 battery modules strapped to it. Plus the carrier structure itself. It was ultimately a part to the carrier structure that hit the house.
Had they chucked each battery overboard separately and the carrier after that, the whole reentry mass would be the same. But with lots more surface area and perhaps more important, a lot less deeply buried and hence well-protected structure. Dumping the parts separately would (IMO) reduce the probability that any significant hunk would survive to impact the surface.
IMO anything that survives down to WAG 40K ft is slowed enough it’s going to reach the surface pretty much as-is. A droplet of molten whatever that was juuust about to fall off might do so, but pretty much, once the stuff is below Mach WAG 5 and in the lower atmosphere, it’s done reentering and is now just falling.
One thing is for sure; If I was gonna WAG what might survive reentry, a hefty Inconel pin is sure what it would be.
Hey! Who says Oldspace can’t do return to launch site reusability? 
I really have to wonder why they chose Inconel here. Rocket engine parts exposed to extreme stresses at high temperatures? Definitely. A… battery pack structure? Maybe they had good reason, but to me it screams using unobtanium just because they had a roughly unlimited budget, so why not. Even for their engines, SpaceX is trying to move away from Inconel because it’s too expensive.
At any rate, I agree with your cube-square reasoning. I wonder if the thing could have been designed with parts that are “glued” together with something that didn’t have much strength at temperature. It would break apart as soon as it got warm and then the individual pieces would easily burn up.
Some new pics of the booster to be used for IFT-5:
An interesting detail I just noticed. Take a look at this pic:
See how some of the stringers (the numerous vertical reinforcing bars) extend below where most of the rest do? I.e., the pink lines here:
Those are just below the catchpoint (the piece highlighted in green). And they slope from being even with the stringers to being even with the surface of the hull.
The chopsticks will grab around there. I believe the point of the slope is so the chopsticks can just go right against the hull, and then ride upwards (until they hit the catchpoint) without catching on the lower edge of the stringers (which has a relatively hard bottom edge. Otherwise, they could easily tear the stringers off.
I looked and the IFT-4 booster had these as well; I just didn’t notice. Kinda nifty. Well, we’ll see them in action soon enough. Musk predicts ~4 weeks.
Does SpaceX use a purpose built vehicle to move the booster, as Apollo did with that giant crawler (though that moved the whole stack)?
Not really. SpaceX uses SPMTs (self-propelled modular transporter) for most of their needs. They need some degree of customization to hold the objects properly, but they’re essentially off-the-shelf construction hardware.
It’s one enormous advantage of fully liquid-fueled rockets. Starship is huge but the booster is “only” around 200 tons unloaded. Easily within reach of SPMTs, cranes, etc., so transport is fairly easy.
In comparison, the SLS boosters weigh about 720 tons each. So it needs a gigantic crawler.
That said, as you note, Apollo used those crawlers as well. Seems like a bit of overkill since the Saturn V dry mass was also ~200 tons. Maybe they built them with future rockets in mind. And in any case, they didn’t have SPMTs then, so a large tracked vehicle was the only option.
Oh, right, for Apollo they transported the entire service structure as well:
The tower undoubtedly weighed many hundreds of tons. Not sure why they did it that way. But probably because it clearly had numerous attachment points and those were more easily installed within the Vehicle Assembly Building. Starship is designed to be just lifted into place, with very little human intervention required to hook up the umbilicals, etc.
You beat me to it. There was a lot on that crawler. I think they used the same one for Shuttle as well, but that may have been a lighter load.
Hm, I was under the impression that the Vehicle Assembly Building (the tallest one-story building in the world) had a ceiling height that just barely cleared the Saturn 5, but the gantry there is clearly well taller than the rocket. Did the gantry go inside the building, too?
I have to say, as impressive as Starship+Booster is. The Apollo V looks like a rocket that can take you to the Moon. That was one gorgeous launch vehicle. For whatever reason, the step design fits my aesthetic. Probably because that’s what I grew up with.
In the case of the Shuttle, they didn’t transport the tower. So while the rocket was way heavier (due to the solid boosters), without the tower it’s hard to say how it came out overall.
I’d predict that the Shuttle’s service structure masses way more than the Saturn V’s one. It’s just way more involved for whatever reason:
