I have to wonder why they have made the launchpad systems so complicated? Arms to catch the booster?
Wouldn’t it be better to just do a powered landing like Falcon? So it would not be dependant on any particular landing site. True, landing legs are dead weight for almost all the mission… but heck, we’re going to be flying these almost daily in the future aren’t we? Premature optimization is the root of all evil, as the saying goes.
There are several reasons. The first is that it saves the weight of the landing legs and supporting structure. For something as large as Superheavy that was a substantial weight savings.
Another reason is cost. Landing legs have to be added to every rocket, but the tower ‘chopsticks’ only have to be built once. Must has said repeatedly that one of his engineering principles is ‘the best part is no part’. Simplify the rocket, move the complexity to the fixed structure. Expensive at first, but a time/money saver when the rocket is operational and dozens are flying.
Catching the booster and rocket means they can be precisely positioned, which lowers turnaround time substantially. This is critical because Starship depends on orbital refueling, which in turn requires five or six tanking fligts to refill Starship, If it took days between each flight to recover the rocket, transport it back to the pad and re-stack it, this plan either falls apart or gets much slower and more expensive.
Musk wants turnaround times for tanking flights to be on the order of an hour or two. The only way to do that is to land the rocket right back on the launch pad, and if you are goung to do that, why not just catch it?
It’s the kind of risky, out-of-the-box thinking that has been the hallmark of SpaceX from day one. If it works, it will cut the cost of Starship operations dramatically. No crawlers needed, No recovery crews, etc. And you minimize the downtime of a very expensive puece of equipment.
Those are the big ones, I’d say. A relatively minor extra benefit is the reduction in reflected ground energy. Landing directly on a pad puts the engines very close to the concrete surface, with all the problems with reflected heat and debris.
Falcon 9 handles this ok, but Super Heavy and Starship are so much larger that there’s a lot more energy involved. Suspending them well above the surface should reduce the issues.
The HLS (lunar Starship) will have a separate ring of engines much further up to avoid debris problems. Should work, but the extra mass/complexity isn’t great. And that’s probably not viable for Mars, so they may just have to burn some mass on shielding.
Good points. I suspect we will eventually have many variants of Starship. We already know of three - The basic Starship, the HLS Starship (with legs and ring-mounted engines), and the ‘fuel depot’ Starship which is extended in length to accomodate more tankage. I suspect we will eventially see a new type for Mars landing, a Starlink-launching version with the Pez Dispenser, research-based Starships that have laboratories built into them and will fly as temporary space Stations, general satellite Starships with clamshell fairings, and probably military versions. ‘Starship’ will be the general family designator like ‘737’ is for jets, but woth lots of variations within the family.
Yeah, I wonder if it’ll evolve into a more modular architecture to make it easier to build variations. It’s already not bad: the ring-based construction means they can easily create shorter and longer variations, and the interior volume is so large that it can accommodate a bunch of different things. But something even more plug-and-play could be interesting. The dream would be some Kerbal-like system where you can just stack modules for power, life support, cargo, habs, propellant, etc. without a huge extra development effort. Hey, I’m allowed to fantasize…
I think the space station idea has real merit. Starship’s internal cargo volume is roughly the same size as the entire ISS. Why build a dedicated space station which will become obsolete over time, when you could just outfit a Starship as a lab and orbit it for a mission duration? You don’t need to get astronauts to/from the station - the station takes them up and brings them home. Long-term experiments could be on a permanent station.
Also, why not make the next ‘Hubble’ a telescope built right into a Starship, like SOPHIA was built into a 747? Starship is wide enough to almost handle a JWST-sized mirror without folding. Being able to do final installation on the ground wothout in-space deployment would lower costs dramatically, and upgrades could be performed by just landing the thing, upgrading it, and flying it up again.
Starship will require rethinking of a lot,of space activity.
Or, better idea, build a space telescope that dwarfs the JWST and has to be folded just to fit into Starship 
When it comes to space telescopes, bigger IS better.
Absolutely. And I don’t think you want to be hauling a telescope up to orbit and back down mulitple times. All that would put a lot of stress on it and after a while it’d probably become difficult to even get it into alignment.
There are more simple, more reliable ways to catch the booster. Sometimes Musk chooses the more spectacular option even while admitting it might be a dumb mistake.
…but nothing motivates a team of engineers more than a challenge like that.
The booster catcher isn’t anything like the complicated bit. It is just the eye candy part. They wanted a flexible crane integrated into the tower, one that can mount a second stage/starship. It turned out to be not a big jump for it to be capable of handling the returning booster. Given Falcons regularly bullseye their landing it isn’t a huge stretch.
The real complexity is in the mount. They realised that they could place a significant part of the engine startup systems for most of the 33 raptors on the mount and not adding mass to the booster. This leads to some very complex and intricate hold downs and disconnects and lots of interesting plumbing.
Nonetheless estimates that it would cost a billion odd to replace seem quite far fetched. SpaceX isn’t NASA and this isn’t Artemis. There is already another one being constructed at the cape.
The complexity of the launch mount should definitely not be underestimated. They have 20 articulated gas/liquid transfer arms, each mating to one of the 20 outside engines. There must be some pretty sophisticated systems enabling the transfer plates to mate properly, etc. I can’t believe it’s all done just by natural alignment; it’s just way too big for the sub-millimeter precision you’d need to have it all fit together without some kind of automatic alignment system.
Maybe the Boca Chica one cost $1B. But the second one in Florida should be cheaper.
Supposedly, Sam Patel–the current director of operations in Boca Chica–is being moved to Florida to oversee operations there. And Gwynne Shotwell is being moved to Texas to oversee Starbase now that it’s getting close to being operational. Seems like a good fit, especially as I believe Sam considers Florida to be “home,” and the same with Shotwell and Texas. It was very impressive to see Starbase ride up from virtually nothing over the course of a few years, so I’m sure Florida will be a walk in the park in comparison.
I never said the mount itself cost $1 billion to build. I was thinking of the total cost of a big failure like that - a delay in a program of that size is extremely expensive. Not just the cost of the tower, but the opportunity cost of having the Starship team set back for months, lost revenue, time/value of money, etc. Basically the kind of costs incurred when any large industrial project gets delayed. Rebuilding the tower is just part of it.
There’s also the loss of a Starship, a Superheavy booster, and the 40 Raptor engines that are part of it. The first one is going to be lost anyway, but a failure like this would probably require throwing a second one away as well.
I’d say the mount is more complicated, but the catch is more complex. Even F9 doesn’t have the landing accuracy that is required, although Booster’s hovering capability might help with this. Either way, I don’t see mastering the landing the 1st or even 2nd goal of the program.
Of course; why call a rocket a Falcon if it doesn’t have feathers? (Or the one called Atlas that didn’t come with maps… 
)
I saw an analysis that suggested one problem was that unlike the Apollo launch sites, the Boca Raton pad does not have angled deflectors and so firing up all the engines at once is more destructive because the blast is deflected back up.
Boca Chica.
Boca Chica is in the mostly deserted wilds of Texas. Boca Raton is in Florida in the heavily populated greater Miami Metroblob.
Both are on the seashore, but the similarity ends there.
That’s some catch, that catch-20.
Probably at least one catch too far.
No launch in 2022. I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: no launch in 2023 either.
Musk has lost interest. Wasting time and money on twitter. For what he paid, SpaceX could have built a new launch site somewhere outside the jurisdiction of the FAA and got on with the job.
No, he can’t. SpaceX’s activities are covered under ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulatiins) , which prevents them from moving out of the US without permission.
Funny how people can simultaneously believe that Musk is a fraud who can’t do engineering himself but just takes credit for others’ work, while at the same time believing that he is so crucial to SpaceX and Tesla that the companies are failing while he works on Twitter.
There will be at least one orbital launch attempt this year, probably in the first quarter. SpaceX is accumulating engines and rocket bodies, and can’t keep testing forever. Their burn rate on Starship funding has to be incredible.
In addition, the commitment to Artemis really requires that they get moving. 2024 is already an unachievable time frame for landing on the moon, but if Starship doesn’t fly this year there is no way they’d be ready to take part in Artemis until at least 2025 and more likely 2026. SpaceX does not want to be the long pole in the Artemis mission stack.
How many flights there are will depend on results. If Starship blows up on the pad, that may be the last flight for quite a while. Otherwise, success or failure there will be multiple orbital attempts this year.
Sam Stone: “No, he can’t. SpaceX’s activities are covered under ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulatiins) , which prevents them from moving out of the US without permission.”
Hmm, how about an entirely new company, incorporated in, say, Belize? Close to the equator for the launch speed advantage? They’d probably love the investment.
I don’t think D D Harriman would have missed that…(obligatory Heinlein reference)…
Aside: does anyone think Blue Origin is ever going to do anything useful?