Let me start out with the little things you'd probably want to know if you haven't spent time trying to keep up. The big launches the most people are tracking have all slid to the right on the calendars. New Glenn's maiden flight is now scheduled for Sunday morning, Jan. 12 at 1:00 AM EST. Starship Flight Test 7 is now scheduled for Monday afternoon, Jan 13 at 5:00 PM EST. To keep up with these, it's hard to beat NextSpaceflight.com/launches. SpaceX has had three successful launches so far this year, all from Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. Their fourth flight of the year is tonight, Wednesday Jan 9 at 10:53PM EST from Vandenberg SFB.
Monday's Flight Test 7 is going to feature the Block 2 Starship, and while we talked about that some on Tuesday, Ars Technica's Stephen Clark did another dive on the subject today. Starship 33 was rolled to the launch pad today. In the next couple of days, the ship will be stacked on the Super Heavy booster, tested and verified to be ready for launch.
"The upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempt Starship’s first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster," SpaceX officials wrote in a mission overview posted on the company's website.
The modifications to Starship to add the Pez dispenser for the simulated Starlink satellites and increasing the sizes of the propellant tanks add nearly 6 feet to the rocket's height, bringing the full stack to roughly 404 feet tall. Yes, that means SpaceX will break their own record for the world's largest launch vehicle. And they're going to break this record in "a few" more launches when they go to the next version (Block 3) Starship. SpaceX says those will have nine upper stage engines, instead of six, and will deliver up to 440,000 pounds of cargo to low-Earth orbit. Yeah, nearly a half million pounds of cargo on one launch.
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, a little more than 17 minutes into the flight, Starship will deploy 10 dummy payloads similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites. The mock-ups will soar around the world on a suborbital trajectory, just like Starship, and reenter over the unpopulated Indian Ocean. Future Starship flights will launch real next-gen Starlink satellites to add capacity to the Starlink broadband network, but they're too big and too heavy to launch on SpaceX's smaller Falcon 9 rocket.
As they did in the last flight test, SpaceX will reignite one of the ship's Raptor engines on orbit.
The engine restart capability is important for several reasons. It gives the ship the ability to maneuver itself out of low-Earth orbit for reentry (not a concern for Starship's suborbital tests), and will allow the vehicle to propel itself to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars once SpaceX masters the technology for orbital refueling.
Starship is closely related to what NASA is calling the Human Landing System or HLS for Artemis. That is, HLS is derived from Starship but isn't exactly the same. Apparently NASA wants more tests of lighting Raptor engines in a very cold environment, I assume as a confidence-builder.
SpaceX continues to experiment with Starship's heat shield, which the company's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has described as "the biggest technology challenge remaining with Starship." In order for SpaceX to achieve its lofty goal of launching Starships multiple times per day, the heat shield needs to be fully and immediately reusable.
While the last three ships have successfully splashed down to end the mission, the ships lost some heat shield tiles while going through reentry.
Engineers removed tiles from some areas of the ship for next week's test flight in order to "stress-test" vulnerable parts of the vehicle. They also smoothed and tapered the edge of the tile line, where the ceramic heat shield gives way to the ship's stainless steel skin, to address "hot spots" observed during reentry on the most recent test flight.
"Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry," SpaceX said.
Starship Block 2 has smaller flaps than previous ships. The flaps are located in a more leeward position to protect them from the heat of reentry. Credit: SpaceX
Comments by Musk after Flight Test 6 strongly implied that this should be the last Starship mission to go suborbital and splash down in an ocean. What they're planning will require at least one full orbit.
"We will do one more ocean landing of the ship," Musk posted. "If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower."
This is just astounding. This is about what I expected to see in the 1980's when I was a kid in the 60's.
ReplyDeleteBig, gleaming rockets that take off and land on their tails.
Heinlein would be proud.
Now all we need are nuclear powered space-only ships. Launch non-nuke Starships to orbit, trans-ship the cargo to the nuclear Starships and get to and from Mars in a third of the time.
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