This afternoon, Next Spaceflight showed that Tuesday's Starship Flight Test 12 had been pushed back until Wednesday, May 20, at the same time of 6:30 PM EDT. I haven't seen an explanation of what led to the extra day, so I can't rule out another slip out later after this one, but that's pretty much always the case.
It's hard to overstate how important this launch is to SpaceX, and by extension to the space industry and the US space programs. There are two fairly big articles about the modifications that brought the Starship from version 2 to 3 for this mission, and there's a lot riding on it. Again, not just for SpaceX but for the US space program, and the private space launch industry in general.
For the details on getting from version 2 to 3, SpaceX themselves have a large article on their web presence, under their updates, in this case devoted to just the version 2 to 3 update.
The article that I think gives the better overview is by Eric Berger at Ars Technica, and titled, "The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver?" This is the one that I think will have more meaning for readers who have been following the development of Starship since they first started talking about it and testing ideas. Like the first awkward hops in August 2019 by the little version of Starship they called Hoppy.
Eric starts from a high level view of how different Starship and SuperHeavy booster are from pretty much every other rocket you've ever heard of. Something he doesn't talk about in these few words is how hard what they're trying to do is. Gravity is tough taskmaster. I've never really played with the math on these things, or any of the (sort of) games and simulations like Kerbal Space or others, but one of the things that comes out of studying spaceflight is that at some size planet, the gravitational pull is strong enough that it's not possible to get away from the planet. Earth is said to be close to that size, such that if we were not much bigger than we are, we could never even get into low Earth orbits. (And I don't want to give a number for how much bigger because I just don't know enough)
Where this converges onto Starship is that this is the largest rocket humans have ever created. The performance that can be obtained is a tough fight.
And yet everything SpaceX aspires to accomplish in the next quarter of a century, all of its enormous valuation, is predicated on a new launch vehicle. A rocket that, to date, has a decidedly mixed record of success. A rocket that has not flown in seven months. A rocket that, finally, may return to the skies on Wednesday.
We are speaking, of course, of Starship—a truly revolutionary rocket. If it works. And after a long period of development and three years of test flights and setbacks, it kind of has to.
A saying that I grew up around so I've had in my head for a good 50 years or more, is "when you try to do things no one has ever done before, you'll see things no one has ever seen before." They may be finding problems in the way SuperHeavy does something that no one in history has ever seen. Could that fact be a reason why they've had more troubles than they thought? Instead of scaling up older designs easily, they find the materials don't work right or other things they didn't consider "just ain't right" because no one has ever done this before. Remember, Starship and SuperHeavy started out to be carbon fiber because it's just the way everyone does this. Early in preliminary design, someone realized that stainless steel had serious advantages and SpaceX shifted to stainless early in the process.
I've covered this before, but consider the engines that NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) uses - the couple of SLS flights that have flown both were powered by Space Shuttle Main Engines that actually flew on Shuttle missions. The SSMEs happen to have almost the same thrust as the Raptor engines SpaceX has been developing for Starship. In May of 2020, I found out that the first stage engines for SLS cost $146 million per engine, so nearly $600 million ($584 m) for just the four engines of the booster core. The SSMEs are rated at 512,000 pounds of thrust and both SpaceX's Raptor 2 and the newer Raptor 3 are in the same class. The Raptor's design price point is under $1 million.
I took a picture of Raptor 1 next to Raptor 2 and added a newer (and color) picture of the Raptor 3. The change from 2 to 3 isn't as dramatic as the Raptor 1 to 2, but the simplification is visible. Yes, those are Raptors 1, 2, 3 from left to right.
The mass of the Raptor sea-level engines has been reduced from 1,630 kg to 1,525 kg - just over 1000 kg, or 2200 lbs. Overall vehicle-level mass savings reach approximately 1 ton per engine through simplification of the engine itself, vehicle-side commodities, and supporting hardware. There are 33 of these engines in the SuperHeavy, so that's a savings of 33 tons that the vehicle was lifting that's now available for payload.
Well, I don't want to quote everything that Berger talks about in his article, but it's an honest and realistic look at Starship and SuperHeavy. As he said, Starship has absolutely had a mixed record of success, with several bad problems in the last couple of years. Who can forget things like the loss of Starship 8 on the way to the Indian ocean raining Starship debris over Caribbean islands?
Debris from Starship falls back into the atmosphere in this view over Hog Cay, Bahamas, in March 2025. Credit: GeneDoctorB via X
I've frequently noted that when it comes to the private launch industry, it's SpaceX and then everyone else. While Starship hasn't lifted a single pound to orbit for any entity, SpaceX lifted over 82% of all the mass put into orbit in 2025. That's pretty much all due to the Falcon 9.
At least SpaceX is experimenting.
ReplyDeleteAs to using steel in rockets, yeah, when you're throwing away all the pieces parts and not reusing and not lifting excessively large amounts of potential cargo, aluminum and carbon fiber are okay. But repeated uses, dealing with launching and reentry under huge amounts of stress, stainless steel does seem to be the best (as predicted by John Ringo in his "The Reaches" trilogy.)
And the savings on Raptor 3 aren't just 33 tons, you have to add the savings on the 3 Raptors and 3 Raptor Vacuums on Starship. That's 6 tons right there removed from the liftoff weight of the whole stack, and then 6 tons saved on Starship by itself.
But it looks like some of that savings will be added back to both Booster and potentially Starship if indeed SpaceX is looking at barge landing either of them.
Very interesting. It's almost like back in the early days of rockets in the late 40's and early 50's. Where there were as many 'failures' as successes. Each failure, of course, was a teaching/learning moment. With all the telemetry and video that SpaceX has on each launch, the teaching/learning is drastically accellerated.