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SpaceX Starship Updates – How did SN5 do? – Super Heavy: How to fit 31 Raptor Engines
My name is Felix and I am your host for todays Episode of What about it!?
And as always, there has been a lot going on in the Space Industry lately, so let’s dive right in!
Starship Updates
So, this is it! The moment, we’ve been waiting for such a long time
now. A Starship prototype took flight and the whole space enthusiast world is talking about it.
Some praise it into the sky, saying that this basically is the start of the Mars colony
and others say, that this was nothing. Merely a large grain silo with a rocket engine not even flying higher than
150 meters. But what’s the truth? How did Starship Serial Number 5 do and what are the implications?
On the evening of August 4th, SpaceX finally was ready to go past T-0 and light up a Raptor engine once again
after last years Hopper flight. Starship serial number 5 equipped with Raptor Serial Number 27, a full flow staged combustion engine
fueled by methane and oxygen soared up to 150 meters into the Boca Chica sky
and made it over to the landing pad for a safe landing.
An incredible achievement by SpaceX and no doubt a historic moment for the Spaceflight Industry.
There are two things about this flight, that arguably didn’t go as smooth as possible.
One being a test stand, that got ripped apart by the Raptor engine exhaust right after liftoff. Now, I’ve played the footage
over and over again and I am fairly sure, that this debris is from the stand.
It also involves an explosion and a small fire
ball, so it’s very likely, that fuel and or oxidizer were involved.
So, what got ripped apart might have been a part of the fueling system.
Nothing to be of concern though as it did not influence Serial number 5’s flight.
Next up we have a small fire on the Raptor engine itself. In the beautiful footage, provided by SpaceX
we also have a camera pointing directly at the engine while the Starship prototype was in flight. Here
you can see the fire starting fairly soon into the flight. This too though didn’t seem to influence the Starships performance at all.
The Raptor engine kept on working flawlessly. The exhaust with its beautiful mach diamonds looked blue and clean throughout the flight,
not indicating any combustion problems during the burn.
If we take a look at last year’s Starhopper flight again,
we see quite the different picture. During the first part of the flight, the Engine performed well,
but the longer the burn lasted, the more problems were visible on the engine. Towards the end of the flight, the exhaust turned completely
yellow, which is a strong indicator for a bad combustion process. Rocket enthusiasts
also jokingly refer to this as engine rich exhaust, meaning that the engine eats itself during operation.
You rock, Scott Manley!
On Starship Serial number 5’s flight though
nothing
like this was visible at all. Raptor serial number 27
delicately balanced the flight with careful thrust vector control and brought the Starship to a presumably soft landing.
I say presumably, because if we look at pictures from after the flight for example from LabPadre, who by the way did a
ridiculously awesome job of broadcasting the whole event, we can see that Serial Number 5 is sitting on the pad slightly
tilted. This could be a result of a rough landing. Again though,
not nearly as rough as Starhopper, where the legs punched through the concrete landing pad during touchdown.
Musk tweeted after the test flight, that the Starship Legs right now are in flux.
Large design changes are coming for the future with possible flip out legs in the end.
The next iteration of legs will already be 60%
larger and in the end, SpaceX is now planning to have legs similar to Falcon legs, but capable of landing on unimproved
surfaces with auto-leveling capabilities,
which will very much be needed on Mars.
So, it seems like the flip out Falcon legs really are the best way to go right now.
On Episode 92 I talked about possible Falcon 9 flip out legs for Super Heavy as seen on one of the signs at the
Boca Chica site as possibly the only good solution for a wider and more stable stand
and back then I got a lot of disagreement on the comments, that this was a long forgotten
idea and that future designs would look different. I even got called Wrong about it,
which made me smile quite a bit back then. original!
Now, that Elon Musk has confirmed flip out legs for future Starships,
the discussion should get new traction and I am keen to see future prototypes already!
So, how did Starship Serial number 5 do? There were many out at the site taking beautiful footage of the test flight. LabPadre, Tim Dodd with Gene and Rachel from Spadre,
Trevor Mahlmann,
John
Randolph and many others. All of them filming from a different perspective and
Gene & Rachel from Spadre together with Tim Dodd the everyday astronaut even had a 4k camera running at high FPS
to get us some incredible slow-motion footage of the flight and it is perfect to describe the flights performance.
Even though the whole stack including propellant was somewhere between
150 and 200 tons in weight,
it delicately moved through the air, never looking uncontrolled or in danger.
The full flow staged combustion Raptor engine, something never really achieved by any other launch provider, did very well.
All this shows one very important thing. It is actually possible, to build a rocket with a very efficient and
never before accomplished engine concept out of stainless steel mostly assembled in the open, extremely fast and cheap and make it fly.
No clean room.
No
10-year planning phase and a price tag arguably much lower than anything out there.
SpaceX right now is finding solutions to problems
no one would have thought to be solvable before. Serial Number 5’s flight can without a doubt be called a huge milestone.
Not because it’s a fully built Starship or because soon we’ll land on Mars.
That’s quite a bit down the road still. Instead demonstrating that a full-scale starship prototype can be built and operated with such a
non-conventional method is the real breakthrough here. SpaceX and Elon Musk have demonstrated that it can be done. Now,
the only thing to do is to continue down the road taken.
Systems need to be designed, fleshed out and tested. New ideas need to be developed
until the prototype is ready for a first orbital flight. Once this milestone has been achieved, many doubters will be silenced again.
Musk has already said on Twitter, that this was just the beginning. Several short
hops are to follow before SpaceX goes higher altitude with a full Starship including fins
and nose cone. What this might look like was nicely animated by Orbital Wedge in a short animation.
SpaceX will start to get data with the aerodynamic surfaces.
This will be crucial for any orbital flight and it will be the next big proof of concept for the Starship program.
It will be incredibly exciting to watch the progress in the future!
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If there’s one thing, I’ve learned over time while following Elon Musk’s achievements,
it’s that laughing about the initial idea almost all of the time is the wrong reaction.
He’s proven countless times now that he can deliver and Starship Serial number 5 is just one more milestone on an
ever growing list of successful endeavors.
Super Heavy: How to fit 31 Raptor Engines
Next up,
let’s take a look at the component again
that will make Starship complete. The Super Heavy booster, necessary for orbital flight with any meaningful payload capacity.
Most of us will know this animation by now.
It’s been played many times as it shows the grand plan, SpaceX is trying to turn into reality.
Since we right now only see Starship prototypes over and over again,
it’s easy to forget about the second major component of the plan. Super Heavy.
The gigantic fully reusable booster rocket, supposed to give Starships the needed thrust to actually get to orbit
with the intended 100 tons of payload capacity.
And just to put this into perspective again
Ariane 5 has a payload capacity of 21 metric tons Delta IV Heavy, the might ULA rocket, has a capacity of
28.7 metric tons
Long March 5, the strongest Chinese rocket has a capacity of 25 metric tons
Falcon Heavy in theory can do 38 to 45 tons to LEO.
New Glenn, once it flies, will do 45 metric tons in theory. The Space Shuttle did
24.4 metric tons and the list goes on. Besides Saturn V, which was able to get an incredible
140 metric tons to LEO, there’s nothing else comparable and if you get it down to price per kilogram to LEO,
we finally end up in a whole new world. Starships will be insanely cheap due to the way they’re made.
And all this due to a fully reusable concept. And Super Heavy is part of this concept.
One crucial part of a fully reusable rocket is maintenance and SpaceX want to break records here too. For Super Heavy, Musk
spoke of 3 launches per day.
In many aspects, Starships will be comparable to modern aviation.
Airliners are fully reusable, capable of fast turnarounds and are optimized to produce as little running costs as possible
while at the same time being extremely reliable and safe to use.
But how does the aviation industry achieve this goal? Maintenance is needed on a regular basis.
This can’t be avoided. But it can be streamlined. Modern airliners are modular.
They have interchangeable parts and are built for ease of access for engineers to constantly be able to work on
internals and replace broken parts on the fly.
What if this concept could be done with a rocket. Without a doubt the king of reusability
right now is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster. It recently broke SpaceShuttle Atlantis’s standing record of 54 days set in
1985 and set the new mark at 51 days. An incredible achievement and an
extremely difficult task to do with a traditional rocket.
With an incredibly streamlined process and maybe even more important a rocket designed for easy refurbishment and maintenance,
the Falcon 9 booster does something, no one else has ever achieved before.
It flies over and over again and the turnaround is only a little over 7 weeks.
But how will SpaceX get this down to a few hours with Super Heavy?
Here you can see a modular engine concept developed by Callum, who was so kind to let me work with it and
use it for todays Episode.
Make sure to check out his twitter for more absolutely stunning SpaceX 3D part schematics.
Awesome work! You Rock!
This is one possible solution for fast maintenance and part replacement
SpaceX and Elon Musk have already talked about before. The main problem when it comes to Super Heavy maintenance will be the engines themselves.
31 Raptor engines with according to Elon Musk’s plan 3 ascend burns and at least three more landing burns.
Constantly under stress and never to fail.
So, the engines will need to be easily accessible and replaceable in case of a damaged part similar to
what we can see on a modern airliner. One possible solution for this could be to make them modular. This includes
valves included in the module itself and not the tank as it traditionally would be the case.
Bolted connections for fast replacements, all fuel turbo pumps oriented outwards for ease of access and replacement.
Two different kinds of modules would be needed, as SpaceX is planning to use two different kinds of Raptor engines. A gimbal version
in the center to be able to steer the booster using thrust vector control. And non-gimbal version with more thrust but no TVC capability.
This 3D model is still based on a Super Heavy booster with 42 Raptor engines and the current design idea is down to 31 Raptor engines
right now, so the modules will be smaller, but that doesn’t really make a difference.
It will make maintenance even easier, as there will be more room to play with when having to fit in les engines overall.
The core idea though stays the same. An inner module with gimbal raptors and several outer modules with
non-gimbal and higher thrust output Raptor engines. All of them built with the same layout. All of them
interchangeable and easily taken out or fitted in.
As seen here, even with a scissor lift and crawl space in between module and thrust dome for installation and maintenance.
Only the center module with it’s gimbal Raptors in this case would need to be directly attached to the thrust puck.
The rest of the thrust structure would be able to use more area to be able to transfer the thrust to the rocket boosters structure.
This idea is not new. SpaceX is using a similar idea already on its Falcon 9 boosters. And the idea evolved over time.
It’s called octaweb. First used on Falcon 9 v1.1
it was a substantial improvement to previous falcon 9 designs. Where before, the engines were arranged in a square,
SpaceX now went for a round setup.
This was mainly done to make each engine segment the same.
This way, SpaceX only had to manufacture one engine layout. Each one was the same now and interchangeable.
In this picture made by Eric Ralph
you can even see the modularity in between the engines. Same concept too.
One gimbal engine in the middle with more space for free movement and several outer engines spaced together much tighter.
In my opinion, Callums approach for a modular Super Heavy engine setup is almost 100% sure the way to go for SpaceX
and we can very likely expect something like this for the development future in Boca Chica Texas.
If a 3 launch per day cadence is the goal, Super Heavy boosters will have to go new ways though.
As said in the beginning of the topic, SpaceX is at 51 days right now.
So, going down to 3 times per day is a whole other category.
If you want to have fast results, modularity and flexibility are very important.
You want to be able to adapt to any sort of situation and be able to implement one solution into as many tasks as possible.
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