Saurabh Singh
Starship is a fully-reusable and super heavy-lift launch vehicle in development by SpaceX. Both of its stages – Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft – use liquid oxygen and liquid methane as propellant. Starship’s main features are its very high payload mass capability and low potential operating cost. A tanker variant spacecraft is planned that will refuel other Starships in orbit, increasing the 100 t (220,000 lb) transport range to higher energy orbits and destinations, including the Moon and Mars. The earliest Starship variant will deploy satellites, while later variants will also serve space tourists, or be optimised for lunar landings. Starship’s potentially low cost is key in enabling SpaceX’s Mars ambitions as well as making point-to-point rocket travel on Earth possible.
• SpaceX explained the planned trajectory of the first orbital flight of the Starship system in a report sent to the Federal Communications Commission. The rocket is planned to launch from Starbase, then Super Heavy will separate and perform a soft water landing around 30 km (20 mi) from the Texan shoreline. The spacecraft will continue flying with its ground track passing through the Straits of Florida, and then softly land in the Pacific Ocean around 100 km (60 mi) northwest of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. The whole spaceflight will last ninety minutes.
• Starship may enable the launching of larger space telescopes, such as the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission that can directly image planets outside the Solar System. Some planetary science researchers incorporate Starship into their research, citing low launch cost and high capacity.
• An analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think-tank wrote possible military-use cases of Starship. One of them is the deployment of military satellites, replacing ones destroyed by anti-satellite weapons. Another is the launch of many reconnaissance satellites to fill gaps if larger satellites in a higher orbit were destroyed.WaleedAbdalati, a former NASA Chief Scientist, stated the rocket may enable recovery of space debris, which are defunct artificial objects in space.
• As it ascends from the launch pad, the combined Starship system will begin to pitch over towards the intended orbit. When the upper stage separates in space, Super Heavy flips over while falling back towards Earth. As it descends, Super Heavy will deploy steel structures called “grid fins”, shaped a bit like potato waffles, from the sides of the booster. These will help steer the rocket stage back towards its launch pad so it can be flown again.
• SpaceX has an ambitious plan to then catch the falling booster using its launch tower.This tower provides engineers and crew members with access to the spacecraft and rocket while they are sitting on the pad before launch. A pair of steel arms will extend out from the launch tower. The grid fins will then take the load as the spent booster falls onto these arms. The tower has been dubbed “Mechazilla” because of its resemblance to a creature from the Godzilla movies.
• For long-haul trips to Mars and back – which could take up to nine months each way -Elon Musk is looking to install around 40 cabins in the payload area near the front of the upper stage. “You could conceivably have five or six people per cabin, if you really wanted to crowd people in. But I think mostly we would expect to see two or three people per cabin, and so nominally about 100 people per flight to Mars,” Musk said.
• The payload bay would also host common areas, storage space, a galley and a shelter where people could gather to shield from solar storms, where the Sun belches out harmful charged particles into space. Starship will also play a key role in Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon. In April 2021, the US space agency awarded SpaceX with a $2.89bn contract to develop Starship into a lander capable of delivering astronauts to the lunar surface this decade.
• The version tailored for Artemis flights would not possess the heat shield or flaps that are necessary for a return journey to Earth. Instead, the Starship Human Landing System would remain in space after its initial launch from Earth, so that it could eventually be used for multiple trips between lunar orbit and the Moon’s surface. The uncrewed, or cargo, version of Starship features a payload bay that opens up like the mouth of a crocodile. This would allow it to be used for launching satellites.
• SpaceX says the huge payload capacity opens up possibilities for new types of robotic science mission, including telescopes larger than the James Webb observatory – the forthcoming successor to Hubble. The system could also be used for space tourism: Elon Musk has promised a trip around the Moon in 2023 to the Japanese online retail billionaire YusakuMaezawa. It could also carry out high-speed journeys between different destinations on Earth.Musk says that Starship could eventually carry people to destinations in the “greater Solar System”, including gas giants such as Jupiter. But this remains a long-term objective.
• In the last few years, SpaceX has tested various prototypes of the upper stage at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.The company started off in 2019 with a 39m-tall “test article” called Starhopper – which bore a passing resemblance to a water tower – and flew it to 150m above ground.The first prototype to feature a nosecone and flaps – Starship serial number (SN8) – flew to an altitude of 12.5km in December 2020. It belly flopped back to Earth, giving SpaceX valuable engineering data about the final part of the vehicle’s return from space. However, SN8 approached the landing pad a little too fast and hard, causing it to crumple and explode. Three more test articles exploded before Starship SN15 achieved success with a soft landing in May 2021. SpaceX plans to launch Starship on Super Heavy for its first orbital test flight in 2022.
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