SpaceX Starship

All the eyes in the space enthusiast community are fixed at tesla's starship facility at boca chica texas this is all in anticipation of the first ever flight test of spacex's booster stage for the starship aptly named the super heavy and from all the details we know about super heavy we can say for sure that there will be a lot of super heavy carrying being done by this massive 230 foot tall powerhouse so let us briefly dive into why super heavy is a game changer in the space industry and what are the things that make it so great to understand the significance of the super heavy and elon musk's plan to eventually colonize mars with a massive fleet of starships we first need to take a brief tour of the development history of the super heavy project but to keep it brief we will just skim through the overall evolution of spacex's starship project because yes super heavy has been part of the starship program from the start as a booster stage for any future rocket that would be used for interplanetary travel we know that spacex was developing a launch vehicle to go to mars as far back as 2012.

Spacex ceo and potential mars colonizer elon musk mentioned that spacex was already working on a launch vehicle that would be developed into a fleet of spaceships that would take humanity to mars it was called the mars colonial transport back then or mct for short and the past nine years haven't diverted from the core design choices made back then for such a transport spaceship spacex wanted to create reusable rockets this would be done in two stages the first stage would be a massive booster rocket that would do most of the grunt work for helping the second stage i.e the rocket carrying the passengers and cargo into orbit this second stage once in orbit or near orbit would separate from the booster stage and continue the journey on its own power this was not something new nasa and other national space agencies had been doing that for decades booster stages were a pretty common concept in space flight to cut down the weight a rocket ship had to carry especially because it would become dead weight once all the fuel and oxidizer was used up spacex wanted to go a step further usually booster rockets would just drop into the ocean or desert sometimes they can be refurbished and used again but other times these booster stage rockets would just be a useless hunk of metal for scrap elon thought why not make these rockets reusable and develop technologies to land the boosters in one piece it also went really well with spacex's whole vision of using reusable rockets and spacex would go ahead to have very significant success with their reusable rocket the falcon 9.

This program went through multiple designs and even name changes as the starship project evolved into what it is today after the development of the mars colonial transport for a few years nearing the end of september 2016 elon musk pointed out that since the transporter would be able to go beyond mars a name change was needed the name selected at the time was interplanetary transport system or its for short but this would be short-lived as one year later elon musk while talking at the 68th annual meeting of the international astronautical congress said that they were still searching for the right name but internally it was being called the bfr the more formal meaning of this acronym was big falcon rocket but informally inside the company and on the internet it was known by a less clean name meanwhile its booster stage would just be known as the booster stage or the first stage of the rocket throughout it wasn't until 2019 when the project settled for its final name starship that the booster stage got its own unique identity as the super heavy side by side with the development of the starship program for years spacex was also developing their own engine that would be used to power both the starship the upper stage and super heavy the booster stage this engine which we now know as the raptor engine was specifically being designed for these two rockets while a detailed discussion on the raptor engine merits its own video in short the raptor engine was made with four things in mind one it should be very cheap to produce two it should be very easy to mass produce it meaning the design should be as simple as possible three it should be very easy to source the fuel for it on mars four it should be made with reusability in mind and up until now it seems that spacex will be able to live to these goals and these are the bad boys that will power the super heavy into orbit exactly 33 of them the number keeps changing initially it was announced that 37 raptor engines would power the super heavy then it came down to 31 engines in 2020. 

Then elon later tweeted the number would be 28. since then we are sitting on 33 being the number of raptor engines that will power the rocket so where do we currently stand with the super heavy the super heavy stands at 70 meters in height and 9 meters in diameter super heavies are designated by the term bn and then a number bn1 and bn2 prototypes didn't make it to testing the first time we saw the super heavy in its full glory was the bn3 or booster 3 as the press likes to call it after being developed for two months super heavy bm3 was taxi to a launch pad and assemble but it was later revealed that bn3 would just be restricted to ground tests the final variant of the super heavy is planned to be powered using 33 raptor engines according to elon musk this will be in a 2010 three configuration meaning 20 raptor engines in the outside ring then 10 in the inner ring and finally three more inside all 33 raptor engines combined would give the super heavy a thrust of 27 mega newtons to put this into comparison nasa's saturn v rocket the largest rocket that nasa ever operated only produced a thrust of 35 mega newtons so this is not something to joke about the plan with a super heavy is that once it helps the second stage reach orbit it will perform a deorbit burn and then fall back to earth but instead of just falling like a regular booster rocket super heavy will perform a retropropulsive landing retropropulsion is when a rocket engine is used in the opposite direction of the motion of the rocket to reduce its velocity and break the rocket so to speak similar to how falcon 9 does a suicide burn and then land safely but according to elon musk he has different plans instead of the super heavy slowing down and landing on its legs spacex plans to catch the super heavy using large robotic arms connected to the landing tower they proposed that this would put less stress on the landing legs and that would mean less refurbishment of parts that have to absorb the kind of force a heavy rocket would face in a landing like that so a massive rocket that can be produced at mass scale at an accelerated speed that is reusable and produces such a high thrust what is there not to like about the super heavy fun fact with the starship stacked on top of the super heavy it stands at a height of about 120 meters making the full starship the longest space rocket in history it beat out the sls block 2 cargo and saturn 5 by 9 meters the super heavy bm-3 underwent the first cryogenic proof test successfully on july 13th the test seemed to be a success but all the fans are waiting in excitement for the first flight test that will be performed on the super heavy bn4 according to the flight plan that spacex has submitted to the federal aviation administration the starship sn20 will launch from the orbital launch pad at star base in boca chica texas about three minutes into the flight super heavy will separate and descend into the gulf of mexico off the coast of bokuchika meanwhile the upper stage starship will continue the ascent to about 328 thousand feet before landing 100 kilometers northwest of the island of kauai in hawaii so all we need to do is wait and see how the super heavy bn4 performs in the actual flight test this will be the first time we will see the super heavy booster in action we have already seen the second stage past the launch and landing test earlier this year now it's the time of reckoning for the giant booster rocket but we have to remember it took spacex multiple launch attempts of their falcon 9 to finally nail the launch and landing of their current flagship rocket so even if bn4 doesn't perform as expected you can be sure that spacex will continue to make it better.