SpaceX Fires Up the Engine On Its Test Starship Vehicle For the First Time (theverge.com) 72
SpaceX successfully ignited the onboard engine of its next-generation spacecraft, the Starship, for the first time today. "The ignition was a test known as a static fire, meant to try out the engine while the vehicle remained tethered to the Earth," reports The Verge. "However, today's test marked the first time this vehicle lit up its engine, and it could pave the way for short 'hop' flights in the near future." From the report: This particular vehicle, referred to as "Starhopper," is meant to test out the technologies and basic design of the final Starship vehicle -- a giant passenger spacecraft that SpaceX is making to take people to the Moon and Mars. The stainless steel Starship is supposed to launch into deep space on top of a massive booster called the Super Heavy, which will be capable of landing back on Earth after takeoff just like SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rocket fleet. And when complete, the Starship/Super Heavy combo should be capable of putting up to 220,000 pounds (100,000 kilograms) into low Earth orbit, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, making it one of the most powerful rockets ever made.
SpaceX is currently building the first Starship spacecraft at the company's launch site and test facility in Texas, Musk said on Twitter. But before that vehicle sees space, SpaceX first plans to conduct a few hover flights with the Starhopper. These tests involve igniting the engine (or engines) attached to the bottom of the vehicle. Though these flights won't take the ship to space, they will test out SpaceX's new powerful Raptor engine -- a critical piece of hardware that will be used to power the future Starship and Super Heavy booster. SpaceX fired up a full-scale version of the Raptor engine for the first time in February. And for the last four months, SpaceX has been building the Starhopper at its Boca Chica facility, an area that the company plans to turn into a commercial launch site. Workers transported the vehicle to a test launchpad at the beginning of March and then recently attached a Raptor engine to its bottom.
SpaceX is currently building the first Starship spacecraft at the company's launch site and test facility in Texas, Musk said on Twitter. But before that vehicle sees space, SpaceX first plans to conduct a few hover flights with the Starhopper. These tests involve igniting the engine (or engines) attached to the bottom of the vehicle. Though these flights won't take the ship to space, they will test out SpaceX's new powerful Raptor engine -- a critical piece of hardware that will be used to power the future Starship and Super Heavy booster. SpaceX fired up a full-scale version of the Raptor engine for the first time in February. And for the last four months, SpaceX has been building the Starhopper at its Boca Chica facility, an area that the company plans to turn into a commercial launch site. Workers transported the vehicle to a test launchpad at the beginning of March and then recently attached a Raptor engine to its bottom.
More Info (Score:5, Interesting)
Musk tweeted: [twitter.com] "Starhopper completed tethered hop. All systems green." suggesting the results were good.
A decent quality video of the test fire can be seen here. [youtube.com] The 'hop' is presumably mere inches, as the tether has essentially no slack.
This is the first known vertical test-fire of the Raptor engine, the first engine firing at the Boca Chica facility, and AFAIK the first time a full-flow rocket engine [wikipedia.org] has been test-fired while attached to a rocket of any sort.
Great progress all around.
Given the orbital hopper is planned to complete construction in June, it's likely the current one will complete its hops by then, suggesting frequent tests rather than the ~40 days inbetween tests of the original Grasshopper.
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Not to mention Arabsat-6A launching a few days after on a Falcon Heavy.
Guess Starhopper didn't want all the attention on her big sister.
Re: More Info (Score:3)
No. The combined Starship/Super Heavy combo will be, but the hooper is relatively tiny.
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Great progress all around.
One of the few things in the world I'm enthused and optimistic about.
Fantastic news!
Starship? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Lets not get ahead of ourselves, this thing is not a starship , it couldn't even get out of the solar system.
Re:Starship? (Score:4, Interesting)
When the name was first unveiled and someone pointed out that implied the ability to go to other stars, Musk replied that with some modifications, it could be a real starship.
In practice though, there's no way a bell-nozzle methalox engine is going to be used to get to another star. Nuclear propulsion, or at least an aerospike engine, would be utilized. Or possibly a huge solar sail launched from Mercury. These technologies are close enough to being ready that they'd overtake a craft launched today using existing tech.
Re: Starship? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aerospike is a buzzword: It is a rocket engine, which works at both sea level and vacuum fairly well. It doesn't give you a magic high ISP over a large vacuum engine. Therefore it has nothing to do with interstellar spaceships.
It was seen as a good solution for single stage to orbit (SSTO), which have been a wet dream for rocket science for ages. SpaceX proved that unnecessary for reuse anyway.
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It'd help an interstellar spaceship if it were doing a propulsive landing on a planet with atmosphere. But I concede it wouldn't be an important consideration for a first trip when we know nothing about what's there aside from maybe a couple gas giants.
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It'd help an interstellar spaceship if it were doing a propulsive landing on a planet with atmosphere.
Everybody who watches sci-fi already knows; the only inter-system spaceships that can land on a planet with an atmosphere have some sort of an energy drive; you don't even think about it with a propulsive drive.
So far, the only "space drive" type of technology are some small prototypes. But we don't have good enough energy storage yet to use that on a spaceship for anything other than maneuvering thrusters.
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It'd help an interstellar spaceship if it were doing a propulsive landing on a planet with atmosphere.
Why in hell would an interstellar spaceship need to land on the planet it goes to? In order to make it there to begin with it would have to be huge. It certainly wouldn't take off from a planet, with or without an atmosphere, it would leave from orbit where it was built. Shirley you aren't expecting something the size of the space shuttle to be making the journey to another star system.
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In order to make it there to begin with it would have to be huge.
Or it could be very tiny like the StarChip proposal [wikipedia.org]. But either way it is not landing on any planets.
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In order to make it there to begin with it would have to be huge.
Or it could be very tiny like the StarChip proposal [wikipedia.org]. But either way it is not landing on any planets.
I'm not sure I'd consider those star ships any more than I do the Voyager probes, which may eventually pass into another star system. Even though they'll be targeted towards Alpha Centauri, unless you redefine the word 'ship', they're still probes.
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which works at both sea level and vacuum fairly well
That's a nice way of putting it. In other words it's a compromise resulting in an engine that is really bad at sea level and really bad in space, but not so bad that it would be cheaper/more efficient to build a 2 engine system...
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No it isn't really bad at both it is actually fairly good at both, it just doesn't get to the same level as a purpose built bell will get.
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"When you're burning millions of dollars worth of fuel per second, anything less than ideal is really bad"
That makes me wonder if the Peregrine rocket will ever be viable for putting payloads into orbit: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-... [phys.org]
Even if it is less efficient, if it can actually put payloads into orbit, it may still be more cost-effective. Most of the articles I've seen on it have been lacking detailed capabilities and technical hurdles it needs to overcome, though.
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When you're burning millions of dollars worth of fuel per second, anything less than ideal is really bad... Yeah ok I was exaggerating, hyperbole is a sin I regularly commit.
Including in that sentence. The total fuel load of a Falcon 9 costs approximately $200,000. Super Heavy might make it over $1 million for its fuel load, but that's still several minutes of burn time to even hit $1 million. It might not even hit $1 million, too. Methane is cheaper than kerosene. There's no public data about how much methane a Super Heavy will need. SpaceX might not even know themselves for certain yet. Super Heavy design keeps changing.
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Right you are. Space fanboys always focus on the fuel and energy, which fall into the category of "round-off error" for all space flight systems, Fuel is free, in comparison to the hardware and operations costs. And that is what makes SpaceX viable - they are cutting the one cost that dominates, the flight hardware, by reusing it.
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The question is: once you have full reusability, how do you cut rocket launch costs further? New engines/fuels/drop rockets...
BFR is only 2.5 of the 4 orders of magnitude cost reduction that Musk wants.
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Starships have two additional problems: getting telemetry back, and slowing down at the destination.
You don't want to spend a huge budget on a starship to get a 100 pixel image of a distant planet.
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If the Sun is inbetween Earth and and the starship, then that'd make telemetry a problem. So we'd want relays in other orbits/lagrange points/interstellar space.
If you mean the signal being too weak, then you'd want to use auto-tracking line-of-sight communications (e.g. lasers).
Unless aiming for a flyby, I imagine the 'slowing down' part would be built into the mission specs, just save ~1/3 of your fuel for slowing at the destination. Solar sails can be turned around so that the target star slows them (alt
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Unless aiming for a flyby, I imagine the 'slowing down' part would be built into the mission specs, just save ~1/3 of your fuel for slowing at the destination.
So you can slow down but still go sailing on past whatever the target is?
Re:Starship? (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you figure? I'm not sure 1/3rd is the proper ratio, but accelerating is going to take a lot more fuel (reaction mass really) than decelerating, since you don't have to decelerate all the fuel you've already used up. And the fuel is likely to be the vast majority of the mass of the entire mission.
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Yeah, I guess when you put it that way it probably would be closer to 1/3.
Did you just ... accept a correction with grace and maturity?
What site am I on, and what did they do with Slashdot?
Re:Starship? (Score:5, Informative)
If the Sun is inbetween Earth and and the starship, then that'd make telemetry a problem
Not talking about the Sun, but rather the problem of the distance and the inverse square law. The closest star is 5000 times as far as Pluto, which means that any signal is 25 million times weaker. We're already using the biggest dish antennas on Earth to get a trickle of data from outer solar system missions.
just save ~1/3 of your fuel for slowing at the destination.
If you need to keep 1/3 of the fuel, your other 2/3 is not enough to bring it up to speed. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation is not your friend.
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Just use a billion times as much fuel - the rocket equation puts no limit on delta-v or payload (which is essentially what braking fuel is), it only states that the amount of fuel needed increases exponentially with the desired delta-V.
Better still, use a propellant with a better isp. Double the isp for the same mass of propellant, and you'll have half your propellant left over after reaching the target speed.
Neither is terribly relevant to the near term, but we're discussing interstellar travel from the p
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Missing link: https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
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Just use a billion times as much fuel
Not just fuel, also fuel tanks, extra staging, and assorted mass. But yeah, in my book that counts as a "problem".
Plus, our biggest telescope array is still only measured in miles
A telescope array is only useful to increase its resolving power, because that only depends on maximum distance. It doesn't help much with sensitivity, because that's related to total area, which only modestly increases with extra telescopes. The biggest single dish in the Deep Space Network is only 70 meter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You could of course use a bigger dish on the probe, b
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Yeah, but tank mass increases far more slowly than fuel mass thanks to the square-cube law, which helps at least.
That's a fair point about telescope arrays, but a gravitational lens telescope doesn't suffer from that problem, with a single lens... thousands? millions? of times larger than Earth's disc, even after blocking out the sun at the center. Plus, I don't think you don't need imaging for a radio antenna, which means you can put your transceiver at the focal point rather than the imaging plane, and i
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What?... Okay, yeah, I guess that makes sense doesn't it? At a given pressure the total outward force on an "equator strip" of a tank would increase linearly with circumference (or radius), which means the tensile strength of the strip needs to do so as well, and thus needs to be proportionally thicker. Hmm. Way to rain on my parade.
Of course, you are assuming the tank is pressurized - the thickness of a tank for liquid propellant with a very low vapor pressure is would be dominated by the need to survi
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Getting data back is a lag issue, not a bandwidth issue. There's no reason we couldn't get a high res image of a distant planet... a decade after it was transmitted.
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Oh so it could travel to another star with "some modifications"? Amazing stuff.
"Nuclear propulsion, or at least an aerospike engine, would be utilized. Or possibly a huge solar sail launched from Mercury."
Oh. Right. But first, lets launch another satellite into LEO.
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That was my thought - the propulsion system *is* the rocket. The rest is just a glorified tin can to carry the payload.
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OK, so if the payload includes a solar sail, then yes?
So, yes?
It almost sounded like were saying "no," except the arguments you made seem to be in support of what he said, at least after subtracting the conclusory opinions.
Re:Starship? (Score:4)
Boeing naming its capsule "Starliner" is OK though?
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You can see more stars from LEO than from where the humans live down here. 24 "hours" a "day," too.
In the word "Starliner," the root is liner. As in, some type of people-mover than operates on a schedule. Modified by the word "star." As the modifier, it can be indirect and still be applicable. So a people-mover that gives you really good views of the stars, this is still a very literal word. Any complaint is merely stylistic, not semantic.
In Starship, however, the key word is ship. The modifier isn't attach
Re: Starship? (Score:1)
It's a name, little pedantic autistic child. Here, tale your meds.
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Like how Tesla's autopilot is really just driver assist.
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Yeah, but that name was already mis-taken for legacy speed maintenance systems. Cruise control? Bull. It's speed control at best, cruising also involves staying on the road and not hitting anything.
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Lets not get ahead of ourselves, this thing is not a starship , it couldn't even get out of the solar system.
It goes faster than Jefferson Starship, sonny boy. They only go 3/5th of a mile in 10 seconds.
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If it doesn't travel between stars, then starship is the wrong name.
The same guy has an autopilot which does not pilot automatically you know.
(applause) (Score:4, Insightful)
Say what you will about Musk, that he's a narcissist, that he's irresponsible, that he's erratic, a cad....I don't give the faintest fuck.
He's NOT EVEN ON THE LIST of the 20 richest people in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_richest_people_in_the_world) but he's DOING SHIT with his money that is trying to do cool stuff other than just make him even richer. In some cases he's spending it on kooky-ass ideas, sure, but at least he's risking it on stuff that may payoff big one day.
The man has almost single-handedly advanced electric cars and self-driving cars from ludicrous fringe research to stuff we're actually talking about.
He's building rocket ships to make space flight reasonable, instead of NASA's six-sigma risk-avoidance budget-protection strategy.
He's trying to think laterally to solve traffic problems in a way nobody's considered before.
I'll admit, I will NEVER travel in a Boring Co tunnel (nope!) nor on a Hyperloop (nope!) nor will I likely benefit from his rockets in my lifetime.
But by god, at least those ridiculous piles of money are being spent on SOMETHING.
To shame them:
Rank Name Citizenship Net worth (USD) Age Main source of wealth Ref(s)
1 Jeff Bezos United States $136.1 billion
2 Bill Gates United States $95.7 billion
3 Warren Buffett United States $82.7 billion
4 Bernard Arnault France $68.1 billion
5 Carlos Slim Mexico $64.1 billion
6 Amancio Ortega Spain $61.5 billion
7 Larry Ellison United States $59.6 billion
8 Mark Zuckerberg United States $54.3 billion
9 Larry Page United States $49.8 billion
10 Mukesh Ambani India $48.8 billion
11 Sergey Brin United States $48.6 billion
12 Charles Koch United States $48.5 billion
13 David Koch United States $48.5 billion
14 Michael Bloomberg United States $47.1 billion
15 Jim Walton United States $46.1 billion
16 Alice Walton United States $45.9 billion
17 S. Robson Walton United States $45.8 billion
18 FranÃoise Bettencourt Meyers France $44.9 billion
19 Steve Ballmer United States $41.6 billion
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Jeff Bezos has his own space program
Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg started The Giving Pledge, which basically amounts to billionaires promising to donate half their wealth to charity over time.
Gates in addition has a n