How SpaceX Plans To Move Starship From Cocoa Site To Kennedy Space Center (clickorlando.com) 42
New submitter RhettLivingston writes: Real plans for the move of Starship Mk 2 from its current construction site in Cocoa to the Kennedy Space Center have finally emerged. A News 6 Orlando report identifies permit applications and observed preparations for the move,which will take a land and sea route. Barring some remarkably hasty road compaction and paving, the prototype will start its journey off-road, crossing a recently cleared path through vacant land to reach Grissom Parkway. It will then travel east in the westbound lanes of SR 528 for a short distance before loading to a barge in the Indian river via a makeshift dock. The rest of the route is relatively conventional, including offloading at KSC at the site previously used for delivery of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks. Given the recent construction of new facilities at the current construction site, it is likely that this will not be the last time this route is utilized. SpaceX declined to say how the company will transport the spacecraft or when the relocation will occur.
SpaceX's "Mk2" orbital Starship prototype is designed 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.
SpaceX's "Mk2" orbital Starship prototype is designed 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.
Appearances can be deceiving (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:5, Insightful)
It does and I, for one, find that completely frickin' hilariously awesome! ;)
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:5, Informative)
I can't get over the looks of that Starship prototype.
It is not really a Starship prototype, just a frame to do some early flight testing on the raptor engines and their steering.
Its like if you wanted to do some low-power tests of a new car engine, you just need a chassis and wheels or test load.
The Starhopper body was indeed "thrown together" with sheet-metal, not by farmers, but close: they normally do water towers.
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The skin of the spacecraft doesn't really serve any aesthetic purposes and even crumpled shedlike stainless steel will be stronger than engineered special composite materials when perfectly formed. The skin is for aerodynamics and heat dissipation mostly, and it's the internal chambers that matters more, such as fuel tanks and such, which are separate structures regardless.
whaterver gets us there (Score:4, Funny)
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>The skin is for aerodynamics and heat dissipation mostly
Actually, I believe it's a generally primary structural component as well.
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Considering that these are going to Orbit,
No, I believe the GP was talking about the existing "prototype", not the future ones in the article.
It will be very cool though if they send them SSTO (single stage to orbit) to test the landing ability.
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:4, Insightful)
They want Starship to be to space what a jetliner is to air travel. If that's the goal then building these things quickly, cheaply and in less than ideal environments. Aircraft are worked on by mechanics in all sorts of conditions but its almost never a clean room. They also want this to be a true interplanetary spacecraft. If they land this thing on Mars, come down a little hard and bend one of the landing legs with steel they can beat it back into shape. With some space age composite you can't fix it.
People have an expectation that spacecraft are supposed to be impossibly complex machines using unobtanium components. And in some parts it will always be that way. But for space travel to get beyond these massive government projects every 50 years or so and become a constant endeavor with direct economic benefit. We need space ships to be toyota camrys not bespoke one offs.
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:4, Insightful)
And this idea isn't new. Starship is the culimation of two of the three main lines of thought of how to reduce launch costs.
1) Go big. All else being equal, big rockets tend to have lower costs per kilogram than small rockets. An extreme design in this school of thought was Sea Dragon [wikipedia.org]. Starship subscribes well to this notion.
2) Go fully reusable with low turnaround. The Shuttle was an early, failed experiment in this notion, meeting neither criterion. Falcon 9 and heavy are much closer, although the upper stage is expended, and there's still a moderate amount of work to be done before the rockets can be turned around (much cheaper than building new stages, however). Starship aims to use the knowledge gained from the Falcons to get turnaround times down to that of a typical jet airliner, with 100% hardware recovery.
3) Go extreme on the staging of cheap identical stages. This is the one big cost-reduction strategy that Starship doesn't use. The classic example of this notion is OTRAG [wikipedia.org], which was totally Kerbal [blogimg.jp] in its approach ;).
One interesting approach that SpaceX has taken that others haven't taken is "transitioning from disposable to reusable". Normally you either set out to design a rocket that's cheap to make - and then keep making them cheaply and disposing of them - or you set out to make a reusable rocket, where you spare no expense toward building them (and let the per-unit-cost balloon) on the notion that it doesn't matter because you'll just reuse them and amortize your costs. SpaceX's success is arguably that they made a rocket that took both paths - cheap enough to be disposable, but also capable of reuse. This allowed them to get a ton of experience (and earn capital) while iterating their rockets disposably, and develop (comparably) mass production with low unit costs, that then holds over when the rockets go reusable.
Starship by contrast is never intended to be used disposably (unless a deep-pocketed customer really wants the extra payload or delta-V). But they're still making them cheaply enough that they could be, so they can still iterate quickly and continue the Agile development process. Indeed, Musk has stated that it looks like Starship may be even cheaper to build than Falcon 9.
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"Going big" on the upper stage is a very interesting design choice for SpaceX, chosen I guess because of eventual Mars plans. Looking at the current specs on Wikipedia, if all the engines were normal Raptors the thing could launch itself to LEO with a tiny cargo, no booster needed.
The combined design certainly simplifies things by having only 2 stages, and makes a moon mission very believable.
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Musk has indeed suggested that Earth-to-Earth will indeed be single-stage. Sure would make things easier.
Lunar trips would be almost too easy with the architecture - refill in orbit, and then it's direct to the moon and back with no staging or ISRU. It's a shame that this level of performance wasn't available in the Apollo era - but mass ratios weren't good enough and the engines + storable propellants of the day (like the aerozine 50 / dinitrogen tetroxide on the LM) just too low ISP. Raptor is closer i
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(That said, in-orbit refueling is a non-trivial task. It'll be interesting to watch that development programme progress.)
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I had forgotten that super heavy couldn't get starship all the way to LEO (at least, not reusably) - too much KSP. SpaceX at least has some demonstrated capability with docking, though I think scale will matter.
How the actual fuel transfer would work is a mystery to me, with everything cryo and very high pressure, how the heck would you pump it without heating it up, or over-pressurizing the destination?
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I kind of suspect that the feed for refueling will be done under constant (low) acceleration rather than pumping. Akin to how they do tank settling on Falcon 9. E.g. thrust in the direction opposite the craft you're transferring to, so the propellant tries to flow into the target craft. I mean, you have to do a settling burn either way.
I'm trying to remember here... isn't the plan for the RCS on Starship supposed to be gaseous CH4+O2? I kind of suspect that the primary RCS thrusters (which need to be abl
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Ah, so just connect 2 lines per tank, so the helium from the "lower" tank can just move to the "upper"? (Or do the Raptors just pressurize with gaseous O2/CH4?) Neat idea, though I guess you'd have to carefully balance pressures first.
I'm sure they can add a couple smaller thrusters if needed - if the problem is making them small enough, they won't be too much mass. Hey, works in KSP.
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No helium used in Starship (namely, because you couldn't refill it with ISRU :) ). It's all autogenous pressurization. Indeed, the pressures between the two craft would have to be equalized slowly before transfer; a big pressure surge from one tank to the next probably wouldn't go over too well. ;)
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I kind of suspect that the feed for refueling will be done under constant (low) acceleration rather than pumping. Akin to how they do tank settling on Falcon 9. E.g. thrust in the direction opposite the craft you're transferring to, so the propellant tries to flow into the target craft. I mean, you have to do a settling burn either way.
Pumping itself will create acceleration of the tank structure in the correct direction.
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Super Heavy (SH) is the Booster for Star Ship (SS) and can certainly put SS in LEO or any other orbit including lunar transfer
SS on it's own cannot make it to LEO, but could do Earth to Earth sub-orbital hops
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SH cannot put SS into LEO, because that would mean putting SH into LEO, and SH is not designed to re-enter from LEO. That means SS will need to at least burn fuel to circularize orbit, and likely to add all the velocity that the second stage on a Falcon currently adds. The point being: it will need to top off in orbit.
As long as SS has more than half it's fuel remaining once it achieves LEO, then SpaceX can just launch 2 of them, do a fuel transfer, and recover the extra SS, leaving a fully fueled SS in o
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:4, Informative)
Elon has said that with full tanks and practically no cargo Starship should be SSTO capable. What makes the big upper stage concept work is orbital refueling. Now its not just a big orbital stage. But its a big interplanetary spacecraft.
That takes care of one of Shuttle's shortcomings. It could get a decent payload into orbit but couldn't really do much after that because all of its fuel save for the small amount to deorbit, was in the external fuel tank.
Hopefully their approach to construction and their experience with reusable rocket turnaround will fix the other issues STS had, slow and expensive refurb between missions. A high sortie rate is key to make this economical. I don't think Starship will get quite to jet liner levels any time soon but it will get much better than any previous designs.
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I actually feel bad for the Shuttle development team. They were given a task that really should have been for a small first-gen-prototype reusable launcher with a high development budget and simple requirements (which could then have been iterated on), and instead were forced by budgetary constraints into making a bloated, underfunded, overspecced workhorse vehicle, kept in flight only due to congressional pork.
The engineering work they pulled off was amazing for the time. But it's a shame that the program
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I have sympathy for the design team after learning that the very bad architecture of the shuttle (looks like a reusable space plane, but is neither) was chosen by Nixon's budget office. Apparently NASA sent up three choices for the shuttle, and this was the "obvious bad choice to make the executive feel smart for avoiding".
The Russians had a good shuttle design, with a proper vertical stack, solid booster recovery with pop-out wings (no salt water ruining everything), and jet engines on the orbiter so it w
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The problem with the Space Shuttle, was that NASA and the Administration cooked the books to make it look cost competitive to the SaturnV throw-away launcher
In order to show comparable costs, they projected that a Shuttle would launch WEEKLY
Unfortunately, they never reached that pace, so compared to SaturnV, the Space Shuttle was waaaay more expensive and limited the amount of machinery we could put into orbit
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:4, Interesting)
I think going big was necessitated by the goal of full reusability to Earth orbit with a 100 metric ton payload. That it is also a nicely sized craft for Mars transport is more a side effect. Our own gravity well is the biggest problem to solve as demonstrated by the fact that there is no need for the Superheavy booster anywhere else.
I wonder if the first stage plans might go larger with the shift to stainless. The stainless could survive a hotter reentry - without any need for shielding in this suborbital application. So it could enable later staging though only at the sacrifice of never returning to the pad for an immediate reload/relaunch as they originally planned. Their current environmental impact statement leads me to believe they may have already made that sacrifice. It indicates, at least initially, that all Superheavy landings from KSC will be on barges.
Which leads me to another question. Has anyone seen any indication of a new barge acquisition? I can't believe the current ones are big enough to land a Superheavy. It is both higher and wider than a Falcon 9 first stage. I'd think its height would just tip the barge right over, especially if that wider surface is hit by a strong wind.
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:4, Interesting)
>Go extreme on the staging of cheap identical stages.
Actually it wasn't lots of stages, it was lots cheap identical rockets bundled together into a limited number of stages. OTRAG as first conceived was a two-stage rocket, though it sounds like some 4-stage options were at least on the drawing board
And Starship (and Falcon 9 for that matter) actually *does* go this route pretty heavily as well, using many smaller identical engines that benefit from economies of scale, rather than one or two large ones. Unlike OTRAG all the engines are fed from the same fuel tank within the same rocket skin - but the fuel tank and skin are comparatively simple pieces of technology, and ones that incur a substantial payload cost when subdivided into many smaller containers with a much larger surface-to-volume ratio (and thus dry mass).
They don't take it to quite the extreme as many of the OTRAG designs, but 35 engines on the first stage is still a pretty dramatic nod to the strategy.
Re:Appearances can be deceiving (Score:4, Interesting)
The initial phase for OTRAG was only two stages, but they had designs for many more [blogimg.jp].
Yes, 35 raptors is a lot. But that makes me think more of the N1 than OTRAG. :)
That said, I feel like I need to knock on wood when I mention the N1 ;) But Falcon 9 has shown that you can have lots of engines work well together and deal with failures peacefully; N1 just had horrible combination of A) failure prone engines, B) inability to isolate failures, and C) rushed software that did everything wrong in response to failures, frequently alongside D) bad wiring workmanship that often led to erroneous sensor information and/or command relaying.
(Wow, I just realized that Starship is planning to have even more engines than N1 on its first stage... that never occurred to me before. N1 had more total engines, all stages combined, but still...)
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They had designs for a 7-booster cluster of F9's as well - I think it's safe to say that rocket designs that never leave the drawing board shouldn't be taken too seriously. That said, if the OTRAG had worked out well it would have been far more easily scalable - though maybe not to great effect if you look at the rapidly diminishing returns on the high end.
As for the N1, don't forget to add in the fact that *none* of the N1 engines used in launches was ever test-fired before launch thanks to pyrotechnic-op
Sounds complicated (Score:3)
Why not just fly the thing there? It ought to be able to do that hop.
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In September? Doubt it'll be flight-certified by then. From what I can see [faa.gov], they're not permitted to test it at the Cocoa site - presumably why they're moving it.
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Just hop it... (Score:2)
...I mean, that would be a good test.
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The flying water tower in Boca Chica has already done that :)
"KSC" (Score:4, Funny)
Every time a SpaceX story references Kennedy Space Center by its initials, I read it as "Kerbal Space Center" instead. Feels more natural somehow.
=Smidge=
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Not Kentucky Spaced Chicken?
Not really a makeshift dock... (Score:3)
The last bit is a seawall that was built to protect the footings for a highway bridge going over the river. Seems much more permanent than a "makeshift dock" would suggest.
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I'm betting a seawall makes for a lousy dock as-is, and that there'll be a makeshift dock built atop it.