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Mars Space

SpaceX Starting On 'Super Heavy' Rocket Booster To Power Mars Trip (cnet.com) 94

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
The latest prototype of Elon Musk's Starship prototype has only flown about 500 feet (150 meters) in the air, but the SpaceX CEO said Monday his rocket company may begin construction of a booster prototype to pair with Starship as soon as this week. CNET reports: Starship is SpaceX's platform for taking humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, but to reach those deep-space destinations, the plan is to pair Starship with a powerful first-stage booster called Super Heavy. So far we've only seen early prototypes of Starship make short test flights or "hops." Musk added that Super Heavy may have fewer engines than originally planned -- possibly 28 Raptor engines rather than 31. "That's still a lot of engines. We'll up cranking up the thrust on those engines." He mused that it might be possible for Raptor to eventually be able to lift 200 times its own weight.

As for when we might see a Starship prototype fly higher than just a hop, Musk said "probably next year" and aimed to reduce expectations a bit. "The first ones might not work," he said. "This is uncharted territory. Nobody's ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket ... and then having something twice the size of a Saturn V (the rocket that astronauts to the moon) that's also fully reusable... that's really something else, that's profound. That's the gateway to the galaxy or at least the solar system."
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SpaceX Starting On 'Super Heavy' Rocket Booster To Power Mars Trip More

SpaceX Starting On 'Super Heavy' Rocket Booster To Power Mars Trip

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  • Apologize now (Score:4, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:19AM (#60460930)

    All you trolls that claimed he would never do it, you guys failed in demoralizing SpaceX .. failed to stop investors .. Taking bets now by fools predicting Raptor will fail and Starship will fail to work by 2025. Reply to this you suckers with your specific predictions so we can check back when it happens and laugh at you.

    • Re:Apologize now (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:36AM (#60460944) Homepage

      Slashdot needs something like @remindmetweets ;)

      Seriously, though, best of luck to SpaceX (and also, congrats to RocketLab on their successful launch the other day!).

    • You sound strangely like Elon :)

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by OMBad ( 6965950 )
      I lost respect for him when he forced his Tesla workers to go back to work during the Corona and they all died.
      • Except, that he did not force them back. They had choices. They could continue to collect unemployment (state decides who collects and who does not ), or get paid a great deal more by working. The employees choose to go back.

    • You don't have to Like Musk to admire him. However especially during his early claims we have seen it before with countless other millionaires and billionaires. However most of them quit early on when working on those projects took more time than expected, got dull to them, or general pushback (and sometimes threats) from the groups pushing the status quo.
      We have heard about other companies trying to make their own space program, perhaps get a small "model rocket" into space. Making electric car, claiming a

      • Well to be fair, all of the REAL possibilities of failure was before SX flew F9 and before Tesla started the supercharging network.

        Once both of these happened, both SX and Tesla were in control of their futures. Prior to that, any number of things, both inside and outside of the companies, could have caused them to fail. Now, it is nearly 100% that any failure would be CEOs fault, and while Elon is in charge, that will not happen.
    • An I told u so? Seriously? It is bad enough that signal to noise ratio has plummeted here with the likes of amipro, caffeinated bacon, etc, and you wish to add to their BS? Seriously?

      To be honest, this is not even that big of an accomplishment for SX.
      F1 was huge. First private rocket to orbit. Company put together and flew the rocket in what, 6 years? That was huge. Most every part, including building the company, had to happen. New engine. New avionics. New processes. QA was a HUGE issue and NASA taught

      • "FH is actually a moderate step, though lots of complexity in making sure that they have it right." Not saying you're wrong--"moderate" is a vague word--but complexity is part of what led to four Soviet failures (and no successes) with their N1, despite years of success with their Soyuz. (It also didn't help that they didn't do sufficient ground testing, that Korolev died when he did, that assembly of the first stage had to be done at Baikonur, and so forth.)

  • Most people have been expecting this... (Score:3)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:43AM (#60460952) Homepage

    ... as SpaceX has been building a high bay for Super Heavy construction, and it's nearly complete. The tweet does certainly sound like an attempt to push down expectations on timelines for hop testing, though. We were however previously told to expect that there would be several more small Starship hops to refine the launch procedure before moving on to a full-height hop. Still, I think most people were expecting sooner than early next year. But I also think that most people have already been expecting a good number of rapid unexpected disassemblies before Starship reaches any sort of maturity. The goal is to get those out of the way as soon as possible. ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      *unscheduled

    • This must be the first time in his life that Elon Must has ever “decreased expectations” towards timelines.

      Gotta wonder how bad it really is, then! :D

    • Note he said next year for more than hops - not next year for more than 150m hops. Theyâ(TM)ll likely spend a long time trying to get 20km hops with bellyflop descents right.

      • Yeah, "more than hops" probably refers to at least near-orbital flights to test the heat shielding and bellyflop handling at hypersonic speeds during reentry.

        But if the engines are working well, I could also see them going straight to orbital payload launches (maybe after 1 or 2 "we made it to orbit" tests) and testing reentry as a "value add" much as they did with landing the Falcon 9. After all, if you're going to launch to orbit anyway, you may as well make the rocket pay for itself before you potential

        • They are at least 1/2 or more from testing close to space. They still have to add tiles.

          • At least - they still have to add flaps!

            I suspect there will be at least a few high-altitude belly-flops, and maybe even power-dives, to really stress-test the flaps and their handling at relatively low speeds where heat shielding isn't needed and just a bit of extra fuel allows for the possibility of a propulsive recovery in case of problems. At hypersonic reentry speeds with a plasma bow wave and the tanks almost empty, any problems are far more likely to be terminal.

        • But if the engines are working well, I could also see them going straight to orbital payload launches (maybe after 1 or 2 "we made it to orbit" tests) and testing reentry as a "value add" much as they did with landing the Falcon 9. After all, if you're going to launch to orbit anyway, you may as well make the rocket pay for itself before you potentially destroy it on reentry.

          Possible Mission: 1/ First orbit 2/ Deploy Starlink satellites 3/ orbital refueling with tanker then landing 4/ Using fuel to transfer to lunar orbit 5/ deploy lunar satellites and landers 6/ Return to Earth orbit. 7/ Refuel again with reused tanker landing again 8/ Fly to Mars and land.

          Do I expect this? No. But it would make a HUGE statement about how good Starship is if they could and did do it.

          • Now that's what I call optimism! The shear number of independent systems that would have to work properly on the first try is breathtaking! You're certainly right that it'd be a huge statement - on the order of "Bow down puny humans and bask in my technological glory"

            I think I'll pace my optimism with a whole lot more for-profit missions interspersed with your steps as technology demonstrations. I suspect just getting to orbit and back again, reliably and repeatably, will be a bit of a bumpy ride. I'd also

            • Absolutely. Part of the beauty of it though is that you don't have to let anyone who isn't under an NDA to know anything about it except that after step 2 there would be a landing. |If you get step 1 completed step 2 should be a slam dunk. Everything else gets revealed as it happens. If it doesn't happen SpaceX can deny any such plans. When it landed at step 8 it would deploy crawlers and or helicopters to survey the region in much more detail for the follow up mission.

              There are two optional step 9s th

    • I wouldn't be completely surprised to see a full stack like the Mark 1 was used as a backdrop for Musk's upcoming SpaceX presentation later in the year. Like the Mark 1, it wouldn't be a working prototype but serve as inspiration and show the full size of a Starship Heavy. It's amazing when you realize that the SN x prototypes are missing a sizable amount of the forward structure... and they are just the payload for a Starship Heavy! This thing's going to be massive!!

      • I'm not sure there'd be much point in a non-working prototype SuperHeavy.

        Mark 1 was very much a proof-of-concept build to explore the problems involved in building such a thing at all.

        SuperHeavy though is really just a somewhat taller version of the current "flying water tower", with more stable landing gear, a "docking ring" to secure Starship, and a much more robust thrust puck that can support dozens of engines. Both the the "docking ring" and landing gear would be necessary even to stack a mockup, and

        • I should have clarified that when I meant "non-working" I meant not working YET. Not building a model SH for the sake of a backdrop, but building out a SH booster that wouldn't have Raptors in it and hadn't been pressure verified yet.

  • Okay, so clearly 'gateway to the galaxy' is just marketing / hype.
    It's going to take a lot more than the raptor engine design to get us to the nearest star, let alone cross 150k light-years.

    Space is big.

    If you looked at just the nearest 20 light-years, there's under 200 stars there (including brown dwarfs, etc).
    If each of those stars were the size of a grain of sand, it would be like those 200 grains of sand from all the sand in all the beaches of Europe.

    • Call it optimism. Maybe going to the stars, or even sending an unmanned probe there, will turn out to be utterly impractical. But if we are going to try, the solar system is a first step. Cheap launches on reusable rockets may well kick off our Expanse at last.

      • But if we are going to try, the solar system is a first step. Cheap launches on reusable rockets may well kick off our Expanse at last.

        The very earliest stages of the Expanse, at best. Without a working fission or fusion drive, we're still talking about months or years of transit time across the solar system, even for a vehicle as capable as Starship is expected to be. Being able to boost continuously for weeks is and always will be outside of the capabilities of any chemical rocket. If and when the work to massively scale up ion thrusters finally succeeds, then we'll have a reason to perfect large scale space-going fission power plants

      • Exactly right. With the BFR, it should be possible to launch Voyager 3 on a much faster course, with engines/fuel that last a long time.

  • Rapid prototyping and incremental updates (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @03:24AM (#60460972) Homepage

    Elon Musk is solving engineering problems with heavy use of rapid prototypes, and incremental updates. Instead o waiting 10 years to prepare a new launch vehicle that might or might not succeed, they are building and blowing up many of them in a year.

    I get the emphasis on safety, but the "waterfall" method of the old no longer works. And that was fed by cost-plus government contracts, which would not otherwise be sustainable. And those actually cause lots of accidents in real life even after years of preperation.

    I think the public finally understood this phenomenon, and no longer react negatively if a prototype becomes a fireworks display.

    • The Shuttle, the great hope for the future, became the great Blocker as soon as NASA refused to fly in unmanned and turned development setbacks into national disasters.

    • Insightful..

      I would argue that "Waterfall" still works, but it is expensive and time consuming on large projects compared to the more iterative development processes. However, there are still times when a bit of waterfall in your process is a good thing.

      The classic example would be designing a parachute. You might want to do quite a bit of validation, throwing dummies out of aircraft for instance, before you strap the chief engineer to your design and push him out at 10,000 feet. That's kind of a waterf

      • I think a lot depends on the relative cost of resources. For your parachute example, cloth and rope is a lot cheaper than a large engineering crew, so iterative development is likely to be far more cost effective. Throw a few parachutes out of the plane, carefully record how they fail, and revise the designs to handle those stresses better.

        That becomes even more true when designing to situations that are not well enough understood to accurately simulate and design to - such as supersonic parachutes where

        • Hmmm... I think the issue is one of risk management. Waterfall development cycles allows a much closer management of risks on a known schedule. In an iterative development process, you don't have much leeway in foreseeing risks and you don't have much hope at a fixed schedule when the team isn't fully experienced in the technologies being used.

          BTW. My parachute example is about verification, the hallmark of Waterfall processes, where you specify, design and build, then assemble, validate and verify you

          • I would say management of *known* risk. When dealing with unknown risks, waiting until everything is fully designed and built to try to discover what the unknown risks are is likely to be very expensive. It works okay for software because nothing is lost in a failure during testing. For expensive physical equipment that's likely to be completely destroyed by a failure you're pretty much stuck with either massive overbuilding, or a few iterative tests regardless.

    • no longer react negatively if a prototype becomes a fireworks display.

      I don't know about that. Rapid prototyping is one thing. Having 2 prototypes blowing up in short order, from problems that from the sidelines seem foreseeable/could have been caught in a less destructive manner is quite another. Thinks like incorrect welds are solved problems (in the sense that we know how to find them before they pose a problem). These fireworks displays also show they're having issues with site safety (one of the explosions took out some of the ground service equipment that had been insta

    • Funny thing, waterfall did not come about until 70s. NASA and DoD did lots of incremental steps on space and aeronautical. Problem is, Old space wants waterfall combined with cost+. 'Maximizes' their income and profits

      • "Funny thing, waterfall did not come about until 70s"

        It existed before then. It wasn't *called* "waterfall" until the 70s.

        • no, my point was not that waterfall design did not exist before then. My point was that in the 50s/60s, Rockets were designed, tested JUST LIKE SX does today. Lots of incremental work, and LOADS of failures. It was not until late 70s, early 80s, when we saw rocket design changed from incremental to pushing the 'waterfall' with very little testing. Best example of that, is Boeing's CST-100, Max, SLS, etc. Even L-Mart is pushing 'waterfall'. Thankfully, it does not appear that Northrup Grumman does, but ...
    • You say this as if it is some unexpected revelation. This is the plan. One of the major reasons to move this development outside of NASA is that it makes intermediate (inevitable) "failures" more okay. SpaceX has done the right thing and embraced an "expect some failures" message. This just would not work for NASA itself right now.

  • Core Space Travel issues still not addressed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OpinOnion ( 4473025 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @06:42AM (#60461216)
    The real reason manned space exploration slowed in the 70s is NOT because of technological limits with the actual propelling through space, but because of the biological impacts of being in space for extended periods of time and the simple fact there is minimal if any profit incentive. So, the biggest problem remains mostly unresolved as radiation shielding nor artificial gravity have been engineered to allow humans to really stay in space or travel through space often. The experience of going to and staying on Mars is going to by physically and mentally very uncomfortable and dangerous to your health, while at the same time robots will keep improving much faster than humans can overcome these core biological limits of not being suited at all for an off world existence unless that world is very similar to Earth. We are adaptable, but only over the course of many thousands of years or more. The SAME exactly main problem that shut down the momentum on the original space exploration missions has not been even remotely solved. Anything beyond traveling to the ISS for short durations where you are still protected from Earth's radiation shielding to a degree AND you don't stay in low gravity too low is pretty unhealthy and robots are getting better and cheaper at a rate that will mostly make humans little more than a liability in space with today's technology. I could send a couple humans at a time and they can stay a few months AND need a lot of supplies sent OR I could take all the money and a small army of rovers. The rovers can run for 10 years straight and sure you need a few dozen, but that's still way less expensive and more likely to produce scientific breakthrough since you will collect more today data per dollar. Space exploration is mostly about collecting data and rovers, probes an satellite are all a lot better at that than humans when in a hostile environment. It's very much like exploring the bottom of the ocean, it's a job for robots regardless if you want to admit it or stick by it. Living on Mars or any other rock in the solar system is going to be uncomfortable the point that humans will not thrive, they will mostly just get exhausted and want to come home because you are literally asking too much of their bodies and no matter what their mind things when they are health. You CAN send people to Mars, but I don't see much change in growing a colony on Mars where people go for reasons other than just to study Mars, not because it's a place for humans to expand to. The best place for human for the sake of survival is underground on Earth, just the same way our ancestors lived through major events like meteor strikes, you borrow or hide in the swamps. The next best place is a space station with artificial gravity and radiation shielding and until you can do the later you can't colonize space in any meaningful way that extends human survivability. On top of that Earth has nearly infinite resources still untapped all throughout it's MASSIVE upper and lower mantle, so the idea you will HAVE to mine space might be total BS. The surface of Earth is tiny compared to the upper and lower mantle, so the total amount of resources untapped on Earth would make ALL human mining so for look like nothing more than a tiny dent in the planet. Plus when you do mine space you will mostly mine the asteroids where you can get right to raw minerals much faster AND you don't have to get stuck in a massive gravity well of a planet. In the bigger picture of space exploration you will mostly NOT want to land on planets because it's a big waste of fuel and robots can do it far better. Humans are better in spaceships where they are not exposed to all the dangerous of the giant gravity well and all that fine dust. Unless this planet has an atmosphere or at least doesn't have dangerous geological or storm events, in which case you will only ever set up a research station like you do in Antarctica. It will never be a colony because the area is too hostile to grow beyond a research base. I wish there was an answer to space exploration,

    • Wow that was a wall of text, but hereâ(TM)s the response to the core of it:

      • Space has plenty of profit incentive. You just need to be able to get a reasonable mass of stuff up to it, or down from it, without it costing $1,000,000,000. Starship is the solution to that
      • Radiation shielding is hard, but Starshipâ(TM)s reusability means you can get bits of your radiation shield moving to Mars separately - you no longer need a single vehicle to get tons and tons of lead out of earthâ(TM)s gravity w

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tragedy ( 27079 )

        Let's also not forget that the larger the space vehicle, the easier shielding becomes. You don't have to ship lead shielding if you're also carrying lots of supplies. Frankly, even the other people in the space vessel make up some of the shielding. It's all about reducing total exposure. In reality, the radiation issue isn't all that bad, even for a trip to mars. If they were super concerned about it, they would design the craft so that the living quarters were inside the fuel tank, so the fuel could act as

        • You'd need about a meter of water surrounding the passenger compartment, it's not trivial and it's not something your fellow passengers will provide.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tragedy ( 27079 )

            You'd need about a meter of water surrounding the passenger compartment...

            For what, specifically? A projected 1 year Mars mission would provide about .66 Sieverts of radiation. That's inside the lifetime limit for astronauts. That's without the extra shielding that a large craft would provide. While a meter of water would be nice from a radiation protection perspective, it's not strictly necessary. Now the halving distance of water is about 7 centimeters, so 7 cm of water shielding added would cut the radiation exposure down to .33 Sieverts, and 14 cm would cut it down to .165 Si

            • Absolutely false, over 1 seivert. 100+ REM which is serious case of rad poisoning and certain cancer besides the other horrible effects. Then you show you don't know how to do shielding math.

              on the order of 1 meter of water in all directions, like I said. maybe more

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tragedy ( 27079 )

                Absolutely false, over 1 seivert. 100+ REM which is serious case of rad poisoning and certain cancer besides the other horrible effects. Then you show you don't know how to do shielding math.

                1 Sievert is not a serious case of radiation poisoning spread out over the years it would take to get that dose. As an acute dose, it is serious, but does not by any means guaranteed cancer. It has about a 5% chance of eventually causing a fatal case of cancer in old age. Consider that normal occupational radiation limits are up to 50 milliSieverts in a year and up to 100 milliSieverts in 5 years. That would allow .9 Sieverts in a 43 year career. So, even though that would be in a shorter time, it's still a

      • "you can get bits of your radiation shield moving to Mars separately" If I understand what you're saying, that's not solving the problem. The problem is not radiation on Mars (you can bury housing underground, and you can do that before people get there). The problem is the radiation en route. So the people have to travel inside the radiation shield.

        It would also help if you could shorten the trip. If some alternative to chemical rockets (once outside the Earth's atmosphere) could get you there faster,

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Alex, I'd like to buy some paragraphs breaks for $400.

    • Did you see blue stars when you exhaled after that one?

      Yes, the ratio of robots to people in space will be very high. They will prepare the way for us as well as being our helpers up there. So what? We will go into space because that is human nature. You are basically asking why people would live anywhere other than Hawai'i.

    • Seriously. Blank lines between concepts *dramatically* improves readability.

      Actually radiation shielding is extremely easy and plentiful so long as you're not trying to move it: just cover your habitat in a few meters of rock (gravel/sand/etc). It's a simple, low-tech solution that works beautifully whether your habitat is on the moon, Mars, or an asteroid. On the Moon or Mars it even reduces the mechanical stresses on your habitat since the weight of rock helps neutralize some of the force of all that

      • Wouldn't some kind of water jacket, even if it was only partial, oriented sunward or for use in the case of a detected gamma ray burst be useful? Wikipedia says 15 cm of water drops gamma rays to background radiation, but neutrons need more than that.

        • Yeah. I'm not sure if partial would do it though - gamma ray bursts and other high energy radiation mostly comes not from the sun, but from deep space, far outside our solar system(and often even our galaxy), and I don't think there's usually much warning.

          On the other hand... I believe roughly half the local hazardous radiation is coming from the sun - and if you could cut your radiation exposure in half with a relatively small, highly directional shield, that could well be worth it. Especially if it's so

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pr0t0 ( 216378 )

      So, uh, okay. Wow. That was a lot to digest.

      Financial reasons may provide the most short-term incentive for planetary colonization, but the simple fact is right now we are all eggs in one basket. We need another basket, and Mars makes the most sense right now. Digging deep into the Earth wouldn't help in a scenario like this one [youtube.com]. But it also wouldn't help in a scenario where a fast-spreading disease wipes out people or food crops. We are also technologically better at dealing with vacuum than we are at deal

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by marktoml ( 48712 ) *

      Mars ... not because it is easy or cost effective, but because it is hard.

      I think the asteroid belt is a bit of low hanging fruit that we will certainly pick at some point too.

      If a private company wants to spend the money (to make that money) I see no downside.

      • The asteroid mining meme got taken out in a famous essay by Jerry Pournelle called “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torch ships“ that does the maths about the energy required to move minerals from the asteroid belt to someplace useful. Unless you are talking about unobtainium it doesn’t stack up. The problem is called delta vee, or change of velocity. Most people forget that when you have accelerated your ship to an interplanetary speed, you have to slow down again when you get there. That w

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