{"id":44528,"date":"2025-01-10T22:38:49","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T14:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/a-taller-heavier-smarter-version-of-spacexs-starship-is-almost-ready-to-fly\/"},"modified":"2025-01-10T22:38:49","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T14:38:49","slug":"a-taller-heavier-smarter-version-of-spacexs-starship-is-almost-ready-to-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/a-taller-heavier-smarter-version-of-spacexs-starship-is-almost-ready-to-fly\/","title":{"rendered":"A taller, heavier, smarter version of SpaceX\u2019s Starship is almost ready to fly"},"content":{"rendered":"

An upsized version of SpaceX\u2019s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week.<\/p>\n

The two-mile transfer moved the bullet-shaped spaceship one step closer to launch Monday from SpaceX\u2019s Starbase test site in South Texas. The launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 2200 UTC). This will be the seventh full-scale test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft and the first of 2025.<\/p>\n

In the coming days, SpaceX technicians will lift the ship on top of the Super Heavy booster already emplaced on the launch mount. Teams will then complete the final tests and preparations for the countdown on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempt Starship\u2019s first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster,\u201d SpaceX officials wrote in a mission overview posted on the company\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

The mission on Monday will repeat many of the maneuvers SpaceX demonstrated on the last two Starship test flights. The company will again attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and attempt to catch it with two mechanical arms, or \u201cchopsticks,\u201d on the launch tower approximately seven minutes after liftoff.<\/p>\n

SpaceX accomplished this feat on the fifth Starship test flight in October but aborted a catch attempt on a November flight because of damaged sensors on the tower chopsticks. The booster, which remained healthy, diverted to a controlled splashdown offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s next Starship prototype, Ship 33, emerges from its assembly building at Starbase, Texas, early Thursday morning.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n SpaceX\/Elon Musk via X<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

For the next flight, SpaceX added protections to the sensors on the tower and will test radar instruments on the chopsticks to provide more accurate ranging measurements for returning vehicles. These modifications should improve the odds of a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster and of Starship on future missions.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

In another first, one of the 33 Raptor engines that will fly on this Super Heavy booster\u2014designated Booster 14 in SpaceX\u2019s fleet\u2014was recovered from the booster that launched and returned to Starbase in October. For SpaceX, this is a step toward eventually flying the entire rocket repeatedly. The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft are designed for full reusability.<\/p>\n

After the separation of the booster stage, the Starship upper stage will ignite six engines to accelerate to nearly orbital velocity, attaining enough energy to fly halfway around the world before gravity pulls it back into the atmosphere. Like the past three test flights, SpaceX will guide Starship toward a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia around one hour after liftoff.<\/p>\n

New ship, new goals<\/h2>\n

The most significant changes engineers will test next week are on the ship, or upper stage, of SpaceX\u2019s enormous rocket. The most obvious difference on Starship Version 2, or Block 2, is with the vehicle\u2019s forward flaps. Engineers redesigned the flaps, reducing their size and repositioning them closer to the tip of the ship\u2019s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Cameras onboard Starship showed heat damage to the flaps during reentry on test flights last year.<\/p>\n

SpaceX is also developing an upgraded Super Heavy booster that is slightly taller than the existing model. The next version of the booster will produce more thrust and will be slightly taller than the current Super Heavy, but for the upcoming test flight, SpaceX will still use the first-generation booster design.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Starship Block 2 has smaller flaps than previous ships. The flaps are located in a more leeward position to protect them from the heat of reentry.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n SpaceX<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

For next week\u2019s flight, Super Heavy and Starship combined will hold more than 10.5 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer. The ship\u2019s propellant tanks have 25 percent more volume than previous iterations of the vehicle, and the payload compartment, which contains 10 mock-ups of Starlink Internet satellites on this launch, is somewhat smaller. Put together, the changes add nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) to the rocket\u2019s height, bringing the full stack to approximately 404 feet (123.1 meters).<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

This means SpaceX will break its own record for launching the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. And the company will do it again with the even larger Starship Version 3, which SpaceX says will have nine upper stage engines instead of six and will deliver up to 440,000 pounds (200 metric tons) of cargo to low-Earth orbit.<\/p>\n

Other changes debuting with Starship Version 2 next week include:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Vacuum jacketing of propellant feedlines<\/li>\n
  • A new fuel feedline system for the ship\u2019s Raptor vacuum engines<\/li>\n
  • An improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors<\/li>\n
  • Redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors<\/li>\n
  • Integrated smart batteries and power units to distribute 2.7 megawatts of power across the ship<\/li>\n
  • An increase to more than 30 cameras onboard the vehicle.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Laying the foundation<\/h2>\n

    The enhanced avionics system will support future missions to prove SpaceX\u2019s ability to refuel Starships in orbit and return the ship to the launch site. For example, SpaceX will fly a more powerful flight computer and new antennas that integrate connectivity with the Starlink Internet constellation, GPS navigation satellites, and backup functions for traditional radio communication links. With Starlink, SpaceX said Starship can stream more than 120Mbps of real-time high-definition video and telemetry in every phase of flight.<\/p>\n

    These changes \u201call add additional vehicle performance and the ability to fly longer missions,\u201d SpaceX said. \u201cThe ship\u2019s heat shield will also use the latest generation tiles and includes a backup layer to protect from missing or damaged tiles.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, a little more than 17 minutes into the flight, Starship will deploy 10 dummy payloads similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites. The mock-ups will soar around the world on a suborbital trajectory, just like Starship, and reenter over the unpopulated Indian Ocean. Future Starship flights will launch real, next-gen Starlink satellites to add capacity to the Starlink broadband network, but they\u2019re too big and too heavy to launch on SpaceX\u2019s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.<\/p>\n

    ,<\/p>\n

    SpaceX will again reignite one of the ship\u2019s Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, repeating a successful test achieved on Flight 6 in November. The engine restart capability is important for several reasons. It gives the ship the ability to maneuver itself out of low-Earth orbit for reentry (not a concern for Starship\u2019s suborbital tests), and will allow the vehicle to propel itself to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars once SpaceX masters the technology for orbital refueling.<\/p>\n

    \n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    Artist\u2019s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon.<\/p>\n

    Credit:
    \n SpaceX<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

    NASA has contracts with SpaceX to build a derivative of Starship to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the Moon for the agency\u2019s Artemis program. The NASA program manager overseeing SpaceX\u2019s lunar lander contract, Lisa Watson-Morgan, said she was pleased with the results of the in-space engine restart demo last year.<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe whole path to the Moon, as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we\u2019ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold,\u201d Morgan told Ars in a recent interview. \u201cTo that, it\u2019s going to be important that they\u2019re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step toward that.<\/p>\n

    \u201cIn addition, after we land, clearly, the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to launch the crews off the lunar surface),\u201d she said. \u201cSo that\u2019s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA\u2019s return to the Moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe biggest technology challenge remaining\u201d<\/h2>\n

    SpaceX continues to experiment with Starship\u2019s heat shield, which the company\u2019s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has described as \u201cthe biggest technology challenge remaining with Starship.\u201d In order for SpaceX to achieve its lofty goal of launching Starships multiple times per day, the heat shield needs to be fully and immediately reusable.<\/p>\n

    ,<\/p>\n

    While the last three ships have softly splashed down in the Indian Ocean, some of their heat-absorbing tiles stripped away from the vehicle during reentry, when it\u2019s exposed to temperatures up to 2,600\u00b0 Fahrenheit (1,430\u00b0 Celsius).<\/p>\n

    Engineers removed tiles from some areas of the ship for next week\u2019s test flight to \u201cstress-test\u201d vulnerable parts of the vehicle. They also smoothed and tapered the edge of the tile line, where the ceramic heat shield gives way to the ship\u2019s stainless steel skin, to address \u201chot spots\u201d observed during reentry on the most recent test flight.<\/p>\n

    \u201cMultiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry,\u201d SpaceX said.<\/p>\n

    SpaceX is also flying rudimentary catch fittings on Starship to test their thermal performance on reentry. The ship will fly a more demanding trajectory during descent to probe the structural limits of the redesigned flaps at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure, according to SpaceX.<\/p>\n

    All told, SpaceX\u2019s inclusion of a satellite deployment demo and ship upgrades on next week\u2019s test flight will lay the foundation for future missions, perhaps in the next few months, to take the next great leap in Starship development.<\/p>\n

    In comments following the last Starship test flight in November, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that the company could try to return the ship to a catch back at the launch site\u2014something that would require the vehicle to complete at least one full orbit of Earth\u2014as soon as the next flight following Monday\u2019s mission.<\/p>\n

    \u201cWe will do one more ocean landing of the ship,\u201d Musk posted. \u201cIf that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    An upsized version of SpaceX\u2019s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week. The two-mile transfer moved the bullet-shaped spaceship one step closer to launch Monday from SpaceX\u2019s Starbase test site in South Texas. The launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[304,625,190,316,317],"class_list":["post-44528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-artemis","tag-moon","tag-nasa","tag-spacex","tag-starship"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}