Scientific Advancement of the Month

For the fourth month of 2021, the title of best scientific advancement has to go to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the incredible developmental work they are doing on their brand new rocket, the Starship. Starship, formally known as Big Falcon Rocket, incorporates many technological innovations that have never been seen in the world of rocketry and space travel. It is also being designed to do something that has never been attempted before, which is landing human beings on Mars. With a height of 394 feet and a thrust of 17 million pounds at liftoff, it blows every previously built rocket out of the water in terms of size and power. It has been in development for nearly a decade, but only within the past few months has it finally begun making test flights, which have been (mostly) successful.

 

One of the biggest innovations of the Starship is its unique Raptor engines. The Raptor engine was developed just for Starship and is unlike any other rocket engine in the world. The Raptor Engine’s defining feature is its full flow staged combustion cycle. Full flow staged combustion is something that has long been considered impossible by the aerospace industry. The Soviet Union and the United States researched this technology for years, but no engine of this type had successfully flown… until now. The full flow staged combustion cycle accomplishes maximum possible efficiency. Every other rocket engine burns some of its fuel and oxidizer pre-maturely to power the turbines necessary to pump the fuel. While some engines are able to recapture most of this fuel and burn it again, most of it ends up going to waste and contributing no actual thrust. However, by sending the fuel and oxidizer through their own separate preburners and turbines, SpaceX was able to successfully achieve the Holy Grail of rocket propulsion. (The actual details of SpaceX’s new raptor engine are actually a bit more complicated than this. More information about these engines can be found here)

 

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The second starship prototype SN9 lifts off on a test flight

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Thanks to the incredibly efficient Raptor engines, Starship is able to have a massive payload capacity. Starship will use 6 raptor engines, 3 of which will be optimized for atmospheric flight and 3 of which will be optimized for flight in a vacuum. All 3 of Starship’s test flights so far have remained in the atmosphere and have therefore been equipped with only 3 engines. These 3 engines look far too small to be able to power the massive starship when compared to similarly sized rockets such as the Saturn V, and yet they continue to reliably lift Starship off the ground.

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In addition to its innovative propulsion systems, starship has also demonstrated an incredibly impressive flight profile. SpaceX forever secured their place in space history with the Falcon 9, which is the first orbital booster to be able to land itself. SpaceX is now applying this technology to the far larger Starship, which is no small feat. Exactly what I mean by this can be demonstrated by something that we’ve all done as children. Remember when you used to take some long, cylindrical object, perhaps a baseball bat, and balance it vertically on your hand, moving your hand to keep the end of the object underneath the top of the object as it wobbled? That is what SpaceX is doing with Starship. However, instead of a baseball bat, they are balancing a 1,400,000 lb rocket plummeting toward the ground, and instead of a hand they are using 3 movable rocket engines with 500,000 lbs of thrust each. That’s what SpaceX has been attempting to do each time they fly Starship, and they’ve been getting incredibly close. More information on Starship’s complicated landing profile and previous tests can be found here.

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Diagram illustrating how planetary entry, descent, and landing (EDL) will look like for starship.

 

In addition to balancing a massive stainless steel tube on a pillar of fire, SpaceX has also been able to demonstrate the ability to steer this massive steel tube to a precision landing from thousands of feet in the air using aerodynamic forces. In the hopefully not too distant future, when Starship enters the Martian atmosphere for the first time, it will be travelling at an incredibly high speed. It will dissipate most of this energy using aerodynamic braking, which is essentially turning it’s broadside into the wind in order to slow down. Once it has slowed down sufficiently it will save fuel by continuing to steer itself to landing using aerodynamic control surfaces which can be seen on the top and bottom of the Starship prototypes. SpaceX has already demonstrated Starship’s ability to fly up to around 40,000 feet, flip horizontally and fall on its belly, flip back vertically and then steer itself to a landing. All 4 of it’s attempted landings admittedly have ended in explosions, but these have been due to issues that occurred at the last possible moment and which will soon be corrected.

 

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A Starship prototype re-lights it’s engines as it falls to slow itself down for the final landing sequence.

 

The advancements that SpaceX has made with it’s Starship booster both in the past decade and In the past 3 months are truly remarkable. I should stress again that all of these advancements are completely original and unlike anything else currently being done in the space industry. The Starship program has massive potential and will completely revolutionize the way we approach space travel. More stats and information about Starship can be found here.