The 2022 SpaceX Starship Update Is Here!
The SpaceX Starship is easily one of the most pivotal inventions of our lifetime. And that’s saying a lot because some pretty spectacular things have been invented in the past few decades. But Starship is a technological revolution that can extend the range of human possibility further than it has ever gone before. This removes barriers that have held back our space exploration programs for decades. By combining super heavy cargo capacity with rapid reusability, the Starship allows us to travel to places we’ve never been and do things we’ve never done before. There’s very little precedent for a vehicle like this aside from maybe the first sailing ship and the first passenger airplane.
And we’re getting pretty close to the day when the Starship makes its mark on history. We’re not there yet. But we are close enough that Elon Musk took the opportunity to show the world what he and the SpaceX team have been up to for the past couple of years.
As if that wasn’t enough, the follow up announcement of the Polaris project has taken things to the next level. Not only does this give us a preview of how SpaceX will manage their first human space walks, Polaris also sets the stage for the first crewed flight of the Starship.
We’ve got a lot to dig into today, so let’s get going.
The Starship
On February 10th at the Starbase testing facility, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk held a live presentation to update everybody on the progress with the Starship rocket and his personal aspirations for colonizing Mars. It’s been almost two years since the last time he did this.
One of the things that Elon spoke a lot about was the launch tower for the Starship, also referred to as the Mechazilla by Elon on Twitter, but during the presentation he mostly referred to it as stage zero - stressing that the tower was just as important and complex as the booster and the ship, they need all three for this idea to work. Prior to the event we did see the tower use its chopstick arms to pick up the ship and place it on top of the booster section, which is pretty dope already. Elon spoke a lot about the importance of the aspect of rapid reusability, calling it the ‘Holy Grail’ of spaceflight. He then says that SpaceX are aiming to ‘aspirationally’ land on the robotic arms of the tower. So it sounds like even Elon is still not convinced this can work effectively, at least not yet. Elon joked that if the booster does come down too hard and shear off the arms, then it would be a, ‘farewell to arms.’
But SpaceX are very clearly counting on the tower catch system to pan out in the long term. Elon was saying that they expect the turnaround time to refly each booster to be as little as one hour. While a ship would be ready to launch again within 6 hours of landing.
Elon talked about the new heat shield for Starship, which is much different than what we are used to seeing on a vehicle like the Space Shuttle. The SpaceX design is a very precise network of hexagon tiles that they produce at a facility nicknamed the bakery. Because Starship is made from stainless steel, the body already has a very high heat tolerance on its own, so the heat shield itself does not have to be nearly as thick as a conventional lander. Elon says that they took a lot of inspiration from roofing tiles when designing the Starship heat shield. And adds that every aspect of the heatshield design is to make it robust enough to support rapid reusability and ensure low cost per flight.
We got our first confirmation about how the Starship would refuel in orbit. We’ve always known that the ship would have to dock with a tanker before it would be able to travel as far as the Moon or Mars. And previously it had been widely expected that the two ships would do a kind of ass to ass connection. But luckily we now know that there will be an attachment point on the back side of the ship, so the opposite of the heat shield, and that long vertical connection point will allow for the ingress and egress of propellant. Elon says that it is mostly the supply of liquid oxidizer that will need to be topped off for a long range Starship flight.
The Raptor Engine version two was on full display at the event as well. We can very clearly see that it is a more simplified design this time around. We could almost call Raptor one a prototype and Raptor two the finished product - because the first engine looks like an absolute rat’s nest by comparison. Elon is saying that the max thrust output so far from the new Raptor is 247 tons, and will probably operate for launches at around 230 tons of thrust. Elon thinks that they can eventually push this engine to operate at 250 tons of thrust. The production rate for Raptor two is going to be about one engine per day, and that lines up pretty close with the company goal of building one full stack Starship per month, which would need 36 of these Raptors plus 3 or maybe 6 of the vacuum optimized variants.
Moving on to more launch based operations, Elon says that both Starbase and Cape Canaveral present options for developing Starship. He confirms that there will be a production facility and launch pad at LC 39A, where Elon says that they are already approved from an environmental standpoint for orbital launches and worst case scenario that would be the location for a first orbital Starship attempt. Elon says that the FAA should approve Starbase for orbital launch in March, but he doesn’t get much info from the agency in the meantime. Either way, Elon says that he is ‘highly confident that they will get to orbit this year’.
The plan for year one is basically to test the system using Starlink launches as the proof of concept. Which is a really nice advantage that SpaceX have, they don’t need to convince anyone else to put their payload into an experimental rocket, they can just fly their own satellites until it is well proven that the system works.
Elon says that SpaceX are optimistically hoping to test the orbital refilling system towards the end of next year.
But he concludes by saying that the primary focus of SpaceX right now is getting the Starship to orbit and then proving their return method for the booster and the ship.
Mars
Alright, now do Mars. We also heard Elon Musk talk a bit more about his vision for Mars. But he has yet to lay out any practical details about how that might happen.
So, Elon’s ultimate goal with the Starship program is to eventually move 1 million tons of cargo from the Earth to Mars. That’s how much stuff he thinks we will need to form a self sustaining city on the Red Planet. And by self sufficient, he means that if ships were to stop arriving from Earth, for whatever reason, then the Mars city could continue on indefinitely.
He also stressed that settling Mars at first will not be a fun time, Elon said it would be cramped, difficult, dangerous and very hard work. He also added that you might die in the process. According to Elon we should look at Mars like a fixer upper of a planet that some day could be made as comfortable as Earth.
And of course, Elon gave his standard talk about how we need to make human life multiplanetary while the window to do so is still open - it might remain open for a very long time, but it might also be very limited, and therefore we have to make our move as soon as possible, just in case.
But again, he gave very few technical details on how that happens. He mused that for medium duration, crewed Starship missions of one to two weeks, the HLS Moon landing for example, SpaceX could probably scale up the life support system that they use in the Dragon Capsule. But in terms of providing life support for a 6 month Mars transit, he basically said they’ll need to invent something new, but not quite sure what that is yet.
The Polaris Program
As if all of that wasn’t enough, on February 14th we got the announcement of the Polaris Program.
This is a brand new initiative led by billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. We might remember Jared as the force behind the SpaceX Inspiration 4 mission last September that sent a crew of civilians into orbit in a Dragon capsule for two days. Jared served as mission commander for Inspiration 4, because in addition to being a tech billionaire, he is also an experienced pilot who has performed in air shows for decades and in 2009 set a world record for circumnavigating the globe in a jet plane, completing one lap around the Earth in just under 62 hours.
Jared’s history of overachieving continues with Polaris, which boasts some very lofty goals. There are 3 missions on the Polaris docket. And the first, named Polaris Dawn is set to launch as early as the fourth quarter of 2022.
Polaris Dawn will again use the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule to take Jared and his crew into orbit. But this mission will take full advantage of the Falcon 9 and Dragon’s maximum performance, flying higher than any SpaceX mission to date and endeavoring to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown.
This super long distance orbital path will take the crew through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt, where Polaris Dawn will conduct research with the aim of better understanding the effects of spaceflight and space radiation on human health.
But there’s more. At approximately 500 kilometers above the Earth, the crew will attempt the first-ever commercial extravehicular activity with SpaceX-designed spacesuits. A space walk, in other words. The entire crew of 4 will be using the SpaceX EVA suits to survive and work in the vacuum of space. Since the Dragon has no airlock, the entire capsule will depressurize for the walk and then repressurize again afterwards. These new EVA suits are an evolution of the Crew Dragon flight suits that we all know and love. The development of this suit and the execution of the EVA will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions.
And lastly, The Polaris Dawn crew will be the first to test Starlink’s laser-based communications in space, providing valuable data for future space communications systems necessary for missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
As far as the second mission for Polaris, that is still up in the air. All we really know is that the plan will evolve based on the results of the first mission. Something that will build on whatever they discover on Polaris Dawn.
It’s the third Polaris mission that is particularly interesting. This is already being billed as the first crewed flight for the Starship. We don’t know when this will happen, or what the mission parameters will look like. But in an interview with Tim Dodd at The EveryDay Astronaut, Jared Isaacman confirmed that the Starship will be crewed for the entire duration of the mission - so the ship will launch and land with people on board. This is significantly different that the plan for the Lunar Starship that will bring people to the surface of the Moon on the Artemis 3 mission - that ship will be uncrewed when it launches from the Earth and will only ever land on the Moon with people inside, which is much, much easier to do than landing on the Earth. That’s going to be one hell of a ride.
The FAA Though
Of course, SpaceX can’t even launch the first orbital test flight of the Starship without approval from the FAA. And it’s just come in as we are researching this video, the FAA are now pushing back their timeline for the Starship environmental review to the end of March. This started out with the end date of December 31st 2021. Then jumped to February 28th 2022. And now we’re March 28th 2022. Without this approval, SpaceX can not launch to orbit from their test facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Elon has said that as a last resort they could still launch Starship to orbit for the first time from their facility at LC 39A in Cape Canaveral Florida - that site is approved for orbital space launches, obviously. But SpaceX have already built the necessary launch and landing infrastructure for Starship at Boca Chica, and that took them a very long time to do. So packing up and moving to Florida is really going to be a massive set back to the program. We really hope it never comes to that.
