Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - What is the Deal With SpaceX’s Starship? (Redux)

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

In 1967, the very first Saturn V rocket was launched. It was the largest rocket ever built.  55 years later, it is still the largest rocket ever launched. However, it might not hold that distinction for much longer. There is a new rocket in town and it might soon displace the Saturn V, and in the process, revolutionize space flight. Learn more about Starship and how it might totally transform the entire space industry on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, this is Gary. I'm out of town this week, so I've been doing what I've been calling Redux episodes. These are Encore episodes where I give an update on the story at the end, so make sure to stay tuned all the way to the end of the podcast. This episode was initially released on February 18th, 2022, and since then, there have been some big updates to Starship. Also, this is going to be the last of the Redux episodes this week, so starting tomorrow, things will be back to a normal schedule. With that, enjoy the episode on Starship. In 1967, the very first Saturn 5 rocket was launched. It was the largest rocket ever built. 55 years later, it's still the largest rocket ever launched. However, it might not hold that distinction for much longer.

There's a new rocket in town, and it might soon displace the Saturn 5, and in the process, revolutionized spaceflight. Learn more about Starship and how it might totally transform the entire space industry on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is going to be a bit different.

Instead of covering a topic from history or explaining some physical phenomenon, I wanted to do an explainer episode about a new technology that has incredible potential, but most people might not know it exists or if they do how it works. I should also note that this is going to primarily focus on one product from a single company. SpaceX didn't sponsor this episode, and I've never even talked to anyone there. But if Elon Musk is interested, I have an executive producer credit available over at Patreon. That being said, ever since the space age began, there has been one massive problem. Getting into space is really expensive.

The standard metric for determining the cost of spaceflight has been the price to put one kilogram of mass into orbit. That figure has traditionally been somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000. Even on the low end, that's an enormous amount of money to send the equivalent of one liter of water into space. That means that any trip to space was going to be a very big deal. The cost of putting a satellite into orbit, even a small one, could often cost over $100 million. Factor in the inherent risk of spaceflight and the insurance which is required, and you have something which is done highly infrequently and requires government involvement to cover the costs and risks. The reason why spaceflight is so expensive can be

boiled down to one simple fact. Rockets are disposable. The problem was recognized really early on. You'd build an expensive piece of technology, fire it into space, and then you could never use it again. Think how expensive it would be to fly if every time you flew, you had to get a brand new airplane. In 1969, while in the middle of the Apollo program, NASA took the first step towards creating a reusable system to get to orbit. This became known as the space transportation system, which you probably know better as the space shuttle. The goal of the space shuttle was to dramatically lower the cost of getting to orbit because most of the system would be reusable. As measured against this goal, the program was a dismal failure. Not only was the cost not lower, but it actually ended up being much more expensive than just using regular rockets.

The boosters on the space shuttle were recovered and reused in theory, but almost had to be totally rebuilt every single launch. The main fuel tank couldn't be reused. Most importantly, the main orbiter was so complex and expensive that the cost of inspecting everything between flights, especially after the Challenger disaster, became cost prohibitive. The cost per kilogram of getting into orbit with the space shuttle was $50,000, one of the high. highest prices in the history of spaceflight. When I said before that it costs between $10,000 and $100,000 to put a kilogram of something into orbit, there was one exception. It was the Saturn 5, which was able to put a kilogram into orbit for an inflation-justed price of about $5,500. The Saturn 5 managed to achieve that simply because it was so large. The problem was every

Saturn 5 launch would cost $1.2 billion in inflation-indjusted dollars. The holy grail of orbital transportation would be something called a single stage-to-orbit vehicle. If you've ever seen the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, in that there is an airplane that just flies into orbit and back to Earth, just like a regular airplane flies from point eight to point B. In pretty much every science fiction movie, there's some ship that can just fly directly into space. While that's the dream, we don't really have anything right now which can come close to doing that. There are a host of engineering problems that would need to be overcome to achieve it, including how you can travel that fast without a booster rocket and how you would return to the Earth's atmosphere.

The next best thing would be a two-stage rocket, which could be reused. One of the big questions would be how do you recover the booster stage? The easy solution is to just let it fall into the ocean with a parachute and then recover it out of the water. While this can work, it's a pretty in-elegant solution. Falling into the water can damage it, preventing it from being reused, salt water can be corrosive, and it just takes more time and money to turn the rocket around if you do it. it this way. The ideal solution would be a rocket stage that could do a vertical landing. Experiments had been done attempting this since the early 1960s, and this was ultimately what

was used for the lunar lander during the Apollo missions. However, it proved very difficult to actually achieve on Earth. Landing a rocket isn't like landing an aircraft. The slightest problem with thrust or maneuvering can cause it to roll over and crash. Most private rocket companies in the 21st century have been pursuing vertical landings. The company which managed to successfully solve the problem was SpaceX. Their Falcon 9 rockets have reusable booster stage that can land back on a landing pad or on a barge in the ocean. For several years, their Falcon 9 launches just had the booster stage land in the water. But in 2015, for the first time, they managed to have the booster land on a landing pad.

Since then, they have had a 90% success rate in booster recovery, with one booster having been reused 11 times so far. The Falcon 9 has radically lowered the cost of getting to orbit by about a factor of four. It can now launch payloads at $2,600 per kilogram. A variant of the Falcon 9 called the Falcon Heavy uses two additional boosters, both of which can be recovered, and due to the increase in scale, it can launch payloads into orbit for as little as $1,500 a kilogram. It's hard to stress just how much the Falcon rockets have disrupted the space industry. There's no government or private company on Earth, which can come close to their price point. And the thing is, on top of that, because they have developed a cheap system that can be turned around quickly,

they now have more experience and data about rocket launches than anyone else in the world, even NASA. They have literally had more orbital launches in the last 10 years than the rest of the world combined. However, as good as the Falcon line of rockets has been, it's far from perfect. The lower stage is reusable, but the upper stage is not. To achieve the goal of a fully reusable rocket, SpaceX is currently working on something called Starship. Starship would not only be the first fully reusable orbital delivery system in history, but also the largest. In addition to reusability, it would have the efficiencies of scale that the Saturn 5 and the Falcon Heavy demonstrated. The stated goal is to get the operating cost of a single launch down to $2 million.

And given its payload capacity, it would mean a cost to orbit on a fully full flight of just, $30 per kilogram. It would mean that the cheapest orbital system would also be the largest, and it would also mean a price reduction of approximately 1,000-fold over prices in the 1960s and the space shuttle. So exactly, how is this going to work? Why is it so cheap? The upper stage is shaped like a bullet with stubby wings. It would sit directly on top of the lower stage, which looks similar to the lower stage of a Falcon 9, but much, much larger. Together, both stages would be over 400 feet tall on the launch pad. The lower stage, also known as the super heavy booster, would return to Earth and land vertically. The major difference between it and the Falcon 9

booster is that it would land at the exact same spot where it took off, and that would dramatically reduce the turnaround time for launching the next rocket. The upper stage is perhaps the real innovation. It is also, confusingly, just called Starship. Originally designed to be made out of carbon fiber, this was changed a few years ago, and it's now made out of stainless steel. Stainless Steel is heavier, but it's also cheaper and easier to manufacture. There have already been several tests of the upper stage, and they finally made a successful landing after launching into a height of 12 kilometers after several spectacular crashes. When it reenters the atmosphere, it will come in at an angle to reduce velocity. A heat shield on one side will absorb most of the friction.

Then, just before it gets to the surface, it'll quickly turn so it's fully vertical and land. There won't be a single type of starship. The plan is to make many different versions for different missions. For deploying satellites, you could have an unmanned version with large pot-bay doors. Another version could be designed to never return to Earth and would be used for landing on the moon or Mars. Yet another version could be used for people. The interior volume of a single starship is greater than that of the entire international space station. A version could be made for just space tourism and take over 100 people into orbit at once.

Not only that, but a starship could be used to transport supplies and people from different points on Earth. You could do a less than full orbital flight and go from Texas to Australia in under an hour. Underneath all of this, what is really taking up the most time and effort right now is the development of the Raptor engine. The Raptor engine would be used in both the upper and lower stages of Starship. Using a single engine design for everything is designed to lower costs. Unlike the Saturn 5, which had massive F-1 engines, the largest rocket engines ever built, Starship will just use more Raptor engines to achieve the same thing. The lower stage is currently expected to use 35 Raptor engines and 6 on the upper stage.

The Raptor engine will be the first rocket engine to actually be put into production that will run on liquid methane. The reason for selecting methane rather than kerosene, which most rockets use, is that methane burns cleaner, allowing the engines to be reused without having to clean the soot. of it. The design goal for each Raptor engine is to have a lifespan of 1,000 uses. Instead of of hand-making each engine, the way they're made now, the plan is to eventually make them in an assembly line producing one or two per day. Likewise, the upper stage starships themselves would also be made in this fashion. The question many people are now asking is what will happen if this system works and gets up and running. Access to space has been incredibly expensive ever since the start

of the space age. When automobiles dramatically reduce the cost of personal transit, it resulted in massive cultural changes. The same was true when the internet reduced the cost of transmitting information. People are just beginning to think of what might be possible with cheap access to space. There's no reason why satellites need to be so expensive given the cost of electronics today. Experimental satellites have been built and flown made from off-the-shelf components. Planetary fly-by missions today cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. There's no reason why with off-the-shelf technology and cheap orbital access, a similar mission could be done by a consortium of major universities for just a few million dollars.

The reason I decided to do this episode is that sometime in the next few months after recording this, the first test flight of the Starship system may take place. If this works, and there's every indication that it will at this point, it will usher in a revolution in space that most people might not even be aware of. It will render everything else which came before it almost irrelevant, just like bows and arrows were to firearms. There will still be a lot of crashes experimenting and tweaking, which will need to be be done to make the system work. Nonetheless, pay attention to what happens over the next several years, as we might have a front row seat to the greatest revolution in space travel in over 50 years.

So it took a lot longer than expected, but both halves of Starship were finally put together, and they conducted two test launches so far. The first launch took place on April 20, 20, 23, and the results were mildly encouraging. It managed to get off the launch pad, but the flight was terminated three minutes after launch when they lost thrust vectoring control of the raptor engines. Thrust vectoring control is one of the big advantages of the raptor engines. Unlike the Saturn 5 rocket, which was used in the Apollo missions, which used five gigantic F1 rocket engines, Starship is using 33 smaller Raptor engines. These engines can literally pivot to steer the rocket, but the more engines you use, the more things can go wrong. Despite many news outlets saying

the launch was a failure, it was actually a moderate, success given the mission's parameters. A second launch took place on November 18, 2023. This time, all 33 Raptor engines work flawlessly on liftoff, and they got to a point where the two stages managed to separate from each other. However, when the first stage did its flip and tried to return back to the launch pad, the engines failed. The second stage managed to make it to an altitude of 149 kilometers or 93 miles before the Auto Destruction Command was given. So while things are looking promising there is still a lot of work they have to do. For starters, they need to get the second stage into orbit. Then they need to be able to land the first stage so it can be reused. Then they

need to be able to get the second stage to reenter the atmosphere and then make a vertical landing, something that's never been done for an orbital spacecraft before. The next test launch is scheduled to take place sometime in February 2024. I think the goal this time is to get stage two into orbit, but not have it land gracefully. It'll probably splash down somewhere around Point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean, on which I've done a previous episode. So there's still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out, but it looks, at least to an outsider, that the project is somewhat on track. If they can pull it off, it'll become the world's first totally reusable spacecraft and will dramatically reduce the cost of launching anything into Earth orbit.