Elon Musk described various aspects of the SpaceX Super Heavy booster.
The Superheavy booster will land tail first. The stainless body will not need any extra heat shielding.
Rocket booster temperatures won’t go much above 600 Kelvin on hottest parts of main body & maybe around 1200K on base, which uncooled steel can handle. Starship is around 1700K for a Mach 25 entry, so needs shielding of some kind.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2019
If methane vapors are brought into the cavity between the inner outer skins and are discharged through the holes to meet the incident flow, a surface layer is created. The flow will interact with the layer, not with the skin. Protection of the Starship hopper guaranteed pic.twitter.com/moQEHKU9HK
— Сергей Литовченко (@LytovchenkoSerg) February 8, 2019
Technically, the steel is radiatively cooled (not uncooled). T^4 is one of the most interesting things about reality!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2019
No, he's referring to black body radiation – https://t.co/AmWC1tgzxK and how heat will radiate away to cool the booster. The Starship does need to be actively cooled which they'll bleed out liquid methane through micropores to cool it.
— Everyday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) February 8, 2019
Booster center of mass is much lower & more consistent (no payload mass to consider), so still biases towards engine first entry
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2019
~1750K is peak heating expected on about 20% of Starship for LEO entry, ~1600K on 20%. Rest drops below 1450K, so no heat shield needed. Radiative cooling at T^4 takes care of 60% of the ship. Another reason for steel.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2019
The Super Heavy booster is only needed on Earth, so think of this as just “Starship” & sometimes it needs a boost, hence Super Heavy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2019
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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