There continues to be many advances on multiple fronts towards the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship.
SpaceX should have a 20-meter altitude untethered test hop of the Starhopper today.
Update: they aborted the Starhopper test just before it left the ground.
The Starhopper is about half the height of a full orbital Starship.
The Dragon that will launch on the Falcon 9 will have ceramic heat tiles that should be used on the SpaceX Starship.
The orbital version of the Starship is nearing the completion of the construction of the body of the rocket. There will need to be six Raptor engines for a complete orbital Starship.
SpaceX testing ceramic Starship heat shield tiles on flight-proven CRS-18 Cargo Dragonhttps://t.co/X4lQUdPD8h
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 24, 2019
Current status of #Starship Mk1. #SpaceX crews are still polishing the stainless steel sections, and the sounds of power tools fill the air. Pretty busy site! pic.twitter.com/fjUcQbTVWv
— Tyler Gray (@TylerG1998) July 24, 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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There are inevitably going to be areas on the ship that can’t be evaporatively cooled, like leading edges of the fins.
Caught that also. I’ve not heard of any deviation from the evaporation cooling plan.
Wow!
“The Dragon that will launch on the Falcon 9 will have ceramic heat tiles that should be used on the SpaceX Starship.”
What’s this? I thought they were going exclusively with steel and evaporative cooling.
Musky said that it would likely be able to reach orbit on its own if it had minimal flight hardware and no payload. Good for orbital reentry tests and not much else, but that’s all it *needs* to be good for.
T+3 sec abort must have been hair raising…
I guess they are risking as little hardware as possible. But isn’t the orbital version including a booster? This is half the suborb, no?
The StarHopper “fuselage” is clearly for test only; is it known whether the frame that holds the Raptors in the Hopper is also for test only?