SpaceX Starship Will Be Fully Operational Tomorrow

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The SpaceX orbital prototype of the Starship is fully assembled. They placed the nosecone on it and it has three Raptor engines.

This is time for Elon Musk to make a presentation on Starship tomorrow.

NOTE: There is some plumbing, wiring and other work that still needs to be done. I just could not resist the Star Wars quote reference. Also, the second Death Star was also highly incomplete when the Emperor made the statement. Elon will be presenting in a few hours.

UPDATE:
The summary of Elon Musk’s presentation is here.

The point of the presentation is to inspire the public and get people excited about space and the future.

Do we want to choose the future where we are on many world and exploring the stars? The critical breakthrough is to make space travel like air travel. We fly the airplane many time. We flew 747s about 30,000 to 100,000 times over its life. We fly them for decades and fly them pretty much every day.

The main constraint on the Super-Heavy booster is ramping up the production of the Raptor engines.

They will need 100 Raptor engines to get to the orbital test. They build one Raptor engine currently every eight days. On 2 months they want to get to one Raptor engine every two days. By Q12020, they want to get to one engine every day. This means the orbital flight would not be until about March, 2020.

SpaceX wants to be able eventually refly boosters up to 20 times a day.
They will fly the Starship about 3-4 times a day. The orbital limitation is about the orbits. This would not be a limitation for a point to point version.

The fully reusable fleet of Super Heavy Starship will increase humanities launch capacity by 10000 times. This is max theoretical.

With 20 rockets you could put 3 million tons per year into orbit.

Less than one year to start from the steel design to the current state. Four months to start building the orbital prototype to the current state.

Tesla’s will be able to operate on Mars. They need no oxygen.

They will bring boring machines to mine water, get materials for bricks and build underground bases.

Mission Accomplished- Elon Musk inspired people about space and the future.

SOURCES- Elon Musk Twitter, SpaceX
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

25 thoughts on “SpaceX Starship Will Be Fully Operational Tomorrow”

  5. Heh I know who you are but who am I? 😀

    Sure, Saturn V F-1 engines run at a chamber pressure of 70 bars. Guess how much chamber pressure are the Raptors, or the Raptor’s staged-combustion preburners? You might want to look those up.

    At the performance level of the Raptors you better believe compartmentalization is a good idea.

  6. Says who? Who are you? An aerospace engineer? Because the stuff you just mentioned about the “armor” for the engines? Wasn’t on Saturn V. So I don’t know where you are getting that this is some requirement for rocket engines.

  10. Likely they will disassemble it after the presentation to continue work yes. I don’t see them leaving the fairing section up there with difficult access to continue the work– it will not be safe or efficient to do it that way. Much easier to take it down and put it back on a jig on the ground to continue outfitting it.

  11. No doubt this beast will fly at some point. Those who thinks this is the finished ready-to-fly Starship need to understand that’s not the case. Set the proper expectations to avoid disappointment. 🙂

  15. The other Raptors don’t go on the Starship (Starship is this second stage that can act as an suborbital rocket, or as a rocket capable of getting us back from Mars and the Moon).

    The second stage only gets 6 Raptors, 3 of them optimized for vacuum and 3 of them optimized for sea level. This prototype will only use the 3 sea level Raptors.

    The other 35 Raptors go to the Super Heavy, the first stage that will get the StarShip out of Earth’s gravity well, for a grand total of 41 Raptors engines.

  16. How are they going to put all of that in if the structure is already closed? Is this just another publicity shot, and they’re going to take it back apart for all the internal work (like they did with the hopper before the nosecone was blown over)?

    And speaking of things getting blown over, I don’t see any guylines…

  17. Lots still missing.

    The “upskirt” photographs of the 3 raptors for instance, that’s definitely unfinished. On Falcon 9 each Merlin engine is in its own armored cell inside the octaweb thrust structure, so in case one engine RUDs it won’t take out the other engines. They need to enclose each of those Raptors in their own protective bays.

    The aero covers for the canards aren’t installed yet.

    The plumbing for hooking up to the header tanks in the nose for certain has not been installed yet.

    The actuators for the fins definitely have not been installed yet.

    Miles of wiring for all the sensors aren’t installed yet.

    No sign ACS / RCS thrusters have been installed yet or plumbed.

    No sign of GSE QD’s. Those have not been installed yet for sure.

    And a thousand more items.

    I’d give it about 2 or more months of intense work before Mk1 is ready for its first hop. I know Musk said “hopefully in a month,” but in the rocket business slips are the rule, not the exception.

  23. No it will not be operational, the hinges are fake, lots of the internal structure like how to move the fins is missing same with loads of plumbing and wiring.
    Still its probably the most sexy upskirt images I have seen.

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