The SpaceX Super Heavy booster that will fly to orbit should be completed within weeks. This first booster will have 29 Raptor engines and each engine will have 225 tons of thrust. The regular Super Heavy boosters will have 32 Raptor engines for 7200 tons of thrust. The Saturn V that flew men to the moon had 3580 tons of thrust.
Kendall Dirks, @Kendall_Dirks on twitter, has renderings of the SpaceX Super Heavy starship standing on the sea launch platforms that SpaceX is making from oil platforms.
CBass productions has a full animation of a SpaceX Super Heavy Starship flying to orbit and returning for the soft splash downs.
Credits (Please go follow these people if you don’t already):
Neopork (Starship and SH Models): https://twitter.com/Neopork85
Alex Svan (Raptor Model): https://twitter.com/AlexSvanArt
Sam Krug (Earth Atmosphere Shader): https://twitter.com/samuel_krug
Spaceport3D (3D Scan of Boca Chica Launch Site): https://twitter.com/Spaceport3D
Nick Henning (Misc. Boca Chica Buildings): https://twitter.com/nickhenning3d
SOURCES-= CBass Productions, Kendall Dirks, 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. Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels. A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
eh, SRB's are heavy, reusable or not. you don't gain back that much performance deleting the parachute kit, and the side thrusters are necessary for separation.
When we can duplicate what the DOD admits exists, its "Katie bar the door", the "Expanse" may be very prophetic, we are not going to get there using "pyrotechnics" however interesting and misleading that may be.
Right on, remember the the "reusable" SRBs?.
When we get our" Matter-Gates working"(Ala"Forbin Project") we will be busy sending all our excess CO2 to Mars.
Headlines read-"Quick, burn everything you can".
Seriously, some of this tech we used to read about as youngsters probably already exists. Elon is giving us a viable way to the inner solar system via old tech( lets not get hung up on it- remember the branch from the "Tech Tree" from the fifties.
"Look not up, look beside you".( paraphrase from "The Book of Silver")
I'd like to see Super-Heavy look like this:
http://astronautix.com/n/n1-mok.html
N-1 looked to lend itself to RENE/annular aerospike designs…
Which is also irrelevant because you can haul up as much cargo as you want to the next mission.
This is way better than Saturn V. Saturn V just showed us we could get there. It was a rocket that`s all. I`m glad we didn`t try to go to Mars then. We`d have never made it and it would have been expensive. Starship is a real Spaceship that can be reused over and over. The kind we used to read about in science fiction.
Elon Musk is Fifty now so it is going to be at least 2026 before he`ll gets there. He`ll be 56 by then. The first ships will not have people on board. They will be cargo so add another couple years to and it before humans land on Mars 2028. But we have another problem Mars has an atmosphere 1% of earths air pressure and a gravity that 37 % of earths so are they going to be able to land on Mars as they do on earth? Or will the first ship just be a test on how to land on Mars? Or will they have to send a tanker to refuel in orbit around Mars.
5% of GDP? for what? useless government projects? like moon landing for the sake of moon landing? Space race was useless in totality. Great resources and intelligence wasted, nothing gained. The results that we got were unsustainable precisely because of the scale and time as goal. There was no plan what to do in space, it was a waste. Chinese geographical discoveries were like that-huge armadas, 100's of ships, millions of workers, huge ships dwarfing anything in history… for what? For nothing, to travel and leave other nations in awe. Compare with Europeans. Ridicolously small ships by comparison, dozen at most in one mission. But the goal-profit. No other options. Dont go empty handed. Fight if you have to. Be or not to be, this must have returns… result? Chinese abandoned this folly and forbid creation of deep sea ships… Europeans dominated the world. NASA and Apollo are Chinese approaches. The current one is European one. You should despiese Apollo if you are space enthusiast, it kept us stuck on this rock for half a century!
Stop looking at thrust, start looking at reusability.
BFR/Starship are literally infinitely better in terms of reusability and reusability is all that matters.
Too big for their landing barges, and until they have a lot more experience with it, they can't plan on bringing it back to land where an error of a few miles would drop it on people. The first one on a orbital shot that actually gets landed dry will be on his converted oil rig, I expect.
Well, on a performance per cost basis it's actually way, way ahead of the old school Saturn.
REAL lost technology of the Apollo project is how to get the public to support space missions to the scale of 5% of GDP.
Nobody ever actually uses the power of a rocket motor, it's always measured in thrust.
And given that it is made in the USA, we will accept that they like using quaint medieval units based on "three grains of sound ripe barley being taken out the middle of the ear, well dried, and laid end to end in a row" or something.
Though a lot of that performance gain gets eaten by reusability. Can't escape from that.
So now it has taken almost 60 years to finally outdo what was done by engineers with no computers, inferior materials and inferior construction methods. I'm glad it's happening but am disappointed at how we threw our lead away and gave in to the social critics. We could have had a fully functioning Moon base by now.
I understood that the 2nd stage would be sacrificed but the 1st stage too? Why not try to retrieve that?
Could we switch out of the Fred Flintstone units when describing rocket motor power?
Elon tweeted that they were going to start with 29 (1 + 8 + 20) and then upgrade to 32 (3 + 9 + 20) "later this year" (possibly with BN4?) He says that "boost back burn efficiency is greatly improved in this config[uration]". Whatever floats your boat, Elon.
Very little confusion with a bankrupt Russian company Boeing is trying to collect judgement from. Perhaps use less common words if you want to *own* them.
Beautiful animation of the first Starship orbital flight. It showed it carrying a Cybertruck which was a nice touch.
Is it now really 32 Raptors for Super Heavy? I missed seeing an announcement of that. I don't follow the SpaceX news slavishly, so I might just have missed an announcement.
Last I recall hearing is 28 Raptors, with some speculation that one would be added within the inner ring to make the total 29, but I don't recall anyone at SpaceX saying 29.
> sea launch platforms
Sea Launch was a joint Russian/Ukranian/Norwegian/Boeing project that launched rockets from a converted North Sea drilling platform. I worked on that project in its early days.
To avoid confusion, perhaps you should refer to the new SpaceX and similar ones as "offshore launch platforms", the way we call their previous life an "offshore oil platform".