What will be ultimate answer for the SpaceX Starship launchpad? Will it be the water-cooled steel plate, an enhanced version of the water-cooled steel plate or a flame trench?
The launchpad needs to be improved to prevent the rocket from digging a large hole and creating a rock tornado.
SpaceX answer for the Starship launchpad will need to be repeated at eventually hundreds of launch sites. If the full Super heavy booster and Starship are mass-produced and launched from many locations at a weekly cadence then launch sites could scale into the hundreds.
Starship upper stage-only launches for rapid air cargo deliveries would only have 25% of the launch power of the booster.
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This is not difficult. It’s a simple engineering problem with multiple cheap and easy solutions. Redirecting the emissions with water cooled blast plates seems like the easiest answer for this existing structure. Future launch pads will probably be perform better and be cheaper with a simple vented blast trench installed beneath them. These engineers have solved vertical rocket landings. I don’t think this simple issue has stumped any of them. Actually, I’m guessing they’re having fun with it. I would.
I think the flames will cut through the steel plate just like a cutters torch. The steel cannot heat fast enough to keep the metal below it’s melting point.
Yes, you can boil water in a paper cup, but the paper is thin. The steel plate has to be thick enough to withstand a lot of pressure. Remember the concrete was basically crushed by the exhaust.
No, the sand fill underneath it was crushed by the pressure of the exhaust transferred through the concrete, and then the concrete cracked and broke because it was unsupported.
Water cooled steel plates are actually pretty standard for diverter plates.
I think the concussive force of the engines caused the sand under the pad to undergo liquefaction, like during an earthquake, and that allowed the concrete to deform rapidly and disintegrate much more quickly.
Why not put the rocket on a well that does not need to raise the rocket a certain distance from the ground. It means that the driving force enters a well
I suggested it to SpaceX through Twitter: The same heat tiles that they are using on Starship. They could create larger versions of those styles and lace everything in the launch tower with it. The entire area could be covered with it, and the entire launch tower. This would give it very good heat proofing against effectively a giant flamethrower which is what Starship is when it’s hovering over the ground. If someone from SpaceX is watching this comment can you please pass it to Elon?
The tiles are very heat resistant, they’re not very strong structurally. Not as bad as shuttle tiles, but not remotely as strong as solid ceramic. They’d be pulverized by the force of the exhaust.
This may be a crazy idea, but could the launch tower be modified to hold the rocket in mid-air 10s of feet above ground until enough thrust is provided to launch?
This may be too much for any kind of tower – even one that encircles the entire rocket – but it seems like there is a practical limit to how flame resistant any kind of platform can be made to the world’s most destructive spaceship thrust.
It’s not a crazy idea, in principle you could just raise the launch mount, and the higher it went, the less damage to the ground.
But that’s the sort of thing where you rapidly run into escalating expense, because as the tower gets taller, the foundation and bottom portion have to be stronger. It’s not something you can retrofit at this point, only implement in a NEW launch pad.
The launch tower and “chopsticks” can lift an empty rocket one segment at a time (booster and upper stage), not fully stacked and fully loaded with 1000s of tons of fuel and liquid oxygen.
it’s seems fair enough, perhaps not a new methode anyway … But can it really handle the weight and heat at the same time …
Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA) was mentioning that there is a general upper limit to milkstool type launch mounts, after which the momentum of the exhaust is too much to handle reasonably, forcing a switch to a flame trench.
Just a flat metal plate by itself, even water cooled, isn’t a workable solution. That exhaust is coming down, and it has to go somewhere. That means it needs to be diverted, not just stopped. And a jet of gas hitting a flat plate square on is going to result in turbulence. 222GW of turbulence = BAD.
This means that in the middle you’re going to need some sort of diverter system. Probably, given six legs on the launch ring, a six sided water cooled pyramid in the center. So that the exhaust “knows” where to go, and isn’t actively guided into the legs themselves.
A flame trench isn’t feasible for Boca Chica due to the high water table, and the launch mount already being at a fixed height. That’s the sort of thing you have to plan from the start.
So we are saying that a trench can’t be dug and drained because of the water table? Pardon my ignorance but how is terrain usually recovered from the sea?
Does the Kennedy Space Center in Florida not have the same issue with a high water table? (Yet they have flame trenches) Nearby Titusville is only 10ft above sea level.
They filled and built up before building the launch pad, the bottom of the flame trench is at about the original ground level, I believe.
The pads at KSC are huge elevated mounds and the flame trenches are dug down to almost ground level. The pads surface is 40 or 50 feet up above ground level.