Bigger and Better SpaceX Starship in a Few Months

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The SpaceX Starship is the largest rocket that has been to space. The last test flight flew over the 60 mile altitude that defines being in space.

The SpaceX Starship will be upgraded. It will be bigger, better and more powerful.

The likely upgrades are they will be 10 meters longer. This will enable it to have more fuel and payload. The SpaceX Starship upper stage is 50 meters long. If this is made 20% longer then it would be 60 meters long.

They will remove some unneeded parts and shift the position of the fins.

The steel will change form 3.97 millimeter thick to 3.6 millimeter thick.

SpaceX will use new Raptor engines.

Raptor 3 will have a higher Isp than the Raptor 2, generate 20% more thrust. It will be reliable enough not to require a heat shield. Eliminating engine shielding would significantly reduce mass.

Starship V2 may be increase the number to nine Raptor engines from six current engines.

8 thoughts on “Bigger and Better SpaceX Starship in a Few Months”

  1. I am not sure what the optimal size will be for the starship and the super heavy. The raptor engines can be made larger and more powerful. And the starship and super heavy can be made wider and longer. I think it will all depend on how much mass you need to put into orbit annually. To maintain the advantages of mass production and reusability you will need a minimum of 10 ships and 10 launches per ship. Of course, more would be better. What I see is that the rockets will get bigger as the amount of traffic to space warrants it.

    • No but it’s much Better, as starship+superheavy was a bit under capability for refueling the transport in orbit.
      Early versions needed a LOT of tanker launches to refuel the mars transport in orbit. (Napkin math had it at apx 6-9 deliveries!) if they can increase the payload to orbit, the transport would start with more fuel and need fewer deliveries to refil it’s tanks while in orbit.

      • Scaling height improves sectional density, which helps with efficiency in pushing through the atmosphere. That’s a sensible improvement for the booster, which exclusively does that. The limit there is increasing hydrostatic pressure under acceleration, which starts to increase the structural load near the bottom of the rocket.

        Scaling diameter does nothing for sectional density, but tends to improve mass ratio; The structural mass tends to scale according to surface area, while fuel capacity scales with volume, so the ideal booster would have roughly the proportions of a soup can. The Starship ideally would be a soup can with a conical end.

        The real advantage in scaling diameter is reduced launch cadence, because each individual rocket can carry more. The disadvantage is that you have to increase the engine count, so reliability starts dropping. But if engine fratricide isn’t an issue, with a lot of engines you can accept some of them happening to fail on a flight, and the statistics start improving with larger rockets.

        So, we can reliably predict that the Superheavy booster isn’t going to end up more than 90m in diameter, anyway. 27m diameter? That I could see. At that diameter the Starship could still provide decent aerodynamics. Of course, at that point you’d have 300 Raptors tiling the bottom, and it would probably make sense to give up on catching it with a tower, and put the landing legs back on.

        At that point, a giant fuel tender rocket would carry enough fuel in one launch for the current Starship design, which would simplify things a lot.

        That would be quite a sight, wouldn’t it?

  3. Its awesome how fast SpaceX is at constantly upgrading this rocket. The only downside is that I’m rather impatient, and I want to see this shiny beast lofting moon bases & massive space stations.
    I wish them nothing but good luck.

    • [ ‘constantly upgrading’

      Is there information like a summary on SpaceX company’s/staff’s moral&ethic philosophy?
      What to expect from SpaceX with that growing power? ]

      • Elon Musk has been very open about what he is trying to do in interviews. This includes Electric cars, Solar power and other technologies.
        Since these companies are a mirror reflection of his desires (at this point), I think that would be the best place for you to look.

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