“We have Ships and Super Heavy boosters built and either ready to launch or in testing for the next several flights with more coming off of the production line as SpaceX’s Starfactory continues to grow,” Jessie Anderson, SpaceX’s Falcon Structures Manufacturing Engineering Manager, said during SpaceX’s livestream of the Starship flight test Thursday.
“The latest phase of the factory currently under construction will come online this summer, giving us several 100,000 more square feet of space.”
The facility is part of SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, one of the first-ever commercial spaceports in the world devoted to a single vehicle; in this case, Starship. Once completed, SpaceX goal for the facility will be to create one Starship megarocket every day at Starfactory.
SpaceX Starship version 2 will start production this summer.
Note, a newer version of Starship has the forward flaps shifted leeward. This will help improve reliability, ease of manufacturing and payload to orbit.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 6, 2024
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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They’re eventually going to try to send a thousand ships to Mars every time the alignment is right every 2 years…. Those ships won’t be coming back. They have to have a thousand ready to go every two years plus all the refueling tankers
People need to realize that there is a reason the industry hasn’t used stainless steel widely in the rocket industry…. its too heavy… Other than the Atlas ICBM there isn’t anything but aluminum rockets. Some composite but they are mostly for solid fuel rockets. The SRB’s on the shuttle were steel as well as SLS 5 segment boosters.
Earth’s gravity well is unforgiving and unless DOE releases their classified propellant-less tech we are stuck with obsolete chemical rockets to achieve orbit.
IMO we will see SpaceX’s ultra heavy booster abandoning their steel booster and making them with aluminum alloy, maybe the same metal that Tesla uses for their casting. The 2nd stage will remain Stainless.
Since SpaceX is a for profit private corporation they will need to achieve profitability with Starship.
It’s not all about reusability but profit that drives this company for their shareholders.
Nope, you’re pretty much wrong on all accounts.
First off there is no propellant-less technology. Everything uses energy in some form, there is no free launch.
Stop sniffing glue or anything from fake 100mpg carbs & similar conspiracies.
Second, stainless is a good choice because it is harder at cryogenic temperatures & if there’s fuel inside the rocket, it’s at cryo temps.
The last test would have burned & broken up in re-entry if it was made of carbon fiber or aluminum.
The space shuttle almost failed due to the same reason, it was barely saved because there was a steel battery strap under the tile that fell off.
The shuttle program proves even the most thought out Ceramic tiles fall off occasionally. It is best to be avoid low temp alloys for spaceships when you have stainless cryo alloys.
Finally, spacex is not a publicly traded company, its goals are solely its owners & making a profit means additional funding towards new technology & exploration, all the money is going back into the company.
Starship has a diameter of 30 ft., and a current payload length of about 60 ft (out of 165 ft length that includes engines, fuel tank, and oxygen tank. (see a weblink to the diagram from NASA (below)).
Maybe it could be designed to have the engines and fuel/oxygen tanks ejected from the vessel, but that would be a herculean task. So let’s go with 30’x60′ of usable space for now.
The 30′ diameter offers an amazing amount of area for humans. Installing a liner to protect from radiation (and a couple of bladders for water and air/oxygen), would take away very little usable space. Linking together several Starships (with tubes connecting the payload areas only) shouldn’t be that difficult. I can envision a large space station and even space hotels with nice viewing areas. Ones that are relatively affordable. $10,000 for 1 night and 1 full day? Where do I sign?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#/media/File:Starship_internal_structure.jpg
That translates into 100 launches per day if they are reuable100 times each. That seems a bit crazy if you ask me. There is an upper limit to the number of objects in orbit past which it takes one unlucky collision by a bit of space debris to destroy everything in orbit in a cascading shower of collision debris.
That upper number is very high though.
Its biggest factor is debris, as organized traffic has little issues with overlapping orbits.
Also the closer to that upper number you get, the cheaper & more ubiquitous debris de-orbiting satellites & tugs, as well as re-servicing craft become.
Eventually the orbitals will become cleaner than they naturally are as we clean up the natural space debris.
For every one starship to Mars, 8 launches of fuel needed: 365/9 = 40. For every starship to Moon, 2 starships refueling 365/3 = 121 so.. every year, SpaceX can send 30 ships to Mars and 30 ships to Moon. Maybe a little less because of starlink and some will be sold to the army. Nice!
I do believe it. Before seeing the full test 4, I had my doubts.
But now it’s clear in my mind they will make it work.
The last result gives them the basis for a partially reusable launcher with a second stage that can do return.
That alone is sellable and revenue worthy. Anything they add to it, it’s gravy.
They will improve the tiles and shield the critical parts better, launch after launch, resulting in an increasingly reusable second stage. One that also happens to work as a tanker and an interplanetary vehicle.
SpaceX will be sending up elements to make a spacious space station. That wouldn’t take very many trips to do it either.
A single crewed Starship has as much habitable volume as the entire ISS. The cheapest, easiest way to build a spacious space station if anyone wants to fund one, is to pay SpaceX to build a version of Starship that IS a SpaceStation module. It could be built so that habitable volume could be extended into the propellant tanks eventually. Engines could be unbolted and returned to Earth. 10 such Starships launched = a SpaceStation 10X the size of the ISS with room to double it’s volume by occupying the prop tanks.
“SpaceX Starship Factory Will Build One Starship Every Day” – that’s a contradiction. If Starship is fully and rapidly reusable, they wouldn’t need a huge fleet. They could just have a handful and use them over and over again.
Even if they’re not rapidly reusable, a huge fleet also contradicts the upmass claims for Starship. If they can launch 100 t, that’s 80 Starlink v2 satellites per launch, so they finish the whole second constellation in about 375 launches. If Starship is only as reusable as F9 has already demonstrated (21 launches per vehicle), they’d could launch the whole constellation with 18 vehicles.