SpaceX prepares to launch its monster rocket ‘Starship’: NPR

At nearly 400 feet tall, Starship is the largest rocket ever to fly. SpaceX hopes it can become a vehicle for interplanetary travel.

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At nearly 400 feet tall, Starship is the largest rocket ever to fly. SpaceX hopes it can become a vehicle for interplanetary travel.

SpaceX

In South Texas, the commercial space company SpaceX is preparing to test a huge stainless steel rocket. The machine could one day transport people to the moon, Mars and beyond.

But first it has to fly.

“It’s a very complex machine; it has so many different components,” says Paulo Lozano, director of MIT’s Space Propulsion Laboratory. The rocket is bigger than ever built. Success will depend on dozens of engines firing in perfect synchronization.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, at least to hear SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talk about the mission.

“Eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life,” Musk said as he stood in front of the giant rocket about a year ago. “It is very important – important in the long term – that we become a multi-planet species.”

Musk hopes Starship will provide a critical step toward becoming multiplanetary, by allowing large payloads to be carried into orbit on the cheap. His goal is for Starship to one day carry the first humans to Mars.

SpaceX also has a business interest in seeing its huge rocket fly. Starship can be used to launch a large number of the company’s internet provider “Starlink” satellites. Starlink is seen as a key part of SpaceX’s future, and Starship will allow the network to grow rapidly, said Tim Farrar, the president of TMF Associates, a telecom consulting firm.

But Starship is unlike any other rocket, and SpaceX acknowledges that the first test flight will be extremely risky. That launch attempt is set to take place during a 150-minute window that opens at 8 a.m. Eastern on Monday, April 17. When the company recently released its timeline for the flight, it replaced “liftoff” in the mission’s timeline with two words: “thrill guaranteed.”

Spaceships were meant to fly

Standing nearly 400 feet tall, Starship is made of gleaming stainless steel, an unusual choice in a business where every pound of weight counts. In fact, SpaceX began looking at advanced, lightweight composites for Starship, Musk told the Space Studies Board of the National Academies in 2021. But he quickly realized that steel was cheap, plentiful and, most importantly, incredibly tough. It can hold cryogenic rocket fuel and tolerate the grueling heat of re-entry better than other materials.

“I’m a big fan of stainless steel,” he joked. “Stainless steel and I should get a room or something.”

The spacecraft flies using a methane-powered engine known as the Raptor. This is a test of a single engine, but the first stage of the rocket requires 33 raptors to fire at once.

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The spacecraft flies using a methane-powered engine known as the Raptor. This is a test of a single engine, but the first stage of the rocket requires 33 raptors to fire at once.

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The rocket also uses an unconventional fuel choice – methane. Most high-powered rockets use hydrogen as fuel because it is light and very efficient, says Lozano.

But methane has some advantages: It is cheaper to produce and easier to handle the hydrogen, and trace amounts of methane are found in the atmosphere on Mars. That means a future Starship mission to the Red Planet might be able to refuel by pulling methane from the atmosphere or some other local source.

“I think the idea, down the road, is to use methane that exists in places like Mars,” says Lozano.

To make up for the extra weight, the Starship relies on powerful engines called Raptors. The spacecraft itself uses six Raptors to fly, but the super-heavy booster that will lift it into space uses 33 of the engines, working together.

Again, the decision to use such a large number of engines is a trade-off, according to Lozano. It allows the rocket to produce a huge amount of thrust, which it needs to get off the ground. But, he adds, “having the large number of rocket engines firing at the same time — that’s actually quite difficult. I think that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges.”

In fact, the Soviet Union tried a similar approach to reach the moon in the late 1960s. It built a massive rocket called the N1, the first stage of which used 30 engines. But even a single engine failure was enough to cause the rocket to explode, and four prototypes were destroyed before the Soviets finally abandoned the program. In contrast, America used five huge engines for the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. The reduced complexity allowed the rocket to carry astronauts to the moon.

The stainless steel rocket saves the world

Assuming everything works out, Musk believes the Starship’s cheap, durable design will make it a workhorse for getting things into space. Last year, Musk said he hoped the Starship could be reused every six to eight hours, and that the booster could be reused, in theory at least every hour.

In the short term, it will not perform interplanetary missions. Instead, SpaceX needs it to transport satellites into orbit for its satellite-based Internet service known as Starlink. Starlink is a major revenue generator for the company, and there has been strong interest from users. But the Starlink system is limited in how many subscribers it can support, says telecoms consultant Tim Farrar.

NASA hopes Starship can be used to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in over 50 years.

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NASA hopes Starship can be used to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in over 50 years.

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“To continue to grow their subscriber base, they need more capacity, and that will require more and bigger satellites,” he says.

It could take thousands of additional satellites to build a system large enough to meet demand. Right now, SpaceX’s smaller rockets can only launch a few dozen at a time. Starship can launch many more – and larger, heavier satellites that the company can use to increase profitability.

“If they can get Starship up and running, that will definitely help a lot,” he says.

NASA is also paying SpaceX about a billion dollars to develop a version of Starship to visit the moon, though the mission is likely still years away.

The launch of Starship comes at a difficult time for the technology industry, notes Farrar. SpaceX is currently trying to raise additional capital to keep Starship and Starlink development going.

For now, investors seem happy to let SpaceX try out its massive, potentially interplanetary rocket. But he says if the launch fails and Starship falls further behind schedule, it could affect SpaceX’s entire business, especially in the current economic climate.

“[If] people lose confidence, and people lose that belief,” says Farrar, “then things will look very different.”