SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says the first completed Starship rocket may be ready for its first orbital launch “in a few weeks” — much sooner than expected.
On August 6, SpaceX stacked the same spacecraft – Starship 20 (S20) and Super Heavy Booster 4 (B4) – to their full height for the first time, briefly creating the largest rocket ever assembled. However, this feat was a symbolic photographic opportunity. SpaceX he did He installed an unprecedented number of Raptor engines in the Booster 4 and Ship 20 in a surprisingly short amount of time, both stages were technically planned to fly, but the Starship S20 was discontinued less than an hour later and shipped back to the factory soon. Then.
Although the Raptors were installed and stacked at a total height of 120 m (~390 ft), neither the booster nor the ship was actually completed, and at least 20% of its engines were not eligible at the SpaceX McGregor, Texas test complex. Both need a week or two of extra work – mostly just plugging in the avionics and installing the secondary and tertiary tubes. Interestingly, on August 13, the Starship S20 was once again transported to SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site in a partially completed state, where it is now located near the orbital launch pad for unknown reasons.
After several days of delays, SpaceX also removed the Super Heavy B4 from the orbital launch pad and returned it to the construction site on August 11, where teams are still working on finishing small pipelines and avionics. Like Ship 20, all Raptors were removed soon after its return, allowing both to complete anti-freeze tests without risking dozens of navigable rocket engines.
Like all previous spacecraft models, “antifreeze” tests will include loading the ship 20 and Booster 4 with ultra-cold liquid nitrogen (LN2) and simulating the extreme weight and thermal pressure of real liquid oxygen (LOx) and methane (LCH4) without a thruster. Risk of catastrophic fire or explosion if anomalies occur.
For more than a month, SpaceX has also outfitted one of two semi-orbital launch mounts with special hydraulic rams that simulate sea-level thrust for the 20th spacecraft and three vacuum-optimized Raptor engines — the first prototype spacecraft in such a configuration. The same thing happened with Booster 4, and SpaceX outfitted a new test jig with nine hydraulic rams marked “B4” – apparently intended to simulate the thrust of nine engines pushing against the Super Heavy’s thrust disk. Additionally, the much larger chassis test kit, informally called a “Can-breaker”, was completed after about 6 weeks of work, leading many to assume that the Booster 4 would be the first superheavy device to be exposed to a simulation. 29 Raptor engine.
However, earlier this week, SpaceX dismantled the six hydraulic trays installed on Mount B NS Remove all nine rams from the Booster 4’s apparent die. Then the Starship S20 was pushed into place next to the orbital launch pad – not the sub-orbital mount that had been carefully prepared for its test campaign a few days earlier. At the time, the only practical explanation – save for some sort of catastrophic misunderstanding – was that SpaceX had apparently ruled out frost-resistant plans for the 20th and Booster 4 spacecraft. With Mimic birds of prey.
So far, every major design change in the spacecraft’s engine division has subjected the first prototype — often one or several test tanks — to frost resistance testing. With A complex series of hydraulic rams used to simulate thrust. This recently came to the fore with SpaceX’s only BN2.1 Super Heavy test tank, which has apparently passed pressure, compression and jigging testing capable of simulating the thrust of up to eight Raptor engines. However, SpaceX has never tested its new Super Heavy nine-engine thruster and has done so. Of course surely The heavy-reinforcement skirt was never subjected to the combined thrust of 20 outboards and 9 middle drives.
The fact that the complex custom test rigs and jigs were already assembled and installed for Starship 20 and Booster 4 before they were removed or disassembled unused strongly suggests that someone at SpaceX – presumably Elon Musk himself – decided that these tests were unnecessary or that it was worth skipping them. Big risk. In fact, according to Musk’s claim, it was reported on August 15 that the Ship 20 and Booster 4 could be stacked and ready to fly “in a few weeks” to materialize, 14-21 days simply not enough time to savor the cold. And NS constant fire in both cars; Combine the stages and run your first real test of spacecraft stack integration – perhaps a combination of cold full stack, wet testing, or a hard shot.
As Musk himself notes, this intricate ballet of unprecedented rocket models may not be the last straw for the first spacecraft launch. Technically, there is some kind of important legal intervention Number The way to launch the Starship in the ‘coming weeks’. At best, the FAA will issue an initial environmental review of the SpaceX Starship’s orbital launch site today, accept the required 30-day public comment, immediately release Starbase for environmental approval a few days after the public comment window, and then approve a license for the Starship’s orbital launch south of Texas once Obtaining the necessary environmental permits.
In other words, the file betterArguably, the ETA regulatory approval status for the spacecraft’s first orbital test flight is late September and breaks the FAA’s precedent. This optimistic scenario is also a fairy tale. In fact, at least 2-3 months after after The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has released a draft environmental impact statement, which is a more realistic scenario for SpaceX. By contrast, the FAA will likely decide that SpaceX needs to complete an entirely new environmental review of the Starbase launch site, easily delaying the spacecraft’s orbital launch by 6 to 12 months. That doesn’t even explain the potential imminent challenges that SpaceX may have to overcome to secure the spacecraft’s orbital launch license.
Given the challenges SpaceX has faced in obtaining a mitigated suborbital launch license for medium-altitude spacecraft flight tests, it is not inconceivable that the FAA will attach some To this limit Onerous restrictions on this license. In the end, only time will tell (and the slightest hint of actual movement or urgency at the FAA), and there is no doubt that nothing will be better in the right places than the largest, most powerful and most ambitious rocket ever built — ready to fly — on a new launch pad. , pending regulatory approval.
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