Musk Talks Specs, Future Missions for Starship

On February 10th at the Starbase testing facility, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk held a live presentation to update everybody on the progress with the Starship rocket and his personal aspirations for colonizing Mars. It’s been almost two years since the last time he did this.

One of the things that Elon spoke a lot about was the launch tower for the Starship, also referred to as the Mechazilla by Elon on Twitter, but during the presentation he mostly referred to it as stage zero - stressing that the tower was just as important and complex as the booster and the ship, they need all three for this idea to work. Prior to the event we did see the tower use its chopstick arms to pick up the ship and place it on top of the booster section, which is pretty dope already. Elon spoke a lot about the importance of the aspect of rapid reusability, calling it the ‘Holy Grail’ of spaceflight. He then says that SpaceX are aiming to ‘aspirationally’ land on the robotic arms of the tower. So it sounds like even Elon is still not convinced this can work effectively, at least not yet. Elon joked that if the booster does come down too hard and shear off the arms, then it would be a, ‘farewell to arms.’

But SpaceX are very clearly counting on the tower catch system to pan out in the long term. Elon was saying that they expect the turnaround time to refly each booster to be as little as one hour. While a ship would be ready to launch again within 6 hours of landing.

Elon talked about the new heat shield for Starship, which is much different than what we are used to seeing on a vehicle like the Space Shuttle. The SpaceX design is a very precise network of hexagon tiles that they produce at a facility nicknamed the bakery. Because Starship is made from stainless steel, the body already has a very high heat tolerance on its own, so the heat shield itself does not have to be nearly as thick as a conventional lander. Elon says that they took a lot of inspiration from roofing tiles when designing the Starship heat shield. And adds that every aspect of the heatshield design is to make it robust enough to support rapid reusability and ensure low cost per flight.

We got our first confirmation about how the Starship would refuel in orbit. We’ve always known that the ship would have to dock with a tanker before it would be able to travel as far as the Moon or Mars. And previously it had been widely expected that the two ships would do a kind of ass to ass connection. But luckily we now know that there will be an attachment point on the back side of the ship, so the opposite of the heat shield, and that long vertical connection point will allow for the ingress and egress of propellant. Elon says that it is mostly the supply of liquid oxidizer that will need to be topped off for a long range Starship flight.

The Raptor Engine version two was on full display at the event as well. We can very clearly see that it is a more simplified design this time around. We could almost call Raptor one a prototype and Raptor two the finished product - because the first engine looks like an absolute rat’s nest by comparison. Elon is saying that the max thrust output so far from the new Raptor is 247 tons, and will probably operate for launches at around 230 tons of thrust. Elon thinks that they can eventually push this engine to operate at 250 tons of thrust. The production rate for Raptor two is going to be about one engine per day, and that lines up pretty close with the company goal of building one full stack Starship per month, which would need 36 of these Raptors plus 3 or maybe 6 of the vacuum optimized variants.

Moving on to more launch based operations, Elon says that both Starbase and Cape Canaveral present options for developing Starship. He confirms that there will be a production facility and launch pad at LC 39A, where Elon says that they are already approved from an environmental standpoint for orbital launches and worst case scenario that would be the location for a first orbital Starship attempt. Elon says that the FAA should approve Starbase for orbital launch in March, but he doesn’t get much info from the agency in the meantime. Either way, Elon says that he is ‘highly confident that they will get to orbit this year’.

The plan for year one is basically to test the system using Starlink launches as the proof of concept. Which is a really nice advantage that SpaceX have, they don’t need to convince anyone else to put their payload into an experimental rocket, they can just fly their own satellites until it is well proven that the system works.

Elon says that SpaceX are optimistically hoping to test the orbital refilling system towards the end of next year.

But he concludes by saying that the primary focus of SpaceX right now is getting the Starship to orbit and then proving their return method for the booster and the ship.

Alright, now do Mars.We also heard Elon Musk talk a bit more about his vision for Mars. But he has yet to lay out any practical details about how that might happen. 

So, Elon’s ultimate goal with the Starship program is to eventually move 1 million tons of cargo from the Earth to Mars. That’s how much stuff he thinks we will need to form a self sustaining city on the Red Planet. And by self sufficient, he means that if ships were to stop arriving from Earth, for whatever reason, then the Mars city could continue on indefinitely. 

He also stressed that settling Mars at first will not be a fun time, Elon said it would be cramped, difficult, dangerous and very hard work. He also added that you might die in the process. According to Elon we should look at Mars like a fixer upper of a planet that some day could be made as comfortable as Earth.

And of course, Elon gave his standard talk about how we need to make human life multiplanetary while the window to do so is still open - it might remain open for a very long time, but it might also be very limited, and therefore we have to make our move as soon as possible, just in case.

But again, he gave very few technical details on how that happens. He mused that for medium duration, crewed Starship missions of one to two weeks, the HLS Moon landing for example, SpaceX could probably scale up the life support system that they use in the Dragon Capsule. But in terms of providing life support for a 6 month Mars transit, he basically said they’ll need to invent something new, but not quite sure what that is yet.