Space fans are once again looking to Boca Chica in the US state of Texas. Space-X wants to launch its giant rocket there for the third time on the Gulf of Mexico this Thursday at 2:10 p.m. Central European Time Starship start. Since there are still ships in the cordoned off area of the Gulf, the start has been delayed by around half an hour. In the first attempt almost a year ago, the Starship was blown up after fuel leaked and the rocket went off course. The spacecraft reached Earth orbit in November, but the safety system aborted the flight due to various technical problems.
So now test three, which is again explicitly a test flight in which the engineers primarily want to collect data in order to optimize the rocket. These tests “do not take place in a laboratory or on a test bench, but rather use the hardware in a flight environment to maximize the learning effect”, writes Space-X. So you could say explosions are part of the business model.
“Elon Musk prefers to shoot the rocket straight away before testing it on the ground for too long,” says Ulrich Walter. The professor of space technology at the Technical University of Munich spent ten days with him in 1993 Space Shuttle in space. “Musk looks at what goes wrong in practice and then corrects it accordingly,” says the rocket scientist. “That’s how he was able to do it on the first test flight of the Starship Find and eliminate over a thousand real errors in one fell swoop.”
A leak in the upper stage of the Starship had caused the flight to be aborted in mid-November last year. Liquid oxygen had ignited on the upper stage and communication between the rocket’s flight computers was lost. The six engines of the upper stage switched off and the autonomous flight safety system activated the abort. At the lower level of the Starship There were problems with the engines during the return to Earth, so the booster self-destructed over the Gulf of Mexico. The “most likely” cause of this was a clogged filter in the fuel supply to the engines, analyzed Space-X. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered 17 technical improvements that Space-X itself had proposed: changes to the lower stage hardware as well as additional fire protection measures and further upgrades for the upper stage. On Wednesday Space-X received the new one FAA launch approval.
Launch preparations for Space-X’s “Starship” in Boca Chica/Texas.
(Photo: Cheney Orr/REUTERS)
This time Space-X is planning a series of new tests during the flight: This is how the company wants to test the loading bay of the Starship open and close. This is a prerequisite for satellites to be placed in orbit in the future. It is also planned to transfer fuel from tank to tank. The background is the plan to establish a kind of gas station in Earth orbit so that it can be there in a few years Starship-To refuel the lunar module before it lands on the moon with NASA astronauts. This is different than previously planned Starship On the third test flight, it did not splash down in the Pacific 90 minutes after take-off from Hawaii, but in the Indian Ocean after just 65 minutes. Before that, Space-X wants to fire a Raptor engine multiple times in space for the first time – important for navigation and course correction.
“Elon Musk has really done meticulous work since the first launch to eliminate the problems, he won’t have them anymore,” says Professor Walter. But the new tests are challenging. “I think there could be further difficulties with the re-entry of the Starship or the planned refueling maneuver in space because Space-X has not tried that yet.”
With the “Starship” freight prices could fall drastically
As soon as that Starship flies reliably, this could mean a turning point in space travel. The giant spacecraft will eventually be able to carry around 200 tons of cargo into low Earth orbit (Leo), instead of the around 20 tons that the Falcon 9 from Space-X or the Esa rocket Ariana 6 can transport. A large part of space travel takes place in Leo. Space-X could then offer significantly cheaper transport prices than before. “When a Starship-Flight costs 15 million dollars, as Musk announced, will not be covered by one Ariana 6 any other rocket can be defeated,” predicts Ulrich Walter.
On the contrary: The Ariana 6 will be six to eight times more expensive than that Starship, and also have significantly lower freight capacities. “I don’t know whether the Europeans can afford this financially,” he fears. The ESA missile system, which is connected to the Ariana 5 was successful for years, would also be compared to that Falcon 9 even less internationally competitive than it already is.
“A start of the Ariana 6 should cost 90 million euros. But as long as the price doesn’t go down to the 30 million euros that such flights will cost in the future, the Europeans have no chance from a competitive perspective,” says Walter. If Europe only cares about having independent access to space, what a value is the additional costs Ariana 6 per satellite but perhaps “not so crucial”, especially in satellite constellations, such as a broadband network from space with hundreds of satellites, says the scientist.
From a commercial perspective, Europe can only catch up if the Ariane or a successor rocket would be developed more quickly and then built in large numbers. “Mass production is Space-X’s cost secret,” says the former astronaut. However, the Europeans “don’t have the money to accelerate development,” he says. “The ESA countries don’t just give Ariane Group 100 million euros to do a test flight.” After all, the classic engineering philosophy still applies in Europe: “First try to eliminate every conceivable error through painstaking detailed work until a rocket test flight is carried out – that takes a lot of time and, by the way, a lot of money,” says Walter.
This Thursday, Space-X will first have to prove that Musk’s motto Learning by doing is practical in space travel. Because he won’t be able to afford too many explosions anymore.