Starship: Elon Musk’s Space Railroad
“The fast path to a self-sustaining city on Mars”
Saturday night saw entrepreneur and visionary Elon Musk standing in front of his gleaming stainless steel Starship in Boca Chica, Texas, explaining how he will increase Earth’s entire rocketry capacity a thousand fold in the next few years. If he can do that it will be giant leap for humanity that puts us back on track to become a true multiplanetary species by the end of this century, Here the story of how this transformation has come about.
The summer men first walked on the Moon was just sixty-six years after Orville and Wilber Wright had flown their Flyer the not-so-vast distance of 36.5m just above sand dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was a mere forty-two years after Charles Lindbergh had flown the Spirit of St Louis across the vast Atlantic Ocean from Long Island to Paris, France. Thirty years on from Lindbergh the Russians reached orbit for the first time with Sputnik. Only four years later Yuri Gagarin complete a single orbit of Earth and returned safely in Vostok 1 to usher in the excitement of the 1960s. By the end of that decade men had landed on the Moon and returned, “for all mankind”.
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Fifty years on from 1969 we’d have expected the Universe, or at least the interstellar neighborhood, to be our oyster. Naturally there’d be moonbases. The inner solar system would have been settled, with cities on Mars and in the Venusian cloudtops, and many more humans living within glorious rotating cylinders in space proposed to the Senate by Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s. Human crews would doubtless have traversed the outer solar system, perhaps in atomic rockets such as Freeman Dyson’s Orion project. We’d likely be building generational worldships with brave explorers prepared to set out on epic voyages to nearby star systems — that would only be reached by their descendants centuries later.
Yet it turned out there was no plan. John F. Kennedy chose to go to the Moon because it was such a far-fetched goal that it gave America a chance to catch up and overtake Soviet Russia. Once the landing was achieved political and public interest in the Apollo program waned. Missions 18 through 20 were cancelled so it was only three years after the first Moon landing that Gene Cernan closed the hatch on the Apollo 17 lunar module and the last of 12 humans to have ever set foot on another world returned to Earth.
Since 1972 humans have been restricted to reaching low-Earth orbit, fully a thousand times closer to home than those who boldly went 50 years ago. While technology in every other sector raced ahead, crewed space travel regressed. There was no ambition and plenty of people — even space scientists — debated the merits of having a crewed space program at all.
Then, on September 28, 2008, something happened that changed everything. On Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll a small company launched a satellite into orbit. Only nation states had done that before. And only big ones. It almost didn’t happen. This was the fourth attempt and the company’s founder had effectively run out of money after the third, but they had come close and somehow he begged and borrowed enough for one more attempt. These upstart rocketeers went by the name of Space Exploration Technologies, otherwise known as SpaceX.
SpaceX and Musk’s other major concern, Tesla, were both within hours of going bust, but on the back of the successful launch NASA awarded Musk a contract. This enabled the South African entrepreneur to begin working towards his dream of dramatically reducing the cost of access to space, through reusability.
Saturn V, the mighty rocket that propelled astronauts to the Moon, stood 110m tall on the launchpad but only the 3.6m long command module splashed down into the Pacific Ocean at the end of the return journey. Until that first SpaceX flight, the way space travel worked for everyone was akin to flying Concorde from Heathrow towards JFK, have passengers parachute out over Manhattan and then deliberately ditch the plane in the Atlantic. Concorde’s an especially appropriate metaphor because advanced 1960s technology had remained the order of the day.
Musk informed us on Saturday that even the first successful SpaceX launch carried a parachute in the hope of slowing the Falcon1 rocket to enable it to be recovered and reused. SpaceX quickly switched to the development of its Falcon9 rocket (with 9 Merlin engines rather than 1) and the Falcon Heavy (effectively 3 Falcon9s bolted together). In December 2015 the company successfully landed a Falcon9 for the first time after delivering its payload into orbit. It’s a miracle of engineering that since then landings, whether back at the launchpad or on autonomous spaceport drone ships (giant ocean-going barges named Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions after spaceships in the Iain M. Banks Culture novels) have quickly become routine. Even the very first test of the Falcon Heavy in 2018 saw two of the three Falcon9 first stages land safely together at Cape Canaveral.
The 50m high reusable Starship he stood in front of is only part of the system that is hoped will transport humans to the Moon and Mars. The first, lower stage is called Super Heavy, a mighty 68m booster. Both Starship and Super Heavy, like SpaceX’s successful Falcon9 rocket booster, are fully reusable. Here’s how it works.
Musk first introduced the world to the Starship at the International Astronautical Federation’s annual congress in Mexico three years ago. Back then the idea of transporting a hundred people at a time to Mars seemed a pipe dream. One day yes, but it wouldn’t be possible anytime soon. We see from NASA’s own Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, first conceived in 2010 and a decade and with $15–20 billion spent on it to date, the earliest the lowest-spec version of this nonreusable rocket will launch is 2021.
Starship needs the Super Heavy booster to reach Earth orbit because our planet is pretty massive and its gravity hard to escape. This or other boosters would then make up to five more trips transporting what would effectively be a Starship-shaped tanker into space to perform in-orbit refuelling. When the Saturn 5 or the SLS reach orbit what’s left of the vehicle effectively coasts on towards its final destination. A full fuelled Starship in orbit can accelerate away to the Moon or Mars or even Saturn.
Only a few months ago there was very little at all at Boca Chica. Now there is a finish Starship Mark 1 and SpaceX has almost completed a Mark Two version at its second site in Cocoa, Florida. The key design decision that has transformed the pace was a switch from advanced composite materials to using 301 Stainless Steel. Musk has explained that this came about as the steel becomes extremely hard in the cold temperatures experienced in space, while also having a very high melting point allowing it to work well for reentry. The cost savings are immense. Carbon composite sets you back $130,000 per ton; with 301 Stainless Steel that figure falls to $2,500. If it works, this single design decision may be the difference between becoming a multiplanetary species or not. It also helps that it’s shiny and beautiful.
Work with steel has meant the giant rockets have effectively been built in four months. Mark 1 is expected to fly from Boca Chica within the next two months and by four months time there will be Marks 3 and 4 at the two construction sites. Only then will SpaceX build a prototype Super Heavy, the limiting factor being the new methane-fuelled Raptor engines. Currently it takes the company eight days to make each one and Musk is keen to have them reduce this to two days quickly, and one a day further down the line. Schematics for Super Heavy showed 37 Raptors powering it, but Musk says it can fly with less. The prototype Mark 1 Starship has three sea-level Raptor engines fitted inside (in an unusual configuration so they don’t overhang the outside of the rocket); the final vehicle will have three sea-level Raptors and three vacuum Raptors (with much larger nozzles).
Reusability is a key to a rapid test program. Traditionally a prototype rocket would be flown once and destroyed meaning you had to build another one. Keeping your rockets intact means you can test them again far more quickly. Building all your rockets, especially when they’re so large, and not throwing them away is what will bring about the increase in Earth’s mass-to-orbit cabability by three orders of magnitude in a short space of time.
Musk announced that an individual Starship will have a pressurized capacity of a thousand cubic meters, about the same as the entire International Space Station. Also, if travelling in zero gravity instead of being limited to floor space you can live on each of six walls of a cube, making a smaller volume much more practical. This huge capacity could help carry significant infrastructure into Earth orbit or to begin the first moonbase. More than that, Musk said “you need that if you’re going to build a city on Mars.
Musk announced that the name of the actual ship that would be first to Mars was going to be the Heart of Gold after Douglas Adams craft from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This week Musk said the first couple of Starships that reach the red planet will be uncrewed, testing systems and again carrying vital infrastructure to support the first human colony.
Musk did suggest that humans may fly within a Starship within 6–12 months, although his schedules are notoriously optimistic. A phrase conveying his attitude to schedules repeated on the night was “If it’s long it’s wrong and if it’s tight it’s right”. A criticism levelled at Musk since the presentation is that some believe he has a laissez-faire attitude to safety, but nothing could be further from the truth. Some questioned during the presentation how humans could survive the long journey to mars in terms of life support systems and solar radiation.
It’s true that traditional rocket programs have tried to tie down every last detail before getting to work actually building the thing. Musk’s approach is far more agile. His response was that these are “far off” questions for a few years hence and they’ll solve them when they need to, but the most important next step is to get Starship flying. As an example, Mark 1 has cold-gas nitrogen thrusters to help it maneuver for landing but because of that it also requires a Raptor to fire — which in turn kicks the vehicle in the wrong direction so more corrections are needed. By Mark 4, Musk expects to transition to hot-gas thrusters removing the need for a Raptor making the landing easier to manage. They could have waited to build the hot-gas thrusters before building Starship Mark 1, but then the whole program would be delayed.
As a private business it would be commercial suicide for there to be accidents and an unsafe culture. What Musk is doing by pushing hard to accomplish these astonishing feats is to achieve something else again.
There are two potential futures for humanity: one in which we become a multiplanetary species and one where we’re forever confined to Earth. That we regressed so much in terms of space travel after 1969 is testimony to a future for humanity in space not being inevitable. Space is hard and without visionaries to drive us forward, it would be easy to remain Earthbound.
Musk open his presentation by saying the Starship was “the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen”. He argues that a multiplanetary future is more inspiring and interesting, but he knows there’s more to it than that. The window in which we can become multiplanetary may not be open for very long at all. If we don’t seize our opportunity now, it may shut and remain closed forever. Musk has no end of travails because Tesla, his revolutionary electric vehicle company, is always under attack from stock market short sellers and at the whim of the markets generally. Because of this, SpaceX is privately held. There is no chance for shareholders to see how lucrative it might be simply to launch a lot of satellites and divert the company from its primary mission.
When you enter the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California, you’re immediately greeted with an image of four versions of the planet Mars, transitioning from the cold rusty world we see today to the warm and wet one of its early history. This is because the entire raison-d’etre of SpaceX is to enable humanity to settle Mars — not just go there for a scientific field trip.
Musk wants to go beyond his stated goal of a million humans on Mars in a self-sustaining settlement by the end of this century. He wants to make Mars more Earthlike, “terraforming” it so humans can access the entire planet rather than living underground in caves or in domes on the surface. There are many proposed schemes for how this might be done, from setting off nuclear weapons under the Martian polar caps to having giant mirrors warming the planet from space and even bombarding it with asteroids to bring more “volatiles” into the atmosphere.
Early humans will at least find plentiful water on Mars and the ability to create rocket fuel locally (extracting carbon dioxide from the thin atmosphere). The overall idea is called in situ resource utilization, using local resources as much as possible rather than taking everything with you. Because Martian gravity is only a third of Earth’s, a fully fuelled Starship would be able to reach orbit and return to Earth without the need of the Super Heavy booster.
We can only become multiplanetary if we are able to build a space-based economy. Musk see SpaceX as the equivalent of creating the railroad, but others need to pitch in to create other necessary technologies such as asteroid or lunar mining. Almost no materials mined in space would ever make it back here. There is as much water on near-Earth asteroids as in all of America’s Great Lakes and once in space it will be far cheaper to access this than carry it up from sea level on Earth. Other materials will be used to build bases and satellites. Other companies and space agencies will build satellites ringing the Sun for early warning of space weather events such as large flares or coronal mass ejections which might endanger humans and equipment. And bandwith across the inner solar system, a space-based internet, need to be built for effective communications everywhere.
Every other species that once dominated our planet is long since gone. If we continue to keep all our eggs in this one fragile basket, the demise of humanity is inevitable. Long before our Sun runs out of fuel and expands into a red giant, its increased radiation output will have evaporated our oceans. Before then, whether from an asteroid strike, gamma ray burst, nuclear conflict, synthetic or natural pandemic, or some other unforeseen mechanism, humans will cease to be.
At Saturday’s presentation, Musk said “As far as we know we are the only consciousness out there”, referencing what’s called the Fermi paradox, the mysterious absence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Enrico Fermi first asked where the aliens were at a lunch in Los Alamos in 1950. Back then it wasn’t so much of a mystery, but the great strides forward in astronomy and astrobiology since make it increasingly puzzling. Just in our Galaxy there are hundreds of billions of stars and most of them have planetary systems. More puzzling still, while the Milky Way is well over twelve billion years old, Earth itself is only 4.5 billion.
Musk ended his presentation with a plea to spread consciousness — human consciousness — across the Universe. The Starship is the beginning of that.
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