Name: The Latest SpaceX Starship Prototype Is About to Launch
Uploaded: 2021-03-10T23:05:07.000Z
Duration: 4 min 56 s
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After SpaceX's previous two Starship prototypes met their explosive demise at the southern

tip of Texas, Starship Serial Number 10 has finally stuck the landing! And then it exploded.

Still, this proved a major part of the Starship concept, but there is still much more to come.

So what can we expect from SN11 and beyond?

SpaceX was founded with the goal of eventually

taking humans to Mars, and their Starship spacecraft—along with its planned enormous

first stage booster called the Super Heavy— is the ship company founder and CEO Elon Musk

believes will take us there. Before we get into what's next for the program,

let's first give SN10's flight its due. In the past few years, SpaceX has been racking

up so many successful Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy booster landings that it's almost

become expected. But when SN8 and SN9 failed to land and experienced what SpaceX euphemistically

call Rapid Unplanned Disassembly, it was a reminder that space flight is never

easy and certainly never routine. Landing SN10 was a huge milestone for the project,

even if it disassembled itself a few minutes later.

Complicating matters is the fact that the Starship prototypes are using a new engine

that's truly revolutionary. Falcon 9 boosters use SpaceX's Merlin engines, which burn

liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosine to produce thrust. By contrast, Starship's

Raptor engines use liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Methane offers higher performance

at lower cost than kerosene. Methane can allow the engines to run at higher pressures and

it eliminates the need for some special equipment because it can actually pressurize itself.

It also doesn't build up deposits within the engine, making it possible to reuse the

same engines over and over with less refurbishing. It might even be possible to create methane

on the surface of Mars, which means a Starship mission to the red planet won't need to

bring along fuel for the return trip home. Despite all these benefits, SpaceX's Raptor

engines are some of the first methane-powered rockets. They're also the first flying examples

to use what's known as a full-flow staged combustion system, which uses all its fuel

for propulsion and doesn't waste any getting the process started unlike Merlin's more common

open cycle system. Put all these design choices together and the Raptor engines can

produce double the thrust of a Merlin and squeeze propulsion from as much fuel as possible.

So it's no surprise figuring out how to land a 50 meter tall prototype rocket powered

by three of these new engines has taken some fine-tuning. Indeed the issue with SN9's

landing seemed to be failure for one engine to relight and control the landing. Now that

SN10 has proven the concept, there's still a lot of work ahead of the SpaceX team in

Boca Chica, Texas. The next launch we're looking forward to

is Serial Number 11. SN11 is almost identical to the previous three Starships, which have

been improving in small ways from one iteration to the next, with things like more robust wiring,

a better nose cone seal, and more mature Raptor engines. Because SN8 and 9 reached their high

altitude goals, managed to switch fuel tanks, and steer themselves on the way back down,

it seems SpaceX thought a soft landing was within reach and decided that Serial Numbers

12 through 14 wouldn't be necessary. With SN10's post-landing detonation, that means

they've only got one more ship from this batch to figure out the landing completely.

The next major upgrades to the design will come with SN15, so we'll keep our eyes locked

on Texas to see what exactly they're cooking up.

Aside from perfecting the soft touchdowns, SN11 can provide other valuable data, like

how the planned heat shielding handles the stress of liftoff and landing. A recovered

Starship will also let SpaceX engineers examine how their raptor engines hold up after repeated

use, and if Elon Musk's ultimate ambition of engines that can be flown 1000 times is

within reach. It's possible we'll see the same prototypes lift off multiple times

as the engineers push the envelope. The next Starship launch should look remarkably

like the previous three. Ideally this time around the landing legs will deploy, the structure

won't be damaged on touchdown, there won't be a fuel leak or fire, and SN11 stays in

one piece. SpaceX has made historic progress already

with Starship. Considering that there's still a lot of work to be done on both Starship

and the Super Heavy rocket, there should be many exciting rocket launches from the southern

tip of Texas in the future. Hopefully they're groundbreaking in the way SN10 was, and not

in the way SN8 and 9 were. For more Countdown to Launch, check out our

playlist here and if there's another launch you'd like to see us cover, let us know

in the comments below. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time on Seeker.