Starship makes its debut this month Musk predicts 50 launches this year

2022 is the year that SpaceX's world-renowned Starship enters orbit for the first time. Last May, a prototype of Starship successfully landed on a test flight for the first time. In the future, starships will become an important tool for human landing on the moon and Mars.

Launch costs were reduced to $10 million

SpaceX CEO Musk, who has just been elected to the U.S. Academy of Engineering, spoke thursday at a rocket launch base in Texas to express his vision of making humans an interstellar species, but musk has revealed few details about the orbital flight of starships.

Musk's speech comes as the starships are completing their final stacking, and nearly 400 feet above sea level will be taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York, making it particularly spectacular in the night sky of Boca Chica, Texas.

Musk revealed that the cost of a single launch of Starship is expected to drop to around $10 million over the next two or three years, and eventually as low as $2 million, up from about $62 million per Launch per Falcon 9 rocket a few years ago.

The repeated recycling of rockets is key to reducing launch costs. Musk had predicted that a first-stage rocket could be reused 100 times, and the engine could be reused at least 10 times.

According to the netizen data collected by Musk, SpaceX rockets have been successfully launched 144 times in the past, successfully landed 106 times, and repeated flight verification times reached 83 times.

Musk's latest prediction for when Starship will first fly is sometime in February, after the date of the first orbital test flight has been postponed several times, including the challenges of the design of the rocket's Super Heavy engine and lengthy scrutiny by regulators.

Target for launches this year: 50

In his latest speech, Musk also predicted that starship's target this year would be 50 launches. He estimates that if launched three times a week, more than 15,000 tons of material could be launched into orbit a year; if launched three times a day, more than 100,000 tons of material could be launched a year; if there are 10 starships, the total mass of material launched in a year can exceed one million tons, which will help realize the vision of delivering materials from Earth to Mars.

Compared to NASA's Rocket Saturn 5, which sends astronauts to the moon, the Starship is designed to be about twice as powerful as Saturn 5 and is wider in diameter than other orbiting spacecraft, reaching 30 feet, meaning it can transport large amounts of cargo or people.

Frequent starship launches will be key to SpaceX's eventual commercialization of launch missions, but finding customers to fill the rocket's massive payload capacity will be a challenge.

Carissa Christensen, CEO of Bryce Tech, an analytics firm that tracks the launch market, said:

"Starship's payload capacity is huge, and today a rocket of this size doesn't have as many commercial uses. It only makes sense if the launch cost is low enough that it doesn't have a launch close to full load. ”

In January, the U.S. Air Force provided SpaceX with more than $100 million in funding to research the use of spacecraft as cargo spacecraft that could deploy supplies around the world in minutes for point-to-point transportation. However, the rationality and logic of this concept still need to be verified.

Previously, SpaceX had test-fired prototypes of the upper half of five starships at an altitude of about 6 miles, but only the last prototype achieved a successful landing, the first four of which either exploded on the ground or in flight. And the ultimate success also shows the courage of Musk's rocket development: flying, crashing, learning, repeating.

According to Musk's demonstrations, a future starship will be launched from Texas, with the super-heavy booster returning to the Gulf of Mexico about 20 miles off the Texas coast after sending it into orbit. Once in orbit, the starship will attempt to circle the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere, landing about 60 miles off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii's northernmost island.

Landing on the moon And flying to Mars

NASA provided SpaceX with $2.9 billion last year for spacecraft development for the first two flights of artemis's lunar landing program. It's a multibillion-dollar human program to send astronauts back to the lunar surface with the goal of making the moon a testing ground for future Mars missions.

Starship's first lunar landing will be an unmanned flight test to verify its ability to land and return on the moon; a second flight is scheduled for 2025 and will carry NASA astronauts.

But the mission itself will face many technical hurdles. Although SpaceX has successfully sent people into low-Earth orbit and docked with the International Space Station through the Dragon space capsule. But so far, the company has not disclosed the system it is developing to protect astronauts' safety during lunar travel.

And before the starship lands on the moon, it will also face unique complexities. SpaceX must first launch several "tanker" spacecraft into space as a refueling station before the final starship lands on the moon, thus landing on the lunar surface and returning. This requires a series of orbital refueling tests, and how to achieve the docking of two spacecraft in orbit is a technically tricky and risky attempt.

For the above technical challenges, Musk also showed off the latest technology in a latest speech called orbital gas station called Orbital Refilling. Musk also said that this is a technology that SpaceX is very good at.

The moonshot program will bring huge profits to SpaceX. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and founder of clothing retailer Zozo, will be one of the first passengers to travel to the moon, flying around the moon and returning with eight other passengers. However, the trip, which was scheduled for 2023, may be postponed.

The ultimate goal of all SpaceX missions is to send humans to Mars and become a cross-interstellar species, which is also Musk's original intention to create SpaceX. Musk has said that SpaceX will go public after the company opens a route to Mars, and he himself will personally land on the Red Planet, at this point in time or around 2025.

To do this, SpaceX needs to develop an engine that is powerful enough. Musk demonstrated the latest version of raptor 2, the Raptor engine that powers Starship, with a thrust of 230 tons compared to the 185 tons thrust of the first generation. Musk also said that compared with the development of the spacecraft itself, how to provide life support systems, so that humans can survive on Mars is not difficult.