[ad_1]
by SpaceX Very heavy booster is a complicated beast.
Thursday (July 29), the head of SpaceX Elon musk gave us a glimpse of the engine section of a Super Heavy assembling at the company’s South Texas site near the Gulf Coast village of Boca Chica.
There is a lot of plumbing involved.
Related: SpaceX’s Super Heavy spaceship and rocket in pictures
Complete power system for 29 Raptor rocket motors on Super Heavy Booster pic.twitter.com/uARWx2HYTrJuly 29, 2021
“Complete the power system for 29 Raptor rocket engines on Super Heavy Booster,” Musk wrote via Twitter on Thursday, where he posted a photo showing metal tubes radiating outward from the core of the engine section like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
“And that’s just the primary fuel lines! The labyrinth of secondary plumbing and wiring is our biggest concern,” he added in another tweet Thursday.
Super Heavy is the giant first stage of Starship, the fully reusable transportation system SpaceX is developing to transport people and goods to the moon, Mars and beyond. The top floor is a 50-meter-tall spacecraft called the Starship.
Both will be powered by SpaceX’s next-generation Raptor engine, which runs on liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Starship will sport six Raptors and Super Heavy will have around 30, as Musk noted in his Twitter post.
Several Starship prototypes have already taken off in South Texas. In May, for example, a three-engined vehicle known as the SN15 passed a test flight which brought it to a maximum altitude of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers).
No Super Heavy has taken off yet, but SpaceX aims to change that soon. The company is preparing for Starship’s first orbital test flight, which could take place in the coming months.
On this flight, a Super Heavy-Starship combo will take off from South Texas. If all goes as planned, the thruster will land in the Gulf of Mexico, about 20 miles off Boca Chica. The upper stage of the spacecraft, meanwhile, will go into orbit and eventually land for its own landing in the ocean near the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
We should expect additional test flights in relatively quick succession after this. Musk tends to set aggressive deadlines, and his Starship plans are no exception; he said the system could be fully operational by 2023 if development and testing continues to go well.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
[ad_2]
Source link