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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said there was a “slight error” in the spacecraft’s current front flap design, requiring some minor but visible modifications on future prototypes of the spacecraft.
Measuring 9m (30ft) wide and approximately 50m (~ 165ft) from tip to tail, Starship is the combined upper stage, spacecraft, tanker, and lander of a two-stage rocket fully reusable with the same name. While SpaceX has a long way to go to achieve this, the company’s ambition is for Starship and its Super Heavy booster to be the most easily and quickly reusable spaceship and rocket booster ever built, nominally allowing the reuse of materials. two on the same day.
Beyond a space shuttle-style heat shield made of blankets and ceramic tiles, the spaceship’s upper stage is supposed to allow this reuse by descending into the atmosphere and landing like no other spacecraft, plane or rocket never flown. Instead of flying, hovering, or crossing the atmosphere nose or tail first, Starship free falls perpendicular to the ground for the last tens of kilometers (~ 10-20 mi) before aggressively rocking into a vertical orientation at the last second and propulsively landing on its tail. Now, according to Elon Musk, two of the four “strands” that largely make this exotic maneuver possible are ready for a small but important overhaul.
Probably a little more forward, smaller, more inward. No fun static aero at the top, because the static aero is no longer directly in the flow.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 18, 2021
In five large-scale prototype spacecraft suborbital test flights completed between December 2020 and May 2021, SpaceX took this exotic landing concept from the drawing board and small-scale wind tunnel testing to the reality. While four of those five tests ended in destruction, their respective Starship prototypes only really failed in the last 15 to 30 seconds of test flights that lasted over six minutes.
After peaking at 10-12.5 km (~ 6.2-7.8 mi) in four and a half minutes, all five Starship prototypes managed to shut down their Raptor engines, roll over onto their stomachs, and then used a combination of small pressurized gas thrusters and four large flaps to drop stably back to Earth. Just as a skydiver can modify their body, arms, and legs to control their orientation and attitude, Starship uses two pairs of front and rear flaps to achieve a very similar level of control.
Thanks to Starship’s large area and relatively low mass shortly before landing, this unprecedented free-fall style descent naturally slows the rocket to just 100-200 mph (~ 50-100 m / s) while still simultaneously allowing SpaceX to avoid massive complexity and add mass of structural wings or ailerons like those of the Space Shuttle. Additionally, while the Shuttle used its wings to hover (albeit like a brick) and land on very long runways, Starship is designed to use three of its six Raptor engines to flip into a vertical orientation and land much like the SpaceX’s spectacularly successful Falcon thrusters. .
During the actual reentry process, in which Starship uses a heat shield made up of approximately 15,000 ceramic tiles to go from orbital speed (Mach 25 or ~ 7.5 km / s) to subsonic speed, these same flaps are also useful for controlling vehicle speed. the angle of attack and therefore the degree of extreme heating undergone. According to Musk, to improve the leverage (i.e. tip the nose of the ship and tilt them to the leeward side of the ship (aft).
Apparently, these relatively minor changes mean that a portion of the ship’s forward flaps will no longer be directly subjected to re-entry heating, potentially allowing SpaceX to entirely remove the static “air-covers” that wrap around the ship’s flaps for prevent superheated plasma and gas from reaching sensitive components. . Ironically, SpaceX’s heat protection team finished installing heat shield tiles on one of these front flap aero covers for the very first time just a few days ago – a structure and part of heat shield that will apparently no longer be needed on future spacecraft.
For now, however, it looks like Ship 20 will attempt Starship’s first orbital launch with its now obsolete front flaps. Depending on the progress of the production of Ship 21, the next prototype could possibly sport this new shutter design.
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