Explained: How SpaceX's Starship Will Build A City On The Moon

Explained: How SpaceX's Starship Will Build A City On The Moon
What about it!?

Very cool.

Starbase at Night

Starbase at night, with a SuperHeavy booster in transport along the curved road

Click to embiggenate. The Silicon Graybeard has the story.

Starship Troopers

The US Special Forces Extreme Techniques to Perform Halo Jumps

Reading Starship Troopers (a zillion years ago) and we've got soldiers dropping from orbit. I went looking for pictures of such, but bupkis. Well, how about HALO jumps? They're not from orbit, but they can be jumping from 8 miles up, which has so little air you might as well be in space, and I found this image.

Why am I thinking about Starship Troopers? Because the Air Force is building a new missile base on Johnston Island:

A mockup of the Rocket Cargo Vanguard program. © Air Force art.

Remember back at the beginning, back before the first Starship prototype was even built, when Elon was talking about how the Starship was going to revolutionize international travel? It was kind of a hair-brained scheme, but evidently someone at the Air Force was paying attention, because they realized it could be used to transport cargo as well as people. Any kind of commercial shipping isn't going to use a rocket, they use cargo ships because pound for pound, they are much cheaper. But if you have an emergency somewhere and you need to get a bunch of stuff somewhere quickly, a rocket is just the ticket.

But the Starship is designed to carry people. It's going to be a little tougher on people than an airliner, but soldiers are pretty tough, so it shouldn't be a problem for them.

Landing in remote regions occupied by enemy forces might be a problem though, so we might want to drop our troops in, like paratroopers. We don't have a technique for doing that from orbit, at least not yet, but Starship can manage reentry, and at some point it's velocity will be low enough that troops could safely exit the vehicle, so we would have Starship paratroops, i.e. Starship Troopers.

It's going to be a few years before we get to this point, but it's undoubtedly coming.

Johnston Atoll is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:

Johnston Atoll

Johnston Island inside Johnston Atoll

Johnston Island

Previous post on the subject here.

Johnny Harris tipped me off.

Starship Flight 7 RUD

Starship S33 Explosion and Re-Entry after Anomaly | RUD Starship S33 Flight 7
SpaceXtudio

I don't know why anyone uses the acronym RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly). Why don't they just say it dun blowd up? Either someone was either trying to be clever when they coined the term, or they were lost in acronym land and everything had to have an acronym, so they coined this one.

SpaceX launched their big booster with a Starship on top this week. The booster returned to the launch site and was caught by the outstretched arms of Mechazilla. The Starship itself did not fare so well, exploding on the way up to orbit and giving us this light show.

The Silicon Graybeard has a longer post.

Putting one of these rockets together costs about $100 million. Space Launch Systems, Boeing's baby is supposed to cost $2 billion per launch.

Mechazilla Snags Booster In Mid-Air

Mechanical SpaceX arms catch Starship rocket booster back at the launch pad
Associated Press

I admit I thought this scheme seemed a little far fetched when I first heard about it, but apparently they made it work. Thing to remember is that while the booster weighs a zillion tons when it is launched on account of it being full of fuel, when it comes back down it is nearly empty. It's like full can of beer when it is sitting on the launch pad and like an empty beer can when it comes back down. Somebody should do the math. I'll bet it's pretty dang close.

Another post about Mechazilla.

P. S. Did the math:

	Empty	Full	Units	Ratio
Beer Can	14	372	grams	26.6
SpaceX Booster	275,000	3,675,000	kilograms	13.4

The empty beer can is half the weight it would be if the same ration held for both containers. Think all those rocket engines in the base might have something to do with it?

SpaceX

SpaceX upper stage anomaly

How is it that we even have pictures like this? We are walking way out on the edge and there ain't no net.

SpaceX Starship 4th Test Flight

SpaceX's Starship Literally Melted! But It Kept Flying To A Miraculous Landing!
Scott Manley

SpaceX marches on. Makes me happy. Scott Manley put this video together and got it out the door in a matter of hours. Took me a day to get my act together to post this.

Starship Reentry

Wow! Watch SpaceX Starship re-enter Earth's atmosphere in these incredible views
VideoFromSpace

This is from the last test flight of the SpaceX Starship which happened two months ago. Visible signs of heating don't show up until after the three minute mark. Up till then we just see the upper surfaces of clouds flying by a hundred miles below us. Once the heating starts we get another two minutes of it getting more intense until the signal is lost. After that we just get noise and filler.

I was blown away when I saw this the first time - it's like the first time this has every been recorded by a camera. Before this it was all just theoretical. Oh, there were the rocket scientists mathematical explanations and evidence of extreme heating after the fact, but for all we know it could have been dragons roasting what they thought were dragon sized marshmallows. I know, not likely, but you know, photos or it didn't happen. So now we have photos and I don't see any dragons.

Besides getting video of reentry heating we were getting it live because of the Starlink Satellites. Because they launch them is box lot quantities I was thinking they were itty bitty little things, but they aren't. Each one weighs like 600 pounds and carries a solar panel array that expands to 100 feet. I'm going to take a closer look at these things one of these days.

The Silicon Graybeard tells us SpaceX is getting ready to make another test flight real soon now. So far they seem to be making progress, no catastrophic failures that have made them think they need to go back and rethink their plan.

I find jibber jabber annoying, but YouTube has a mute button. The last couple of minutes of the video they display a couple heat shield tiles. These are the same kind of things that fell off of the Space Shuttle Columbia and caused it to disintegrate on reentry back in 2003. Hopefully the glue guys have got a better glue now.

Previous posts about reentry here.

Starlink

Starlink Satellites

Go Elon, go:

SpaceX Starlink

Starlink is the world’s most advanced satellite internet constellation, beaming terabytes per second to the most remote parts of Earth. Made possible by the advent of reusable rocketry, Starlink marks the beginning of a new age of orbital technology.

In the Starlink constellation, there are 5,601 orbiting satellites.

The links go to a page that shows the satellites in motion. With so many satellites in orbit, it's hard to believe that they are not colliding with each other all the time. Of course, space is a big place. Even if all of the starlink satellites were all following the same orbital path, they would still be four miles apart.

LNG Explosion

Tank truck with 60 TONS of gas explodes in Ulaanbaatar
Chuck Pergiel

RT reports:

The accident in Mongolia’s capital has killed six and left 14 injured. A truck carrying 60 tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) collided with a car and exploded in the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar.

 

Truck & cryogenic trailer

LNG is about half as dense as water. Cooling natural gas to −260 °F will turn it into a liquid, reducing its volume by a factor of 600. Tanks are lightly pressurized at around 4 or 5 PSI (pounds per square inch). A single trailer can carry about 30 tons of LNG, so either there were two trailers involved in this accident or somebody got the number wrong. At least they were only off by a factor of 2, not 2 zillion. Not bad for an innumerate journalist.  Where is Ulaanbaatar anyway? Middle of nowhere, that's where:

Ulaanbaatar Mongolia

Note that just past the west end of Mongolia there is a short stretch of border between Russia and China. Mongolia is surrounded by Russia and China.

SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster

SpaceX Starship Heavy Booster holds 750 tons of liquid methane (LNG is basically methane), so it's going to take 25 trailer loads to fill the booster.

Update December 2025 replaced missing video.

Grid Fins

Grid Fins on SpaceX Super Heavy Booster

I'm watching a video about the recent SpaceX rocket launch and this scene flashes on the screen for a couple of seconds. I'm posting it because it shows just how big the grid fins are. In pictures of the whole rocket the grid fins look pretty small and inconsequential. They are not.

Merlin Engine

SpaceX Merlin 1D engine

Starship - Successful Test Flight

Watch: SpaceX Starship Test Flight Ends in Explosion on Second Try | WSJ
The Wall Street Journal

Launched this morning at oh dark thirty West Coast time. I was awake so I watched it. Pretty great. Everything seemed to work fine going up, but things kind of fell apart on the way down. Near as I can tell the booster blew up all by itself and Starship was destroyed by command when they lost communication.

Still, the test did better than expected. (Not hard when you expect nothing. Tamp down your boundless enthusiasm with a healthy dose of 'I just know it's going to blow up on the launch pad', and then if it gets off the ground you can say 'wow, just look at that'!)

Starship Directional Control

Why did SpaceX keep Starship’s Grid Fins out on ascent?
Everyday Astronaut

The launch he's talking about happened last April. This video showed up while I was whiling away the afternoon watching YouTube Shorts, the greatest time sucker since the invention of tiddly winks. I like this video because it shows the grid fins in action, it shows how ginormous they are and there is also a clip of the central group of rocket motors swiveling on their gimbals. They used to use hydraulics to move them but they have since changed to electric actuators. No, not more Tesla motors.

SpaceX Starship Launch

Starship atop Heavy Booster, ready for launch, Boca Chica, Texas

It was going to be launched Monday, but didn't. Launched today and got way up there, but then the second stage wouldn't separate and the whole thing ended up going blooey.

Aft view of Heavy Booster on it's way up.

Still, the heavy booster got off the ground carrying a good size payload. Not bad for a first attempt. And it wasn't even using all of it's engines, as you can see in the above image. I count 27. I think the total is supposed to be 33.

SpaceX Starship

The SpaceX Starship Full Wet Dress in Texas on Monday, December 23, 2022

The Silicon Greybeard has a post up about the SpaceX Starship. Nothing Earth shattering, I just like to keep tabs on Elon's pet project. They continue to march along, making incremental progress. The pace feels more like NASA in the 1960's when there was always a rocket launch / disaster in the news, not like the glacial pace that NASA has been taking since the end of Apollo.

SpaceX Raptor Engine

SpaceX Raptor 2 Engine

The Silicon Graybeard has a post up about SpaceX's engine building program. They're looking to reduce the cost of building a Raptor engine from $2 million down to a quarter of a million. With progress like that we might actually be back on the moon by the end of the decade.

Satellite Communications

Hughes Satellite Antennae Meter

Found this in the shrubbery outside my daughter's house. Those are coax connectors sticking out of the sides at the top, so it appears to be some kind of meter for use with satellite TV of some sort. Turns out it used to align satellite dishes when they are being installed. This kind of scheme works with geosynchronous satellites, you know, the ones that are way out there, like 20,000 odd miles.

You can probably use some more conventional test equipment to do the same job, but this was designed for use by people installing satellite dishes when that was all the fad. Just Google Hughes Satellite Antennae Meter. Apparently HughesNet still offers internet via satellite. 

Talking to Marc yesterday and he tells us he was in Alvord desert last week, on vacation, but working, which isn't really a vacation, but what do I know about working anyway? Anyway he's got a Starlink satellite communicator. Starlink satellites are in Low Earth Orbit, about 350 miles up, about three times the altitude of the International Space Station. As such, they are moving across the sky, they are not stationary like the broadcast satellites.

When you are camping power is always an issue. You can always start your car to get juice to charge your batteries, but you really don't want to be doing that. The whole point of camping is to get away from running engines. OK, maybe not the whole point, but a major attraction.

Starlink Satellite Constellation
Currently 3,000 satellites

A Starlink antennae doesn't use a whole lot of power, but Michael tells us that when you first fire up Starlink it sucks about 80 watts of power for like 20 or 30 minutes and then it drops down to about half that. During that first 30 minutes it is downloading the ephemeris, which is a bunch of data that tells it where the satellites can be found. It needs this because it has to constantly adjust the antennae's aim. I think they use to actually move the antennae, but the current version uses a phased array antenna where aiming is controlled by adjusting the phase of the signal sent to each of the component elements.

Phased Array Antenna

Quora has a bunch of information about aiming satellite antennaes. I mean, how do you aim to hit something 20,000 miles away? Forget about doing anything like adjusting the sights on your rifle. At that distance you aren't even going to be able to see it. You would need something like a 5,000 power telescope to see them.

The Artemis Program

The Artemis Program
Megaprojects

Finally some straight talk without a lot of fluff. He covers the main issues involved with getting to the moon, but promises more in a follow up video. It's been four weeks, Simon, where is it?

Not one word about how grossly expensive the SLS (Space Launch System) has proven to be, but that should be expected since it was designed and built by government employees and government defense contractors. In NASA's defense, they are working out there on the bleeding edge, trying things no one has done before and documenting them so that other people can make use of that information. As for Boeing (the prime SLS contractor), they're big and fat and happily ensconced in the government pack. I doubt they could move nimbly if their life depending on it. You get in with the pack and nothing is more important than keeping your fellow pack members happy. Sure, you show up for work and you do things, but coffee, donuts and chitchat are just as important, aren't they?

The bit about the construction of the Orion module was interesting. An aluminum-lithium alloy, stronger than titanium? I wonder if anyone else is using it for anything. Hit me Google.

The primary use for Aluminum-Lithium alloys is in aerospace, i.e. making parts for airplanes. It has been around since the 1920s although it didn't start being used in aircraft till the 1950s.

Getting to the moon is one thing. Getting down to the surface is another, especially with all the gear you are going to need to establish some kind of permanent base. SpaceX's Starship could very well get us there, but the Starship is 160 odd feet tall and the bottom 100 feet are all fuel tanks. When it lands, you've got to descend 100 feet to get to the surface. You could use a winch to move between the ship and ground. A high speed electric winch would make it quick, but it would still be a nuisance. What happens when you want to move something like a bulldozer, or a nuclear reactor? The Starship is a chunk, maybe a 100 tons sitting on the moon. You want to shove a ten ton reactor 20 feet out the door and lower it to the ground? You ever see those videos of giant cranes falling over when they try to pick up something too heavy? So we might need something like this:

Dynetic's HLS (Human Landing System) Concept

SpaceX Starship Presentation 2022 Summary – The Holy Grail Breakthrough!

What About It?

There is so much stuff about SpaceX being produced these days that it can be overwhelming so I try to ignore it. Building and testing rockets takes time, it is liable to be a couple of years before SpaceX has developed their rockets and systems to the point where we can think about sending a rocket to the moon, so there is no point in getting overly excited, you will just burn yourself out. Just be patient, we'll get there. Felix provides a good summary of Elon's state of SpaceX speech. Just after the two minute mark there is a video clip of the Starship being lifted up by Mechazilla. That is very impressive.