Starship Is In Deep Trouble

It's a death trap.

Photo by Forest Katsch on Unsplash

It’s 2018: Corona is just a weird beer, #MeToo has finally taken down Weinstein, and Elon Musk has just announced to the world that he is on track to put humans on Mars in 2024 with Starship. 2024 came and went, and Starship is barely a functional rocket, let alone able to take us to another planet. Indeed, the Starship is facing some significant issues, like its payload to LEO being less than half what was promised, and its current price per kg to LEO being higher than the 58-year-old Saturn V (read more here). But these issues aren’t necessarily dealbreakers for Starship. What is a dealbreaker is its safety, as Starship’s entire M.O. is to significantly scale up human space flight, and Starship is set to be an utter death trap. Allow me to explain.

SpaceX recently lost a Falcon 9 booster. Upon landing on the floating platform, a fire inside the rocket forced one of the landing legs to fail, causing it to tip over and be “lost.” SpaceX hasn’t confirmed whether it exploded or sank into the ocean.

Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse. It is a semi-reusable rocket, with its first stage, also known as the booster, being able to safely land and launch again. This reduced the cost of launches, making Falcon 9 the most popular route to space. It has operated for nearly 15 years, launched 458 times, and has a launch reliability of over 99%!

However, as this recent landing failure shows, SpaceX still struggles to land the Falcon booster reliably. In fact, 3% of Falcon 9 landings result in the loss of the booster.

So, why does this matter?

Because this is how SpaceX wants to land humans back on Earth with Starship.

Unlike the Falcon 9, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. Both the booster (Super Heavy Booster) and final stage (Starship) are meant to land safely back on terra firma and fly again. This means that astronauts would launch and land with Starship for crewed missions.

As such, Starship must be able to land safely substantially more than 99% of the time if it ever wants to conduct human space flight.

However, SpaceX still struggles to land the far smaller and much simpler Falcon Booster at such a success rate. In fact, landing Starship is a monumental leap from landing the Falcon Booster.

The Falcon Booster doesn’t reach orbit, so its speed peaks at roughly 4,600 mph and only weighs around 20,000 kg. Moreover, it never makes it to space, meaning it operates in a consistent atmosphere. Meanwhile, Starship reaches orbit, meaning it travels at a whopping 17,500 mph. This also means that during landing, it has to re-enter the atmosphere, and the sudden transition from the vacuum of space to an atmosphere at this speed causes a dramatic number of challenges. Not only that, but to slow down, Starship is meant to do a “belly flop” and use its bluff side to increase aerodynamic resistance and shed off its high speed in the upper atmosphere, dramatically increasing the complexity of reentry. Oh, and it weighs around five times more than the Falcon Booster. This extra weight, combined with the immense speed, means that Starship has roughly 72 times the kinetic energy of the Falcon Heavy during landing! Again, this makes the whole landing process significantly more complex and risky, especially as Starship has enough kinetic energy upon reentry to melt all the steel it is built from!

The engineering difference between landing the Falcon Booster and landing a Starship is as big of a gulf as between a bicycle and an F1 car. Yet, Falcon Booster landings still fail 3% of the time!

The implications of this are staggering.

Musk has historically claimed that Starship could launch as often as 20 times per day, which is moronic. More recently, SpaceX has claimed that multiple Starship launches per day are possible and that a small percentage of these could be crewed launches. So, two launches per day, meaning 730 launches per year, and let’s say 2% of these are crewed, so roughly 15 crewed missions per year.

If SpaceX can get Starship to land with the success rate of the Falcon Booster (with major emphasis on the word “if”), one Starship crew will be lost every two years to a failed landing. Oh, and Musk wants some of these crews to be massive, up to 100 people.

However, the Starship’s landing failure rate could easily be double, triple, or even quadruple that of the Falcon Booster because of the complexities we have discussed. So, we could easily see multiple crews lost per year due to landing failures.

With this in mind, would NASA, ESA, or any other space agency ever certify Starship for human space flight? I mean, we haven’t even talked about the reports that Starship’s heat shield is too thin (to save weight), meaning that during landing, Starship’s interior is likely hotter than an oven. Even if they can stick the landing, how can a crew survive such conditions?

In short, Starship in its current guise is far from being fit for human space flight, and the entire concept needs completely reworking to solve this fatal flaw.

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Sources: Space.com, Satnews, SSC, Astralytical, Teslarrati, Will Lockett