SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is a chronically online billionaire, which leads to abundant controversies. An upshot of this behavior is that we get to hear about what SpaceX engineers are doing on an almost daily basis. In a recent Twitter Spaces stream, Musk talked about some of the 1,000 changes coming to the Starship before its next test flight.
Starship is SpaceX's big bet on the future—emphasis on big. At 394 feet (120 meters) tall, it's the largest rocket ever to fly. Imagine a mid-sized apartment building lifting off the ground and flying into space. That's Starship. It needs a lot of power to reach escape velocity, so it's also the most powerful rocket, with more than 16 million pounds of thrust at launch. However, the vehicle's first flight in April of this year ended abruptly at an altitude of 24 miles. Instead of dropping the Super Heavy first stage and continuing on to space, Starship lost control and began spinning. SpaceX opted to destroy the vehicle remotely, but officials still consider the test a success.
The fate of that first launch-ready Starship is probably due to many factors, including the flying concrete. SpaceX chose not to have a flame diverter in place, and the rocket's exhaust was so intense that it obliterated the launchpad, hurling bits of concrete thousands of feet away. Several of the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines were out by the time the rocket lost control, but Musk notes that the vehicle had a "hodgepodge" of engines built and tested at various times. The next test flight will include all-new engines with several improvements, like electric thrust vector controls and improved manifolds to keep hot gas from leaking back into the system.
Perhaps the most significant alteration to the rocket comes to the crucial stage separation hardware. Musk says that Starship will be modified to perform "hot staging." This method has been used by Russian Soyuz vehicles for years, but Starship would be the first US-based rocket to do so. In hot staging, the engines on the upper stage are turned on before the first stage separates. Engineers are adding vents to ensure exhaust can escape without damaging the vehicle, and the top of Super Heavy will need to be reinforced. This will add about 10% to Starship's payload capacity, which already tops 100 tons to low Earth orbit.
Ars Technica confirms SpaceX is doing something about the disintegrated launchpad, too. It's pouring more than 1,000 cubic meters (about 35,000 cubic feet) of steel-reinforced concrete, and it will install two water-cooled steel plates on top of the concrete.
In uncharacteristic fashion, Musk did not offer a timeline for Starship's second test flight. It's currently dealing with regulatory issues and a smattering of lawsuits related to the first launch.
