SpaceX may Launch Worlds Largest Rocket next month | How Starship rocket could help humanity discover the solar system — and beyond
With the first orbital test launch of Starship imminent, scientists are fantasising about the possibilities it could enable—from trips to Neptune to planetary defence.
Tuesday, December 7, 2021 | Chimniii Desk
Key Highlights
- The nearly 400-foot-tall rocket, called Starship, is intended to carry NASA astronauts to the moon.
- And Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, has loftier ambitions: he wants to use it to colonise Mars.
- One proposal from an international group of scientists called Conex (Conceptual Exploration Research) is for a spacecraft called Arcanum to explore Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, by utilising Starship's heavy-lifting capabilities.
- Alternatively, some scientists fantasise about using Starship to prepare for trips to other stars.
- Musk has suggested that SpaceX could launch up to a dozen Starship test flights in 2022, with missions to the moon and Mars on the horizon—along with a slew of scientific opportunities. "
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The nearly 400-foot-tall rocket, called Starship, is intended to carry NASA astronauts to the moon. And Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, has loftier ambitions: he wants to use it to colonise Mars.
Much has already been written about Starship's capability for human spaceflight. However, the rocket has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of our neighbouring planets and moons. "A starship would fundamentally alter how we explore the solar system," says Ali Bramson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University. "Planetary science is on the verge of exploding."
If the mission lives up to expectations, scientists are already discussing sending missions to Neptune and its largest moon in the outer solar system, bringing back massive amounts of space rock from Earth's moon and Mars, and even developing novel ways to protect Earth from incoming asteroids.
Starship—which is currently under construction at a Texas site termed "Starbase"—is comprised of a massive spaceship atop a massive booster known as Super Heavy. Both can return to Earth and be reused, thereby lowering costs. The entire vehicle will be capable of regularly launching 100 metric tonnes (220,000 pounds) of cargo and people into space at a low cost. Starship's usable volume is a whopping 1,000 cubic meters—large enough to contain the entire disassembled Eiffel Tower. And this excites scientists.
"Starship is, like, wow," says James Head, a Brown University planetary scientist.
Musk discussed the project's scientific potential in mid-November, during a publicly accessible virtual meeting about Starship hosted by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. "It is critical that we strive to become a multiplanet species as soon as possible," he stated. "We will learn a great deal about the nature of the universe along the way." Musk stated that the Starship could carry "a great deal of scientific instrumentation" on flights—far more than is currently possible. "We'd learn a lot more than we would if we had to send relatively small vehicles with limited scientific instrumentation, as we currently do," he explained.
"You could deliver a 100-ton object to Europa's surface," Musk stated.
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Low-cost and reusable
At the heart of many of these concepts is the fact that Starship is designed to be not only large but also inexpensive to launch. Whereas NASA and the European Space Agency must carefully select a few missions to fund due to launch costs in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, Starship's affordability may allow for many more. "The low cost of access has the potential to fundamentally alter the landscape of scientific research," says Andrew Westphal, a physics lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, referring to flights that could cost as little as $2 million per launch. "You can envision privately financed missions and citizen consortia collaborating to fly things."
Additionally, Starship has a significant advantage over other super-heavy-lift rockets currently in development, including NASA's much-delayed Space Launch System and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. The upper half of the rocket is designed to be refuelled in Earth orbit by other Starships, allowing for greater emphasis on scientific equipment rather than fuel. To send humans to the moon, for example, eight separate launches may be necessary, with each successive "tanker Starship" supplying fuel to the "lunar Starship," which then travels to the moon with scientific equipment and crew.
Scientists are now fantasising about what Starship might enable them to accomplish. Earlier this year, Jennifer Heldmann of NASA's Ames Research Center published a paper in which she discussed some of the scientific opportunities that could be opened by Starship missions to the moon and Mars. One significant advantage is that Starship could transport full-sized equipment from Earth—there would be no need to downsize it to fit in a smaller vehicle, as was required for the Apollo moon missions. For instance, "you could bring a drilling rig," Heldmann explains. "You could drill a kilometre into the ground, just as we do on Earth." This would allow for unprecedented access to the moon's and Mars' interiors, which are believed to contain ice and other useful resources. Previously, such an idea was considered "a little bit insane," according to Heldmann. However, she adds, "you could do it with Starship and still have room to spare." "Is there anything else you wish to bring?"
Because Starship is capable of returning to Earth, it will theoretically be able to bring back massive quantities of samples. The sheer volume of material that could be recovered from a variety of locations would provide Earth scientists with unprecedented access to extraterrestrial material. This could shed light on a slew of mysteries, including the moon's volcanic history and "the question of life and astrobiology" on Mars, according to Heldmann.
Additionally, the Starship could enable more extravagant missions to other locations, either directly from Earth or possibly by using the moon and Mars as refuelling stations, as Musk envisions.
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Let us travel to Neptune.
One proposal from an international group of scientists called Conex (Conceptual Exploration Research) is for a spacecraft called Arcanum to explore Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, by utilising Starship's heavy-lifting capabilities. Neptune has only been visited once, by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, and there is still so much unknown about it. "Nobody is really thinking about what Starship could enable on this next level," says James McKevitt, a researcher at the University of Vienna and Conex's co-leader. "That is the purpose of Arcanum."
With a mass of approximately 21 metric tonnes, the spacecraft would be four times the mass of the largest deep space probe to date: NASA and the European Space Agency's Cassini-Huygens mission, which explored Saturn from 2004 to 2017. At the moment, no existing rocket is capable of launching such a craft, but Starship would enable it. Arcanum would consist of several components, including an orbiter to study Neptune, a lander to study Triton, and a penetrator to strike Triton's surface and "conduct a seismic experiment" to better understand the planet's geology and structure, according to McKevitt. Additionally, the mission could include a telescope, allowing for studies of the outer solar system and assisting in the search for planets orbiting other stars.
Some of the other concepts are even more speculative. According to physicist Philip Lubin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a large enough rocket, such as Starship, could be used to deflect an asteroid away from Earth. This mission could carry enough explosives to completely destroy an asteroid the size of the 10-kilometer-wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. Its fragments would self-destruct harmlessly in the atmosphere before they could reach our planet.
Additionally, a starship could be a more efficient way to launch massive space telescopes capable of observing the universe. At the moment, equipment such as NASA's and the European Space Agency's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope must be launched folded, an expensive, complex, and delicate procedure that is prone to error. NASA has suggested that a proposed super-telescope called LUVOIR, which would be used to image Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, could launch on Starship, while Musk has stated that SpaceX is already working on "an interesting project" that involves "taking a lens designed for a ground-based telescope and converting it into a space-based telescope." No additional information has been released.
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Say hello to your neighbours.
Alternatively, some scientists fantasise about using Starship to prepare for trips to other stars. According to René Heller and colleagues at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Starship could provide a low-cost means of testing technologies for a spacecraft capable of travelling multiple light-years to neighbouring star systems. Starship could launch a sail-powered spacecraft to Mars, which would use an onboard laser to propel itself against a thin sail and reach incredible speeds, allowing for a demonstration beyond Earth's orbit. "If SpaceX would be so kind as to take one of our sails on board and release it halfway on its journey to Mars, we should be able to track its acceleration and path through the solar system for several days, almost to Jupiter's orbit," Heller says.
Alternatively, Starship could be used to send a probe to Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, a difficult task without significant lifting capability. "It's extremely difficult due to the difficulty of getting into orbit and avoiding Jupiter's harsh radiation," says Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona. "However, mass aids those endeavours. You can have an abundance of fuel and shielding against radiation."
Musk has suggested that SpaceX could launch up to a dozen Starship test flights in 2022, with missions to the moon and Mars on the horizon—along with a slew of scientific opportunities. "Once Starship takes flight, development will accelerate dramatically," says Margarita Marinova, a former SpaceX senior Mars development engineer. "There will be an exponential increase in the number of people who are able to fly things." These missions could range from stand-alone Starship missions to ride-along missions on an existing flight manifest. "With a 100-ton capability, adding science hardware is relatively simple," Marinova explains. "If someone wishes to purchase payload space, they may do so. It will be a sea change in the way we conduct science."
Naturally, there are compelling reasons to exercise caution. While Starship has conducted test flights without the Super Heavy booster, the full rocket launch has yet to occur. It's a monstrously large and complex machine that may still encounter difficulties during development. SpaceX and Musk, too, have a history of being notoriously imprudent (to put it mildly) with timelines and objectives (a proposed mission to Mars, Red Dragon, was once supposed to have launched as early as 2018). Additionally, Starship's proposed method for reaching the moon and Mars, which relies on multiple refuelling missions in Earth orbit, is complex and untested.
However, there are numerous reasons to be excited about what Starship could accomplish if it is successful. From the inner to the outer solar system, and perhaps beyond, it has the potential to usher in a new era of space science. "I'm sure some extremely bright people are considering sending scientific missions aboard Starship," says Abhishek Tripathi, a space scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alternatively, as Musk put it, “It’s really whatever you can imagine.”
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