Musk confident Starship will start launching 100 tons to orbit next year

WASHINGTON — SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk says he is confident that Starship can start delivering 100 tons of payload to orbit next year while reusing both stages.

In an interview during the All-In Summit Sept. 9, Musk said he expected an upgraded version of the vehicle, known as version 3, to start flying next year, with both the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage recovered and reused.

“Unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching both the booster and the ship, and being able to deliver over 100 tons to a useful orbit,” he said.

That performance is essential for SpaceX, allowing it to both place larger next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit and support the lunar lander version of Starship the company is developing for NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign.

Version 3 of Starship will be a “gigantic upgrade” from the current version 2, he said, including the use of third-generation Raptor engines. “Pretty much everything changes on the rocket with version 3.”

He cautioned that the upgraded rocket “might have some initial teething pains because it’s such a radical redesign.” The current version 2 vehicle suffered three consecutive mission-ending failures in test flights earlier this year before a largely successful Flight 10 mission Aug. 26.

Musk confirmed there is one remaining launch of version 2 of Starship, planned for later this year, before switching to version 3. He didn’t offer an estimate of when the first version 3 launch would take place.

At the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium Sept. 8, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said that final version 2 launch will, like the previous flights, be a suborbital mission. “We’re going to try and understand how the ship flies,” he said.

He said he expected the first launch of Starship version 3 would also be suborbital. “If that’s successful, then we’ll probably go orbital after that with the next v3.”

Thermal protection system testing

One of the key challenges for Starship is developing a thermal protection system for the upper stage that can survive the rigors of reentry but does not require significant maintenance between flights.

“For full reusability of the ship, there’s still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield. No one has ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield,” Musk said, citing the extensive work required on the space shuttle’s heat shield between flights.

“We really are looking at fundamental physics here,” he said, “trying to figure out how do we make something that can withstand the heat, is very light, doesn’t transmit the heat to the primary structure, and the tiles stay on and don’t crack.”

On Flight 10, SpaceX tested some alternative tile technologies. That contributed to the odd discoloration of the vehicle after reentry, with part of the nose section white while much of the body was rust-colored.

Gerstenmaier said that on Flight 10, SpaceX installed three metallic tiles to test their performance compared to the ceramic tiles used elsewhere on the ship. “They would be simpler to manufacture and more durable than the ceramic tiles,” he said. “Turns out they’re not.”

The metallic tiles “didn’t do so good,” he said, oxidizing in the upper atmosphere during reentry.

The white material in the nose, he said, was from an ablative material below the tiles that SpaceX also uses on its Dragon spacecraft. “What that’s showing us is that we’re having heat essentially get into that region between the tiles, go underneath the tiles, and this ablative structure is then ablating underneath. So again, we learned that we need to seal the tiles.”

One technique that shows promise, he said, is a material he called “crunch wrap” that he compared to wrapping paper that goes around each tile when it is installed on the vehicle. Tiles on the ship that used the crunch wrap had less of the white ablative material than those in other parts of the vehicle that did not use it.

“What we found was that this crunch wrap technique is allowing us to essentially seal between the tiles without putting a gap filler in between the tiles,” Gerstenmaier said. For the next flight, SpaceX plans to use crunch wrap for tiles throughout the vehicle “and see if we can get better sealing and better tile performance moving forward.”

That next flight, he added, will do less experimentation with thermal tiles than on Flight 10. “We’ll probably cut back a little bit. We’re going to try to go more toward the configuration we want to fly next year.”