Elon Musk continues to surprise us with his astounding technological developments as the
days are going by.
This time he has revealed how his company SpaceX is going to land a rocket by catching
it midair!
We’ll give you an insight on the Starship and its Super Heavy landing trick that will
revolutionise the industry and will save SpaceX a lot of millions by saving crafts, stay until
the end so you can see how!
Detailed data has been provided by Elon Musk about the final landing burn and not just
only the movement from directly above the Mechazilla.
The striking feature that you might find exciting is the fact that it is located 1800 meters
above Mechazilla.
A comparison between a Super Heavy and a Falcon 9 booster shows that the point at which this
Falcon 9 booster starts the reentry burn is also 1800 meters- the same for Super Heavy.
Some could even say that the Super Heavy is another variant form of Falcon 9 booster with
the booster coming at an angle.
The utility of the angle lies in the fact that it would come in handy when SpaceX will
perform a dogleg manoeuvre to protect the Orbital launch mount and Mechazilla in case
something untoward happens during the early phases of the launch.
The angle also provides the much-needed lift from the booster’s body that would facilitate
a smooth and slow descent.
This tells us a lot about what SpaceX is planning to do with the Super Heavy and it looks like
they are going to follow what they are already doing with their Falcon 9 boosters.
The booster, after reaching a height of 800 to 700 meters above the pad, switches to using
only three center engines coming down from an initial count of 13.
This move creates a massive bump in the body-acceleration graph but poses a small challenge to the entire
machinery.
If you notice, there has been a shutdown of certain engines which means that the TVC of
the remaining 3 engines has to fight to keep the booster on track.
Irrespective of whether a rocket is going up or down, whenever there is a loss of engines
which means shut down of the initial number of engines, the remaining have to compensate
for the sudden change in the thrust vector control also known as engine gimbal.
This method is common for all of the High-altitude Starship Flight Tests to date.
Starships with their Raptor engines have avionics and TVC hydraulic mechanisms in place that
make it possible for the spaceship to perform this in-flight with relative ease.
At this point, the booster becomes so slow that it is difficult for it to produce any
meaningful lift and thus undergoes necessary changes too.
In other words, the booster is programmed to turn its engine sections straight downwards
while positioning itself above the Mechazilla.
Also, the loss of all those engines means a drop in the velocity until it makes the
final approach to position itself at the center of the Mechazilla Chopsticks with the grid
fins pointing left and right.
An immaculate and detailed animated video was recently released by Ryan Hansen Space
regarding this where he worked closely with Owe- a member of SpaceX 3D Creation eccentric.
The video showed us how the lifting booster 4 onto the orbital launch mount will be carried
out by SpaceX and how the Mechazilla Chopsticks will play a crucial role in this.
This animation provides an incomparable demonstration of the mechanics of the Chopstick in which
it has been elaborated that the Chopsticks work the same way in both liftings or catching
a booster.
In other words, while the boosters will either get ready to get lifted or land, they will
come to do so on the Chopsticks with little arm or anchor-like projections.
These anchors are positioned in the middle of and directly under the grid fins we talked
about that are present on either side of the booster’s haul.
Thus you can understand that it is of utmost importance that the grid fins are oriented
towards the chopsticks while the booster is coming down.
What are your thoughts on how safe and feasible this process is?
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Jumping back to the matter of landing- one important question that experts have raised
at this point is if SpaceX can pull off a controlled rotational movement on their boosters
in descent.
In uninterrupted footage where a Falcon 9 is seen to make the descent from Space to
LZ1 at Kennedy Space Centre, it was noted that the entire process of the rotational
movement happening just meters above the pad was very much under control.
The booster was seen to rotate back and forth just before reaching the final meters when
it stops rotating altogether.
All thanks to the grid fins that make controlling the rotational movement much easier than before.
Thus, in theory, Super Heavy with the same kind of mechanics, we can expect the same
kind of technology will be at work there too.
Just to remain extra safe, Mechazilla has preventive measures in place if the booster
is not positioned perfectly.
It can tolerate a few degrees of deviation from the rotational axis.
In another animated video by Owe from SpaceX 3D Creation Eccentric, the working of this
safety has been demonstrated.
The video shows us certain pushers close in on the boosters after the catch which then
guides it to the correct center position of the Chopsticks.
Thus the booster is positioned on the orbital mount launch correctly.
They say experience makes you wise and SpaceX with 101 landings of an orbit class rocket
booster has all the experience in the world they need to make this happen.
Thus this is one big advantage that SpaceX inherently has over any other space research
center in the world.
Another interesting thing found out about the lifting and launching is that the Mechazilla
Chopsticks don’t need to move much up or down while catching the booster.
One of the first reasons behind this is the enormous size of Mechazilla which is the orbital
launch tower and the weight of each Chopstick is estimated to be 100 tons!
The second and the most important reason is that Falcon 9 doesn’t need the drone ship
to have any kind of dampening apart from the already present honeycomb crush blocks present
inside the legs of the rocket.
But in comparison, there are no legs when it comes to a Super Heavy and thus the question
of having honeycomb crush blocks to dampen the vertical descent goes out the window.
Instead what the Super Heavy has are movable bars that work as landing surfaces for the
booster.
These bars can move up and down to achieve the distance to dampen the descent that a
Falcon 9 does with the help of its crushed legs.
Though this distance is just a few centimeters theory, it is very crucial to a smooth and
soft landing.
And the softer the landing, the better is the success of the spaceship.
Coming to the last part of how the booster catch is going to take place, we need to address
the 5-second air hoovering Super Heavy does before finally making the landing.
This is in contrast to a suicide burn landing that people are used to seeing with a Falcon
9.
The suicide burn is a technique used to achieve zero velocity on every Falcon 9 booster.
There are two reasons why SpaceX has stuck with this mode of landing when it comes to
the Falcon 9 series- the first being the consumption of a minimum amount of fuel in a suicide burn
landing.
Secondly, the engine of the Falcon 9 booster is Merlin 1D which has too much thrust and
cannot throttle down enough.
The booster before it lands is very light due to almost empty tanks thus making it impossible
to hover and if they managed to do this, there would be continued loss of fuel further.
Thus the spaceship would come to a standstill and then start ascending again.
As the name suggests, the Super Heavy booster outweighs a Falcon 9 booster even when its
tanks are almost empty.
The minimum throttle range of the Raptor engine a Super Heavy has, is 10% of the total thrust
developed by it.
Elon Musk has made us aware that the value of this thrust is around 220 tonnes when a
chamber pressure of 300 bar is present.
Thus the requisites for hovering are facilitated by a Super Heavy and SpaceX intends to use
it to their advantage and provide a soft landing to this spaceship.
From all this discussion, one very pronounced thing is the determination of SpaceX to excel
with their Super Heavy spaceship.
They are going above and beyond to make the lifting and landing of this spaceship as flawless
as possible.
But why do they even want to venture into uncharted territory with so many risks?
Surely landing a spaceship with legs would be much easier.
But then again, SpaceX aims to achieve full and rapid reusability with their rockets and
this is how they are going to make it happen.
Be sure to check out your favorite SpaceX video here.