Starship

### Engines

Booster: 33 sea level RaptorShip: 3 sea level Raptor; 3 Raptor vacuum (current prototypes)

## Milestones

### First spotted

2019 (first one built completly (MK-1)) 2022 (full stack)

### First flight

25 July 2019 (Starhopper test flight)20 April 2023 OFT-1

## Starship development

### Next

None (no extreme modifications will be made anymore, but it will be updated, like for example V2 and later V3)

### See also

Super Heavy Booster

**Starship** is a two-stage super heavy lift launch vehicle currently under development by SpaceX. It is the heaviest, tallest and most powerful space launch vehicle to have flown into space. Starship is intended to be fully reusable, which means both stages will be recovered after a mission and reused.

The Starship space vehicle is designed to supplant SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, expand SpaceX's Starlink satellite constellation, and launch crews to both low Earth orbit, the moon and Mars. SpaceX plans to use a variation of the Starship vehicle as tankers, refueling other Starships to allow missions to geosynchronous orbit, the Moon, and Mars. A Human Landing System (HLS) variant of Starship is to land astronauts on the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis program. Starship is primarily meant to enable SpaceX's ambition of colonizing Mars but will most likely be prodimentally used for launching Starlink satellites.

Starship consists of a ship stacked on top of a Super Heavy Booster. The booster and ship are both powered by Raptor engines, which burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The Super Heavy Booster has a total of 33 Raptor 2 engines. 13 of the inner engines can gimbal via eTVC (Electric Trust Vector Control). The outer 20 can not gimbal. The ship has a total of 6 engines, with 3 designed for sealevel and the outer 3 optimised for space. Both stages are constructed primarily of stainless steel, a material chosen as an alternative to a series of prior designs.

The booster is designed to use its engines to slow itself down before it is caught by a pair of mechanical arms attached to the Integration Tower (IT). The ship is protected during atmospheric reentry by its thermal protection system, consisting of hexagonal tiles. The ship will use a 'belly flop' maneuver where the spacecraft turns from a horizontal into a vertical position, then lands using its engines. This maneuver was tested with SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11 and SN15. SN15 was the first to land and survive the landing.

The Starship system aims to achieve frequent space launches at low cost. Development follows an iterative and incremental approach involving frequent, and often destructive, test flights of prototype vehicles. The first flight test of the full Starship system took place on 20 April 2023, successfully lifting-off with several engines out, but ended four minutes after launch with a loss of control and destruction of the launch vehicle. The second flight test of the vehicle took place on 18 November 2023, successfully achieving stage separation, but the Super Heavy booster exploded seconds into firing its engines for its boostback burn, while the upper stage was lost nearly eight minutes after launch.

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# Ship Versions

Since the first Starship prototype (Starhopper) began construction in 2018, massive changes have been made and often between vehicles of the same generation however based on tweets from Elon Musk and clear large physical differences there have generally been agreed on three clear divisions of SN3 to SN6; SN8 to SN14 and; SN15 to SN19. With orbital prototypes there is a more official divison of Version 1, 2 and 3 however it is important to note that even within Version one countless changes were made.