SpaceX ’s Starhopper Flight Test Is a Big Step Forward for Elon Musk’s Moon Dreams

You know a spacecraft is cool when you watch it fly and can’t help but think it looks more like a bit of Hollywood CGI than an actual machine. The SpaceX Starhopper spacecraft was very much the real deal — a bright chrome, a 60-ft. tall, three-finned contraption powered by a single engine — when it made an exceedingly brief, 54-second flight on Aug. 27 in Boca Chica, Texas. But it still seemed whimsically imaginary. “It almost looked like a cartoon or something,” Cheryl Stevens, a nearby resident, told Reuters. All the same, the flight represented a tiny but very important step for the development of a much bigger spacecraft: the 180-ft. tall Starship rocket that SpaceX boss Elon Musk hopes to launch on a crewed flight around the moon as early as 2023. That’s an awfully ambitious deadline that may or may not be realistic. But the Starhopper test helped prove two critical elements of Starship hardware: the engine and the maneuvering thrusters. NASA’s Apollo orbiter and lunar module used what are known as hypergolic fuels: a mix of hot-tempered chemicals that ignite merely by being brought into contact with each other. That eliminated the need for ignition hardware, simplifying the engine and reducing the risk of breakdowns. But hypergolics are exceedingly toxic and corrosive. For Starship, SpaceX is introducing a new engine, named Raptor, that uses a lighter, energy-dense mix of methane and liquid oxygen. And since SpaceX envisions la...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime Space SpaceX Source Type: news