Starship and Super Heavy are plenty ambitious on their own, but it’s unsurprising to hear that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk already has some thoughts on what could follow that next-generation launch vehicle in the new decade.
Hinted at in a brief tweet on August 28th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX’s massive Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle – set to be the most powerful rocket ever built upon completion – could eventually be followed by a rocket multiple times larger.
Once complete, Starship’s Super Heavy booster will be the single most powerful rocket booster ever built, standing at least 70m (230 ft) tall on its own and capable of producing as much as ~90,000 kN (19,600,000 lbf) of thrust with 30 250-ton-thrust and 7 200-ton-thrust Raptor engines installed. Assuming 31 throttleable 200-ton Raptors, Super Heavy’s minimum max thrust is a still record-breaking ~62,000 kN (13.7 million lbf).
Starship/Super Heavy ‘stack’ would be the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever assembled, but Elon Plans the follow up to be 4 to 8 times bigger.
He revealed part of his grand plan on Wednesday when a Twitter user asked about a 39-foot-wide (12 meters) version of Starship. Musk replied that a “next-gen” version of Starship would probably be double that diameter.
Elon tweeted that Starship Version 2.0 will be 18 meters in diameter instead of 9 meters. This would mean the area of the cross-section would be 4 times higher. If the height was also doubled then it would have 9 times the volume. The engines would likely be upgraded for the Ultra Heavy Starship 2.0. This means the next rocket might be able to launch over 1000 tons per launch.
This would be about twice the payload of the Sea Dragon. The Sea Dragon was a 1962 conceptualized design study for a two-stage sea-launched orbital super heavy-lift launch vehicle. The project was led by Robert Truax while working at Aerojet. It would have had a payload capacity of 550 tons. It would have been 150 meters tall and 23 meters in diameter.
The SpaceX Super Heavy Starship 2.0 may also be limited on height. Tovera Vashini on twitter notes that rocket height is limited by thrust per area. This could mean that SpaceX Super Heavy Starship 2.0 may also end up very near the Sea Dragon in capacity.
The following graphic shows about how big the first Starship system would be compared with its prototypes, such as Starhopper and Starship Mk 1. The Apollo-era Saturn V rocket and NASA’s upcoming Space Launch System moon rocket are also included for scale.
A very rough estimate would peg Starship 2.0’s gross (fuelled) mass at a gobsmacking ~40,000 metric tons (~90 million pounds). In the unlikely event that SpaceX would use the current generation of Raptor to power such a colossal rocket, the booster would need a bare minimum of 100+ Raptors just to lift off at all. Using Saturn V’s F-1, still the most powerful single-chamber rocket engine ever built, Starship 2.0 would need a minimum of 60+ engines to lift off.
Boosting Starship’ volume so much says little about how much payload or how many people a next-generation Starship could haul into orbit, or how deep into space such a gigantic spacecraft could go. But it’s hard not to imagine the answers are “more, bigger, faster, and farther” since it could carry that much more fuel and make room for many more Raptor rocket engines.
Such a size could accommodate space telescopes that astronomers may only dream of right now. For example, NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will fold up into a 15-foot-wide (4.57 metre) fairing of an Ariane 5 rocket around 2021. If a next-gen Starship is ever realised, it might fit six or more of the $US10 billion space observatories inside its fairing.
However, Musk envisions building a city on Mars that will be self-sustaining by the 2050s(and eventually has pizza joints). If he hopes to see that mission accomplished before his time on Earth is done, though, SpaceX may need the biggest rocket its leader can dream up.
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