‘The Super Heavy’ booster is a large first stage for the SpaceX Starship launch system. The presentation began with a description of the delineation between the starship system and the superheavy booster. The presentation aimed to describe the first mission of the superheavy and its implications to the space sector and space industries.
The presentation specified the size of the previous SpaceX rocket, the Falcon 9 and the historic Saturn V launcher from the Apollo program. Previously the largest rocket ever effectively used by man.
The booster is still in testing with the most recent static fire test taking place in July 2021. The Super Heavy booster is sixty-eight meters tall and nine meters in diameter. Initial thrust at launch will be provided by three sea‑level Raptor engines that produce seventy two million newtons of thrust together.
The Fuel tanks are located above the engines and consist of separate liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant tanks, there is also a segmented header tank with fuel for the reentry and landing phase. Together these tanks hold three thousand three hundred metric tons of propellant.
For reentry the top of the booster is equipped with four steel grid fins, these are used to guide the booster during the descent phase and to aid in the launch tower’s mid‑air, ‘catching of the booster at reentry’.
The presentation also covered the Superheavy boosters used in SpaceX’s marketing as increasing and as a part of the US’s industrial heritage. Included was a photograph promoted by SpaceX’s CEO mirroring iconic photography of the construction of New York City’s skyscrapers.
The empty mass of the booster is eighty-five tonnes with the total mass at launch being one thousand three hundred and thirty five tonnes. The engines used will be six sea level optimized Raptor engines developed for the Superheavy program. The main fuel type is Methane (CH4) and the oxidizer is Liquid oxygen (LOX). The thrust at launch will be one thousand two hundred and twenty tonnes.
In some ways the most important single statistic is specific impulse; it represents the average force released per second. For starships it will be three hundred and thirty meters per second at sea level and three hundred and fifty-six in a vacuum. Overall ISP is used as a metric, the higher the number the higher the efficiency of the engine, Superheavy is a noted step up in the ISP for a vehicle its size.