Starship is a two-stage super heavy lift launch vehicle under development by SpaceX. It is currently holds the record for the largest and most powerful rocket ever built and flown. Starship is intended to be fully reusable, which means both stages will be recovered after a mission and reused.
The Starship launch 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 and Mars. The vehicle is fundamental to SpaceX’s ambition of colonizing Mars. SpaceX plans to use Starship vehicles as tankers, refueling other Starships to allow missions to geosynchronous orbit, the Moon, and Mars. A planned lunar lander variant of Starship has been contracted by NASA to land astronauts on the Moon as part of its Artemis program starting in 2025.
In March 2006 SpaceX made its first Falcon 1 launch, which began successfully but ended prematurely because of a fuel leak and fire. By this time, however, the company had already earned millions of dollars in launching orders, many of them from the U.S. government. In August of that year SpaceX was a winner of a NASA competition for funds to build and demonstrate spacecraft that could potentially service the ISS after the decommissioning of the space shuttle. Falcon 1 launches that failed to attain Earth orbit followed in March 2007 and August 2008, but in September 2008 SpaceX became the first privately owned company to send a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit. Three months later it won a NASA contract for servicing the ISS that was worth more than $1 billion.
A complaint by a US labour agency says the employees sent an open letter to the firm’s executives in 2022, detailing workplace concerns.The letter called him a “distraction and embarrassment”, according to Reuters news agency.The complaint by a regional official at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accused SpaceX of violating the workers’ rights under federal labour law which allows co-workers to jointly advocate for better working conditions.
The complaint also said those involved in the open letter were interrogated before being discharged.Lawyers for one of the former employees, Deborah Lawrence, have reportedly accused SpaceX of having a “toxic culture”, where harassment is tolerated.In a statement, seen by Reuters, Ms Lawrence said: “We wrote the open letter to leadership not out of malice, but because we cared about the mission and the people around us”.
The NLRB’s general counsel acts like a prosecutor and brings cases to the five-member board appointed by the organisation’s president.If SpaceX does not settle, the case will be heard by an administrative judge, whose decision can be appealed to the board and then to a federal appeals court. A hearing is scheduled for 5 March.
The Starship spacecraft is 50 m (160 ft) tall and 9 m (30 ft) in diameter. It uses 6 Raptor engines, three of which are optimized for use in outer space. The engines produce 14,700 kN (3,300,000 lb) of thrust. The vehicle’s payload bay is planned to measure 17 m (56 ft) tall and 8 m (26 ft) in diameter with an internal volume of 1,000 m3 (35,000 cu ft); slightly larger than the ISS’s pressurized volume. Starship has a total propellant capacity of 1,200 t (2,600,000 lb) across its main tanks and header tanks. According to Elon Musk in 2019, the header tanks are better insulated due to their position and are reserved for use to flip and land the spacecraft following reentry. A set of reaction control thrusters, which use the pressure in the fuel tank, control attitude while in space.