Today I came across an article which talked about what NASA chief said recently about SpaceX's Starship project. He said that SpaceX's plans regarding the Starship spacecraft are going to be orders of magnitude more difficult than anything NASA has done in its history.

That's quite true as the company wants Starship to be an inter-planetary vehicle, which is no joke. We have only ever gone to our natural satellite, the Moon which is much closer to us than any other planet, and so to make something capable of going to far off planets with humans in it, is certainly one of the biggest challenges.

But that is just the way Elon Musk rolls. He takes on problems that are very hard, often times that are even considered impossible to solve by experts in the same field and goes ahead and solves them anyways.

The latest one in the development story of the Starship, is the way it will be cooled, which is unlike anything that has been tried before in rocket ships.

Bleeding Water

To cool the outside of the Starship, SpaceX is planning to use a technique called transpiration cooling where a liquid material (water or fuel) will flow between the two layers of stainless steel that they are using to build the spacecraft.

Also, there will be micro-perforations on the outer layer of Starship, that would allow the liquid material to seep or "bleed" which would help cool it down. This would theoretically replace the use of ceramic tiles that need to be replenished on each flight and are costly.

If this technique is successful, then it would make things a lot more easier and cost friendly for rocket launches as they could just be refilled with the liquid material just before launches!

But NASA's chief said that he doubts this system would work as the company may face several problems using this technique. One of them could be the clogging of the micro-perforations with foreign objects, like "bird poop".

In any case, I think it is worth giving it a shot because sometimes the craziest of ideas work out and make life so much easier and our goals so much closer to completion.