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Starship has a real potential to be accelerated beyond the schedule given because of the return to the moon. NASA gave SpaceX a lump of cash a couple of months
by mabbo 6y ago
Starship has a real potential to be accelerated beyond the schedule given because of the return to the moon.
NASA gave SpaceX a lump of cash a couple of months ago to fully spec out a Moon-lander variant of Starship, along with two other companies. It's outlandishly large compared to its competitors, but SpaceX has this knack for doing things cheaply.
Imagine what happens if NASA looks at all three plans and says "They're all equal in terms of meeting our goals, except that Starship has many times the payload capacity and is cheaper than the others". Add in SpaceX's pretty good record for success, and it could make the decision interesting.
If they are selected, suddenly there would be a lot more money in SpaceX's hands dedicated to developing Starship even faster. They could blow up 2 prototypes per month instead of just 1.
- loceng 6y agoHis stated goal is to create to start mass producing Starships, he personally wants 1,000 of them with relaunch time of 1 hour for each vehicle, I believe allowing 2-3 launches per vehicle per day.
- thePunisher 6y agoI don't see Starship landing on the Moon. It's just too big and unwieldy and will likely topple upon touchdown.
- dfee 6y agoAre you an aerospace engineer? Because the credibility of your comment hinges on that.
- thePunisher 6y agoNo, but a friend of mine is and he said exactly the same thing.
- LolWolf 6y agoHey, Kerbal Space Program is a perfectly valid alternative to a degree in Aerospace engineering! EDIT: Obviously kidding.
- beckingz 6y agoResume: -Designed and simulated entire spacecraft and rocket system for hypothetical moon landing. -Simulated thousands of spacecraft lithobraking events to assess spacecraft durability
- stcredzero 6y agoLithobraking might well become viable with some combination of tethers and electromagnetic accelerators to mediate.
- m4rtink 6y agoThe lunar lander variant they submitted to NASA has terminal landing thrusters at about >half of it's height (so about >25 meters high) for fine guidance during last stages of landing & to reduce the amount of dust and rocks sent flying by the rocket exhaust when landing on an unprepared spot. Can be seen on picture in this article: https://spacenews.com/nasa-evaluation-sees-spacex-lunar-lander-as-innovative-but-risky/ https://spacenews.com/nasa-evaluation-sees-spacex-lunar-land...
- valuearb 6y agoLots of it’s weight is in its butt. It will land fine.
- thePunisher 6y agoNot really. The passenger and cargo area are on top and the fuel tanks are at the bottom, which will be mostly empty after landing. IIRC Starship has a cargo capacity of 100 metric tons, all of it topside. The Raptor engines at the bottom will counterbalance this somewhat but it will still be top-heavy.
- valuearb 6y agoThat’s my point. Those Raptors are heavy.
- thePunisher 6y agoNot that heavy. A Raptor weighs 1500kg (1.5 metric tons) so 6 of them makes 9 metric tons while the weight at the top of Starship should be almost 100 tons.
- m4rtink 6y agoIIRC at least in some iterations starship has cargo pots at the bottom inside the "skirt" next to/between the vacuum optimized outer engines. That could help weight distribution & makes the pods easily acessible once you drop them to the surface post landing.
- barkingcat 6y agoGravity differences will make things very different from an intuition point of view.
- mabbo 6y agoFortunately, NASA does. That's why they accepted SpaceX's proposal bid to design a full version.
- macintux 6y agoTo me it’s the huge distance astronauts would have to travel from the ship to the surface that seems like a serious demerit.
- jfoster 6y agoGiven the low gravity, could they abseil down and just climb back up?
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoLadders are hard. Proposal is elevator
- thePunisher 6y agoAnd what if the lift fails? How are they gonna climb up 40 meters with a huge and bulky Moon suit? It would be bummer if you had to die on the Moon because you couldn't climb back up into your spaceship.
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoThe proposal has two separate crew access airlocks with their own lifts, two separate cargo cranes that can be used in an emergency, and presumably some rope on board that the crew remaining in the vehicle can jury-rig to drag the EVA team up if necessary. The sheer scale of Starship is stupefying. If it ever gets there, it will in one go transport tens of times the payload of every previous lunar mission put together. The scale of what it can do will allow it to be quite a bit less efficient about things than everything else has to be, and so it can spend some mass on redundancy of important systems.
- eT8AZithxooKei6 6y agoOr a crane? https://comicpunch.net/reader/mangas/The%20Adventures%20Of%20Tintin/The%20Adventures%20Of%20Tintin%20Explorers%20On%20The%20Moon/cw031.jpg https://comicpunch.net/reader/mangas/The%20Adventures%20Of%2... https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/I91epbDCEioqEofHg7FKdYVNGAq_MzVuGg6ABcR8oKSPIv-ZIKpY57fFc3a1P8bD8LsXkr4R_DE_NZxQeCz8GTosNhoBqq9yXWCGSYpA15Mf-1GLjNfesUYR6N2REKA_UA https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/I91epbDCEioqEofHg7FK...
- rtsil 6y agoThat's actually a good remark. Dr. Zubrin argues that a full-sized version of Starship cannot land on the Moon unless it uses a landing pad, as it would create a large crater [1] and thus topple, and would also blow up the lunar rocks and dust in orbit [2], which would endanger any object orbiting the Moon (and Lunar dust is also quite corrosive). One can speculate that's one of the reasons why the NASA proposal uses a mini-starship version. [1] https://spacenews.com/op-ed-toward-a-coherent-artemis-plan/ https://spacenews.com/op-ed-toward-a-coherent-artemis-plan/ [2] https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459-dr.-robert-zubrin https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459...
- kanox 6y agoSpaceX already offered a solution: separate thrusters a few dozen meters off the ground. Current plan is for Raptors to be off for landing. It's disappointing that Zubrin didn't mention that.
- CarVac 6y agoZubrin has a recurring tendency to ignore things that don't support what he plans to say.
- WorldMaker 6y ago> Imagine what happens if NASA looks at all three plans and says "They're all equal in terms of meeting our goals, except that Starship has many times the payload capacity and is cheaper than the others". Isn't the more likely hypothetical outcome in that case that all three plans arrive on a similar timeframe regardless of how well SpaceX can underbid simply: "The Congressmen from Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas have all agreed to disqualify SpaceX's bid so that the SLS can move forward unopposed."?
- traes 6y agoSLS is not in competition with Starship, as this post[0] from Everyday Astronaut front page nicely outlines. [0] https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/ https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/
- WorldMaker 6y agoThanks for the article, a lot of interesting details. They definitely are not in competition today, and certainly not in competition technically where they are taking very different approaches and currently have very different end goals. I was responding to the hypothetical situation of the above poster where if Starship comes in under budget and better specced than SLS in the Artemis timeframe for Moon mission lunar lander designs and the SLS teams came in with one over budget (and Sierra Nevada does whatever they do probably somewhere in the middle) ["all three plans"], the SLS is still likely to win in the political competition (for so very many reasons including those for why the SLS is nicknamed the "Senate Launch System"). Keep in mind the whole point of the Artemis "land a person on the moon again in our lifetimes" is a political gambit to curry favor with US taxpayers that their "money is well spent" with a pat on the back that NASA and probably (and maybe even especially) that the SLS have been useful uses of taxpayer money. (Even if NASA has done plenty of things between the last moon landing and today, and even if NASA is just as equally involved in the commercial space projects, Artemis and SLS are as much political symbols as space projects.)
- chasd00 6y agoI really want to see the Starship full stack launch but can't Falcon Heavy get to the moon now? I mentioned in a thread a couple months ago that they could probably strap the Blue Origin lander to the top of FH and call it done. EDIT: oh yeah, and what is it with all the exploding starships? Are the interns in charge of testing or something? / to the interns on HN, only kidding. you could probably do it better than us old folks anyway hah
- Robotbeat 6y agoThe Blue Origin lander is pretty big and would need to be launched in pieces. The Dynetics lander, on the other hand, is much smaller and could definitely fit in Falcon Heavy with the extended fairing (that SpaceX is already developing for Air Force payloads). I'm a big fan of the Dynetics lander. It's small for its capability and just a single stage (plus drop tanks) so should have low development and build costs. Video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFBeVQ3STZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFBeVQ3STZ0
- twic 6y agoYou want to get all the exploding done before you launch the rocket with crew aboard. Saturn V could lift 140 tonnes to low earth orbit. Falcon Heavy can lift 54 tonnes to low earth orbit. I think that means it could get a mission to the moon as long as it weighed 38% of what Apollo did. That doesn't sound like a fun trip. Unless you assemble the moon ship in earth orbit first. Falcon Heavy can launch Orion on its own, or the European Service Module that it requires. I imagine it could launch a lunar lander too. You would also need a booster to send the combination to the moon - the Saturn final stage that did that weighed 100 tonnes, twice what Falcon Heavy can launch. So, maybe you launch an empty booster, and send up a couple of tankers to fuel it on orbit? It's a lot of launches, and a lot of work to do in orbit. That's not impossible (and is cool as hell), but there would be a lot of work to do to make it possible.
- inetknght 6y ago> Saturn V could lift 140 tonnes to low earth orbit. Falcon Heavy can lift 54 tonnes to low earth orbit. I think that means it could get a mission to the moon as long as it weighed 38% of what Apollo did. That doesn't sound like a fun trip. While I haven't yet seen anything concrete, SpaceX's definitely wants to have orbital refueling. If I recall, that's actually one of SpaceX's requirements for Starship. Orbital refueling would mean that lift capacity to LEO doesn't translate directly the range beyond LEO.