5 ms·
Anywhere on the globe in less than an hour... plus months of planning and days of preparing the launch vehicle. How fast can one "scramble" a Starship off the
by luma 6y ago
Anywhere on the globe in less than an hour... plus months of planning and days of preparing the launch vehicle. How fast can one "scramble" a Starship off the ground?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoI assume fast turn around times from the Boca Chica (Texas) spaceport. Pick whichever Starship SN is refreshed and ready to go. Less Space Shuttle, more Southwest Airlines. Vehicles on the ground are vehicles not generating revenue.
- fastball 6y agoProblem is you kinda need a spaceport at the destination so that the starship can get back to you.
- rlt 6y agoYou might be able to have a hub and spoke model, where the Starship drops off its cargo then hops back to a hub for stacking on another Super Heavy.
- ben_w 6y agoGiven the drone ship landings of the Falcon first stages, I wonder: could you land a Starship on a US aircraft carrier? And the obvious next question: given Musk is happy to take ship names from pop culture and sci-fi, might he name one of the Starship vehicles “Enterprise”, and could the Starship Enterprise land on the USS Enterprise (CVN-80)?
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- rlt 6y agoLess than one hour turnaround. Three flights per day per Starship. According to Elon (who can be admittedly optimistic): https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50346.0 https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50346.0
- mikewarot 6y agoThe cost is likely to fall in the 1%-3% range of that of a C-17. The War Department could buy 100-200 of them for the cost of 2 C-17 Globemaster IIIs. I would be interested to see if some form of portable, quickly constructed landing pad could be deployed, much like the mats used as runways during WWII.
- wmf 6y agoCost per what? Per flight?
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- mikewarot 6y agoTo go 1/2 way around the world, at 590 mph is 21+ hours. Cost per hour, according to https://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/costly-flight-hours/ https://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/costly-flight-hours/ is $23.811 So, the one way cost to get a C-17 full of cargo anywhere in the world is about $500,000 1 Million round trip. I had the cost wrong, I thought it was per vehicle, it's per launch... $2,000,000. If it could fly back, it's only $4,000,000 per round trip.... just 4 times the cost of a C-17 delivery and return.
- modeless 6y agoGeez, I had no idea C-17s cost $200 million each. That's crazy.
- ben_w 6y agoDo they need a landing pad? They have to be capable of landing on unimproved martian or lunar rock, with enough spare capacity for either the fuel for a return flight (from the moon) or a local fuel generator (from Mars).
- m4rtink 6y agoThat should work, but it will likely not be able to safely launch again even if you managed to refuel it. The engine power needed to launch in Earth gravity, even with a small hop fuel load might be too much for engines so close to the ground & with thick atmosphere preventing the exhaust from dissipating.
- neaanopri 6y agoUS Military is used to training recruits to use high tech equipment, and had the pockets to buy hardware to sit around "just in case"