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Gateway makes heaps of sense in a reusable spacecraft future. You have vehicles specialised for certain tasks such as ferrying crew from Earth to Lunar orbit an
by manicdee 6y ago
Gateway makes heaps of sense in a reusable spacecraft future. You have vehicles specialised for certain tasks such as ferrying crew from Earth to Lunar orbit and back, and specialised vehicles for landing crew and cargo on the surface.
Starship is trying to be launch vehicle, cruise stage, landing/ascent vehicle and reentry vehicle all in one and has to make huge sacrifices in terms of payload capacity and delta-v to achieve that.
Starship can land on the Moon and return, but it needs a fleet of tankers to refuel it for each trip. A specialised crew transfer vessel (no heat shield, no aero surfaces, no landing legs) would be able to head directly from LEO to LLO and transfer crew without having to be refuelled in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth first. Using Starship to get from Earth to the Moon is like using a Ram 3500 to pick up groceries from the corner store.
- skissane 6y ago> Starship can land on the Moon and return, but it needs a fleet of tankers to refuel it for each trip. A specialised crew transfer vessel (no heat shield, no aero surfaces, no landing legs) would be able to head directly from LEO to LLO and transfer crew without having to be refuelled in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth first SpaceX is already talking about a few different variants of Starship (Crew, Cargo, Tanker, Lunar Landing). There's no reason why they couldn't come up with a special "Lunar Transfer Starship" variant to meet the use case you describe
- manicdee 6y agoI'm sure they will, especially if they ever get to research nuclear thermal propulsion. For the meantime that Lunar transfer ship is Orion with a small boost stage.