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It's... not? There are no allowances in Starship design for long range trip. It could be used to kickstart building a vessel that could do it, by being useful l
by p_l 4y ago
It's... not? There are no allowances in Starship design for long range trip. It could be used to kickstart building a vessel that could do it, by being useful launch vehicle to ship materials, but that's it.
- Isinlor 4y agoStarship is literally contracted by NASA to land people on the Moon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS
- arethuza 4y agoIt appears to be designed to go from lunar orbit to the surface - not to take people to lunar orbit? Edit: I was referring to the Starship HLS variant linked to
- Isinlor 4y agoThis is lunar lander variant. They just adopted Starship to the NASA requirements. Starship is first and foremost designed to deliver people and/or 100T of cargo to Mars.
- deepdriver 4y agoIn theory it can do both. However, it is not yet crew-certified.
- Isinlor 4y agoSpaceX builds Mars Starship in their private capacity, so they don't have to certify it with NASA. It most likely never will be according to criteria from commercial crew program, because it does not have and will not have an escape system.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- p_l 4y agoI knew about lunar use, and distances for lunar trip are much shorter than distances for Martian one. Somehow I forgot that Musk claims they are going to Mars in Starship - thought it was too small for that, but a good chance of kickstarting the kind of industry you need to build one to take to Mars and back.
- Isinlor 4y agoStarship is at least 10x bigger than any current NASA plan of sending people to Mars. For HLS NASA requirement was capability of delivering 2T of cargo to the Moon. Starship offers 100T or more.
- deepdriver 4y agoStarship is specifically designed to fly to and land on Mars: https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/ https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/
- p_l 4y agoThat's... some chutzpah, especially combined with no mention of specific problems involved. But maybe for a very small crew it will work? That said, they could update the page, it's 2022 already and promising great things in the future year of 2020 is not a good look.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoMusk/SpaceX have been working on Mars for literally decades at this point, and are very cognizant of the incredible difficulties involved. Here's a primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_program
- p_l 4y agoIt might surprise you, but that doesn't make SpaceX's Martian program the longest one, or even in the running for that title. And while I do not want to besmirch SpaceX engineers working on it, the website is not a statement from them, it's a statement from PR machinery. Which holds similar weight as "FSD is next year" being told for 7 years by Tesla PR. If they manage it, congrats. If not, I still reserve the right to laugh at the PR machine (not at the engineers, they have a hard problem to solve that isn't helped by overpromising PR).
- me_me_me 4y agoIts not designed for crew to exit the ship once it lands on mars. I do not have high hopes in that design.