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The big idea with Starship, at least for missions going beyond LEO is to drop upper stages in LEO as fuel tanks and use them to fuel the "payload" Starship. In
by GuB-42 4y ago
The big idea with Starship, at least for missions going beyond LEO is to drop upper stages in LEO as fuel tanks and use them to fuel the "payload" Starship. In the Artemis mission, it is supposed to take astronauts from the Orion capsule, land them on the moon and back to Orion, with talks about a "gateway" space station. So Starship definitely follows the modular / orbital assembly principle.
The idea of purely modular launchers (like OTRAG) never really took of. Armadillo Aerospace tried to capitalize on that idea, but they never really went beyond John Carmack's hobby project. All attempts at anything but "extreme optimization" failed, including the other end of the spectrum with the humongous Sea Dragon. That's because of the so called "tyranny of the rocket equation" and considerations like the square-cube law.
- orbital-decay 4y agoWhat I meant is not things like OTRAG (which was an abomination indeed), but practical configurable launchers unified to the certain degree into a family. Think Delta IV, Atlas V, Angara, or even Falcon 9, which is the only surviving rocket from the family that was originally planned. The reason modularity of that kind wasn't especially successful isn't the tyranny of the rocket equation, but the economy. Turned out the launch market is too small to capitalize on fringe cases, and the added flexibility simply haven't outweighed the loss in efficiency. When the modularity was starting to pick up steam, most thought that the market will expand much faster, and few people expected Iridium to be a miserable failure, for example.