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Unless some plans have drastically changed, the idea with Starship is to launch a lot from many locations on Earth. Recent reports mention Gwynne Shotwell desc
by avmich 3y ago
Unless some plans have drastically changed, the idea with Starship is to launch a lot from many locations on Earth.
Recent reports mention Gwynne Shotwell describing the factory being built at Starbase as capable of producing around 3 Starships per week. If such a factory works for a year (which doesn't look like a long time for a factory) that's ~150 Starships. 150 Starships each have a chance to launch about twice a year if the launches are daily.
Surely numbers should be modified, some of them don't look right. First, we are probably going to have (way) more than 150 Starships. Second, a Starship is likely going to fly (way) more than twice a year. It's not a Space Shuttle after all. Next, what about those plans - Moon flights, which need refueling on low Earth orbit; Mars flights which need the same; all other flights - like orbital stations, sending probes to planets, space telescopes; finally, business class-like suborbital hops for passengers on Earth?
All of that requires a lot of places to launch Starships. Unless some plans drastically scaled down, it seems like we'll have to see an industry for launchpads growing and prospering in the near future.
- Beached 3y agowhat is more likely to happen is that they have 15x Launches for one mission, due to all the refueling needs. all these launches happen in rapid iteration from one to 3 pads over 1, 2 or 3 days. the. everything sits silent for a few weeks to a month. repeat 10 to 20 times a year.
- Valgrim 3y agoAs a satellite launcher, Starship would be incredibly cheap on shared payloads, and refueling would not be necessary there.
- darklycan51 3y agoAnd how would that work exactly? they had to redesign the entire launchpad just to hopefully be able to sustain starship. Let's say you go down in london (originally they thought basically a generic spacesport would let you, which is no longer the case). You'd need their entire boca chica infrastructure to fly that again...
- grecy 3y agoI expect once they finish iterating on the boca launch site and infrastructure and it works perfectly, they will then have their template they can duplicate anywhere in the world. Like starship itself, it will be complex, but easy to mass produce
- BurningFrog 3y agoI assume a Starship could be shipped on a ship if need be?
- Valgrim 3y agoOr the assembly line could be in a ship itself
- avmich 3y agoYes, suborbital passenger transportation looks least clear now :) . Maybe the Boca Chica launchpad will get modified/improved to be more compact. It's still at early stages of design/use, so maybe significant improvements could be added. Particularly given that the last redesign took less than half a year. E.g., a wall around the pad, say, with diameter of ~100 meters and a significant height, would likely protect environment from steam, gas, particles and noise to some degree. So the question with the word "exactly" doesn't have answer right now.
- darklycan51 3y agoYeah but what do you do about the 33 engines that literally blasted the floor off lol
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> what do you do about the 33 engines that literally blasted the floor off Worry about it when that’s the priority problem. Tackling that now is like designing blast pads before you have commercial jet liners.