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Here's a fun thought, how many Starship launches would it take to put the equivalent mass of the ISS up in the same orbit?
by bane 3y ago
Here's a fun thought, how many Starship launches would it take to put the equivalent mass of the ISS up in the same orbit?
- DarmokJalad1701 3y agoThe ISS weighs ~420 metric tons. That is 2-3 expendable launches or 3-4 reusable ones.
- GeoAtreides 3y agoJesus Christ, that really puts it into perspective what a game changer starship is
- bane 3y agoNow do the same calculation in units of hubble space telescope and james webb space telescope masses. Then look at expected reusable launch cost and figure out how many HSTs or JWSTs we could have put in orbit for the same cost.
- 93po 3y agoJWST would also be incredibly less expensive if it didn't have to do the very complex folding required by smaller rockets
- Retric 3y agoJWST would still have been an extremely novel and therefore expensive on Spaceship. We just don't build anything that uses that kind of sun shield or those sensors etc and everything needs to work on one shot, thus serious engineering effort.
- Teever 3y agoWith Starship flights it should be the right combination of cheap enough, frequent enough, and big enough to enable whole new paradigms of construction in space. We'll be able to design modular space telescopes that benefit from economies of scale, so that we'll be shipping up the sun shield in separate pieces anyways so if any particular one is lost that's okay we'll have an assembly line to produce more.
- Retric 3y agoLaunching several doesn't solve the issue of needing a design and construction that actually works. For something nobody has ever built before and we can't really test in zero g without launching etc. Unfolding the heat shield was a relatively minor design issue compared to say the instruments, we just had less ability to actually test it on the ground.
- birdman3131 3y agoHow much larger could we have made it still doing the folding on starship?
- 93po 3y agoI have no idea. Ariane 5 rocket has payload dimensions of 15x50 feet. Starship is 26x56ft. The unfolded mirror is 21 feet across, so if you increased that by 73%, then 36 feet. This is all probably really unfounded assumptions The benefit of starship here is probably being able to massively reduce the expense and risk of future JWST duplicates that don't need to fold. Also in the launch cost, which was $1 billion for Ariane 5 whereas Starship would be in the tens of millions.
- Shawnj2 3y agoLaunching JWST on Starship would still be incredibly expensive because JWST is at the Lagrange point on the other side of the moon and 1 starship needs like 30 other starships to fuel it to get there
- 93po 3y agoHow do you explain how the Ariane 5 used for the JWST, with a mass to GTO half that of Starship, was able to position the JWST without 60 launches?
- Shawnj2 3y agoSimple, it’s designed to launch a payload into lunar orbit and starship isn’t. To move something using starship into lunar orbit you need to move an entire starship there while the Ariane 5 is designed to do it in 1 launch at the expense of much less payload capacity and no reusability.
- 93po 3y agoI still don't follow. The Ariane 5 launched the JWST with enough fuel to get where it's needed. Starship can launch the exact same payload, plus twice the entire weight in extra fuel. Starship also offers no-reusability launch options for stuff just like this.
- danw1979 3y agoNot just the capacity per launch but the cost per launch also.
- trailynx 3y agofor comparison, building the ISS took 40 assembly flights [0] (36 of them from the Space Shuttle) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_the_International_Space_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_the_Internationa...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoHow many launches are required to land on the Moon?
- DarmokJalad1701 3y agoDepends on what lunar lander hardware is being used. If we were using Apollo hardware: Apollo LM: 16 metric tons (landing about 5 tons on the moon) Apollo CSM: 29 metric tons The third stage of the Saturn V, called the S-IVB, (which was used for the trans-lunar injection burn) weighed 123 tons - however this was also used to get into the initial orbit. Starship can launch 150 tons to LEO in reusable mode or ~200 mt when expended. The Saturn V was able to launch 141 tons to LEO. So it should theoretically be possible for Starship to launch an LM+CSM stack with an S-IVB with enough fuel for a trans-lunar injection burn. Then fly the rest of the mission as in Apollo. Or we can refuel the Starship a few times in LEO using a bunch of re-usable flights and land 100 tons of payload on the lunar surface. The latter is probably cheaper and simpler at this point.
- GuB-42 3y agoAccording to this: https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=Df6Eq9uq6IJCApUs&t=1730 https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=Df6Eq9uq6IJCApUs&t=1730 Six... eight... more like twelve... at least 15
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]