3 ms·

Still need to launch from either Guyana or Florida though, so that doesn't solve anything unless you do the integration with the final stage in the Atacama and

Still need to launch from either Guyana or Florida though, so that doesn't solve anything unless you do the integration with the final stage in the Atacama and ship the entire assembled rocket somewhere.

bee_rider 3y ago
I wonder if this is actually a good application for orbital manufacturing. Kidding. Kinda…
perihelions 3y ago
You could do a Starship* hop from Chile to Guyana, and there transfer it to the ESA's launch vehicle. *(Meaning the upper stage by itself, once it has lunar lander legs).
- throwway120385 3y ago
  Are you saying ESA should have waited for this to be technically possible? Or that it is technically possible now and ESA should have looked in to this option?
  - perihelions 3y ago
    It's a speculative, blue-sky idea—as is the context discussion that's proposing to assemble space satellites in a remote desert for optimization reasons. It's not technically implausible. Starship (upper-stage only) in principle has a very long hop range—it's almost an SSTO by itself [0]. In principle it could also support landing on non-spaceport facilities like deserts—after all it's explicitly designed for landing on the moon, in accordance with the NASA Artemis contract. Would SpaceX be thinking about trying long-range hops on Earth, as a testing mechanism? I'm not sure it'd be completely crazy to consider that. Musk has extensively talked about the concept of Starship (full stack) as city-to-city passenger transport [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-transport-earth-travel https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex...