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You need vastly different design parameters for Earth orbit, interplanetary and interstellar craft and masses corresponding to each. Starship is all about a lo
by quink 2y ago
You need vastly different design parameters for Earth orbit, interplanetary and interstellar craft and masses corresponding to each.
Starship is all about a lot of mass to Earth orbit. This is a little mass somewhere between interplanetary and interstellar design parameters. Yes, Starship could put it into Earth orbit, when expendable probably interplanetary, sure.
And it may well help launch it, but that’s where its relevance ends, it’s at the other end of the spectrum of what you would design for. For example, at this corner of the design space, chemical propellants aren’t a thing.
- golol 2y ago>And it may well help launch it, but that’s where its relevance ends. You can expand in parallel. If Starship works you can launch 100 spacecraft instead of 1, or in other words, you can expand your system by a factor of 100 "in parallel" and hence increase whatever you get from that small payload margin by a factor of 100. Besides that there are other approaches like laser array + photon sail which more directly benefit from mass to LEO.