3 ms·
Really depends how much money you want to spend and if you're willing to wait a bit longer for Starship orbital refueling to be tested. We could build a more o
by jlawson 2y ago
Really depends how much money you want to spend and if you're willing to wait a bit longer for Starship orbital refueling to be tested.
We could build a more or less arbitrarily large rocket in orbit by adding more and more fuel. More fuel means more delta-V means the probe is faster.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago"Launch today" is a very undesirable constraint for this goal. All of the probes that have escaped made extensive use of gravitational slingshot effects, which are only available during favorable launch windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea... Long story short: they plan these out for decades at a time, and take your best shot when the planets align, literally.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 2y agoWe needed the slingshotting because until recently on-orbit construction was mostly a pipe-dream. If you can build larger ships in orbit, relatively cheaply, you can go a lot more direct, a lot faster.
- datameta 2y agoEven on-orbit refueling is a huge boon for orbital assist flexibility.
- wafflemaker 2y agoIt's ineffective, you need more stages. Tsiolkovsky's equation shows how much dV you get with a given wet : dry (empty) mass of a rocket stage. Very quickly it's becoming very inefficient. Unless you are talking about some untested rocket that dumps empty fuel tanks in pairs. (Like in the dV book by Daniel Suarez).