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Will starship make any difference in the speed of these probes or will it just allow much heavier probes to be launched?
by t1234s 2y ago
Will starship make any difference in the speed of these probes or will it just allow much heavier probes to be launched?
- tekla 2y agoA little, but mostly insignificant. The real practical benefit is that if Starship succeeds to be as reusable and rapidly launchable as claimed, its easier to line up launches with gravity assist windows as needed, and thats where you get the huge velocity increases
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoYes and yes. Starship offers about twice the delta-v and triple the mass capacity as Falcon Heavy. Capitalising on the former for a deep-space mission, however, would require sacrificing some reusable.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoGiven its relatively low cost, it would be entirely possible to use a non-reentry starship as a bus for an interplanetary probe with extra fuel capacity. They'd just have to strip down their lunar starship and possibly add segments for larger tankage.
- jccooper 2y agoStarship itself will not be a great deep space delivery vehicle, in the same way current disposable second stages are used. Too big and too... reusable. However, it'll make a great delivery system for some serious high-energy escape velocity "third" stages, rather like the Shuttle "Inertial Upper Stage" that delivered Magellan and Galileo and Ulysses.
- Laremere 2y agoWell, Starship is specifically designed to make it to Mars if refueled in LEO. So it could deliver monstrously large Mars rovers. If they're going for the outer planets, they could do as you suggest after the first burn using a refueled Starship. Either way you're sacrificing a Starship second stage (old, or better yet reduced mass version) to the gods of delta V.
- jessriedel 2y agoA re-fueled Starship will be able to deliver ~100 tons to the surface of Mars, to be compared with the heaviest existing rover that was slightly over 1 ton. Yes, it will take ~10 Starship flights to fully refuel one Mars-bound Starship, but the fully reusable design is supposed to ensure this can be done for relative cheap.
- jvanderbot 2y agoThe vision I have for NASA missions is to avoid these tiny one off probes and use starship to lift multiple boosters to orbit, assemble a server rack and multiple imagers, a radio thermal power source, and boost it to orbit around each outer planet (except perhaps Jupiter, too much radiation). It's just not the right business model to build "small" probes like this that trickle back imagery when we can be downloading the same imagery AND querying data that's sitting in situ to run analysis on a planet -local server of TB of real time signals. Imagine you see something interesting in one image, and just ask the server to find local similar things all over the planet from the imagery in storage. Instant frequency and geospatial analysis product without begging for observation time or (worse) a new mission. Oh and a kilometer scale telescope in orbit.
- Teever 2y agoI think that there will always be a desire for small probes, but you're right that one-offs aren't economical. The advantages of Starship is that with such a massive payload capacity it can carry many small probes and combined with a low cost per kg it will justify setting up assembly lines that churn out small probes by the thousands. We'll pepper the solar system with these probes and they'll act as nodes in a large interplanetary network relaying data between each other and larger, more powerful nodes as you describe. The nodes in a network are important and more powerful nodes are more desirable, but the network itself is a powerful thing that it greater than the sum of its parts. This combined with economies of scale will always justify more smaller satellites.
- gorgoiler 2y agoWith economics, I think we have to be careful when questioning the financial efficiency of organisations like NASA, Universities, research, and the like. Some of these things should be societal cost centers. The question for me therefore, based on your comment, is whether Europa Clipper’s expense can be justified because it is funding the current generation of custom space vehicle and mission experts, keeping alive their traditions and skills for the next generation. The alternative view is that it’s a waste of money to continuously support the careers of what are possibly the spaceship equivalents of wheelwrights, stable masters, and saddlers.
- mturmon 2y agoRelated to your question, but not responsive to the “speed” aspect: Here is a nice article from Ars [1] on the impact of starship on large space telescopes. This is focused on Webb successors (which in NASA fall under astrophysics, not planetary, like Clipper) not “planetary probes” per se, although a linked and more technical article [2] touches briefly on that. One coauthor of [2] is the chief scientist for astrophysics at JPL, so it’s not just idle speculation. The ability to launch an 8m telescope definitely has space mission designers interested. However, probe velocity itself is not addressed. [1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/astronomers-say-new-telescopes-should-take-advantage-of-starship-paradigm/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/astronomers-say-new-te... [2] https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/76/2/40/2869438/Accelerating-astrophysics-with-the-SpaceX https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/76/2/40/2869438/Ac...
- TrainedMonkey 2y agoStarship lets you trade money and mission complexity for time. A fully refueled Starship in LEO should have around 5km/s in an expendable configuration. A gravity assist from Earth or Mars typically provides 2-5km/s. Looking at the https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of_the_solar_system/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of... 5km/s from LEO is barely enough to reach Jupiter. Looking at the mission trajectory direct launch would shave off roughly 2 years from 5 year mission - https://europa.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/ https://europa.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/ You could also launch much-much heavier probe with a dedicated boost stage and / or electric propulsion...
- ANewFormation 2y agoThe largest probe ever launched afaik is Voyager 1, and it was less than a ton. Even 'massive' things like the James Webb telescope only weighs 7 tons. Starship is aiming for being able to launch 200+ tons. So stuff like this on a dedicated mission would have vastly more delta-v available but also be kind of silly. There's no reason we couldn't scale things up and just launch hundreds of probes at once all through the Solar System. Alternatively instead of launching probes we could look to start launching modular observation stations that could one day even house humans, or perhaps even grander ideas. Launching one off probes, rovers, and satellites is really something I think we should be aiming to move beyond, let alone on the ridiculous time intervals we operate on at present. We shouldn't still be making basic, yet revolutionary, discoveries on the Moon, more than half a century after we set foot on it.
- creer 2y agoSpeed is not necessarily the correct lever it might affect. A probe with much larger antenna, with much larger or multiple radioactive power sources, with much more solar panels, with much more onboard fuel, etc could be much more useful with the same speed.