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Which gives me great amusement about the current human spaceflight plan to land upright Starship on the moon, and lower astronauts from the top of what is effec
by sho_hn 2y ago
Which gives me great amusement about the current human spaceflight plan to land upright Starship on the moon, and lower astronauts from the top of what is effectively a tower-like 13-story building (52.1m without landing legs, at 9m tube width) using some kind of elevator solution. To put things into perspective, this is roughly the same height as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and with landing legs extended probably about the same width as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS#/media/File:HLS_Starship_rendering.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS#/media/File:HLS_S...
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-astronauts-test-spacex-elevator-concept-for-artemis-lunar-lander/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-astronauts-test-spac...
Sure, there's lots of details to consider, e.g. center of gravity, overall weight, maximum possible duration to hover and ability to accurately steer and pick your landing spot. But the inherent difficulty in "how do you not topple over" is definitely there, and it's clear the proposed Starship lander will have to outperform these IM landers significantly.
That said, if you want to scale out payload to the surface I guess you have to (which however eats into your center of gravity advantages from having lots of engines at the bottom, too).
- RandomBacon 2y ago> how do you not topple over Projectile grappling-hooks to embed into nearby ground then winch the line taught? Just have to make sure all are launched at the same time with force vectors that cancel out. Maybe even launch them before touchdown so it doesn't topple over during landing if one of the feet land on a random rock.
- itishappy 2y agoMy vote is for a large BattleBots style flipper that they flop their rover around with until it falls in their preferred orientation.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jimnotgym 2y agoJust don't land too close to where the house robots are...
- ForOldHack 2y agoCould you land a weeble? So it wobbles and does not fall down.
- xvector 2y agoI saw this episode of For All Mankind! It didn't seem to end well
- nick486 2y agowith enough energy(like starship would have), i suppose you could get out of an irrecoverable tipping over motion by just lighting the engines and trying again. Before you fall, obviously. "works in KSP"^TM
- johnyzee 2y agoIf they can control the angle of each leg with enough precision, that might be enough to compensate for (slightly) uneven terrain. I understand that the recently successful Blue Ghost has sensors to detect suitability of the landing spot, and used it to re-position twice while landing. Starship would probably need something like that, too.
- kristianp 2y agoAt least they're likely to do unmanned test landings until they successfully land upright. But it seems nobody followed the design of the appollo lander, except the Blue ghost which landed successfully last week.
- jimnotgym 2y agoI wonder what height you can safely jump from onto the moons surface?
- echoangle 2y agoProbably around 12 meters (40 feet or so?). That would be like falling 2 m (6 feet) on earth, which isn’t very safe but pretty doable. Maybe 8 meters to make it more safe? That’s based on impact speed.
- philistine 2y agoProbably less than that. Consider your suit needs to survive without a tear.
- jimnotgym 2y agoOh I guess the suit is going to prevent you doing a parcour roll!
- hatthew 2y agohey the leaning tower of pisa is still standing, clearly this precedent means that starship HLS will be stable
- iJohnDoe 2y agoStarship is simply due to the desire to have a Sci-Fi looking ship land on a planet. It’s not being done for practical reasons. It’s being done because it looks cool. To learn more about the strategy for landing on the moon, listen to this audiobook. Extremely good. The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon