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Starship was designed from the very beginning to land humans on Mars and it is correctly sized for that. It's apples-and-oranges to compare its design to Apollo
by perihelions 1y ago
Starship was designed from the very beginning to land humans on Mars and it is correctly sized for that. It's apples-and-oranges to compare its design to Apollo.
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.
- arghwhat 1y ago> Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing. Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
- hliyan 1y agoI completely forgot about this. Current aerodynamics and heat shielding are optimized for Earth reentry. They may have to significantly rethink the design for Mars. What they land on Mars will likely be very different from what we see today.
- rtkwe 1y agoEven if it does go to Mars there are some major warts on the design. When you land you're 35-40 meters or so up in the air so there's a whole other elevator assembly needed just to get people out of the rocket to the ground.
- ceejayoz 1y agoWe've been hoisting people and cargo up/down with pulleys and cables for thousands of years. This seems like the smallest obstacle Starship has to face.
- pennomi 1y agoWe’ve been opening and closing doors for even longer and yet it has still posed a challenge for SpaceX when dealing with the payload door on Starship. Space makes even trivial things hard.
- ceejayoz 1y agoSure. But they gotta fix the door, either way. Winching stuff out of said open door seems like a much, much easier task.
- rtkwe 1y agoThe satellite door is completely different from what they'll need for MarsShip, that's even larger and has to function as an airlock. None of what they're trying to do now matters for the Mars door.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThat's a lot of certainty for something that hasn't even been designed yet. The outside door needn't be part of the airlock. It's certainly big enough to have an internal airlock leading to depressurized internal space. The things that make a door that tests fine on Earth break in orbit are likely to be things that need fixing for a similar door on Mars. They won't be all the same challenges, but some will absolutely be shared.
- rtkwe 1y agoOn another planet as their only way on or off of the spacecraft is a whole different level of risk.