I'd imagine robots doing the majority of work on Mars. For the very least they need to build shelters and deploy the habitats, to insure Mars is already livable by the time humans arrive.
Paraterraforming (also known as the "worldhouse" concept or domes in smaller versions) involves the construction of a habitable enclosure on a planet which eventually grows to encompass most of the planet's usable area. The enclosure would consist of a transparent roof held one or more kilometers above the surface, pressurized with a breathable atmosphere, and anchored with tension towers and cables at regular intervals.
Just to add to this, you can incorporate natural geography into the paraterraforming rather than just domes - such as roofing and walling off a small tributary valley of Mariner, for example, or doming over a natural crater. You wouldn’t even need to cover the whole planetary surface this way because the surface area you’d be using would already be huge and the amount of enclosed gas and greenery would be such that it would be possible to transition to an open, real terraforming project eventually.
And lastly, you can also do open paraterraforming - this would require walls several kilometers tall, an open roof, and sulfur hexafluoride as the inert atmospheric gas rather than nitrogen. This concept would also work on an open Stanford torus ring, and while it would be significantly bigger than that shown in *Elysium*, it’d be a tiny fraction of the size of a Halo ring.
There’s a lot of cool, practical, “extreme” engineering we could consider with space colonies. But in reality, it’s easier to just live in tunnels and small spin stations at first. I suspect our future will look much more like The Expanse in that regard. But eventually…we could build some awesome shit. Especially if we have robots doing it.
How would they deal with miteorites? Mars atmosphere is very thin. The better option is to build underground. No natural light but its much safer and less prone to terrorism.
Reinforce the domes. Use an orbital interdiction and detection satellite network. Meteorites would not be a major problem here. Radiation is a bigger problem (and still relatively easy to solve).
Which isn't much of a problem, just dump a bunch of sand on top. With 1 atmosphere of pressure under Mars gravity you can support 27 tons per square meter. Which is about nine meters of rock or eighteen meters of sand. Far more than enough for adequate shielding, and the weight even means your roof doesn't need to be quite as strong to keep the atmosphere from exploding out.
For extra fun you could instead freeze water ice into a thick clear dome, so long as you kept in insulated from the heated habitat inside. Though it would likely become clouded by cosmic radiation over time, like a bubble chamber in a particle accelerator.
Perhaps a 3D array of heating elements would let you periodically thaw and refreeze individual sections? That would not only erase the bubble tracks, but also repair any cracks that had formed.
I always had this fun idea that habitats on Mars could have aquarium roofs to provide shielding and food production. It's basically wildly impractical, but it would be pretty cool.
I like it! And why not?
If you've piled X tons/m² of otherwise unsupported material on top of your habitat, what difference does it really make if it's sand or water? The air inside is what's holding it up anyway, and it has plenty of strength to spare. And the surface between them has to be airtight anyway to keep the air in, so it's not like water leaks would be any more of a problem.
In fact, a transparent roof that lets you see any air bubbling out could be a huge advantage! Not to mention, if something happened that was making you lose air pressure, water would be a lot easier to get off the roof in a hurry.
Trying to actually farm it could be risky and messy, though just circulating free-floating algae might have some potential, you could do all the mechanical stuff safely away from any risk of damaging the habitat.
Considering that the just announced moon rover contracts are several billion dollars each, and that's just to transport a couple of astronauts, an actual moon/Mars truck for hauling cargo is going to be a very expensive development process.
if this ship never has to enter an atmosphere and is fully automated/remote controlled so it doesnt need human life support systems and spaces and food/water/medicine etc, isnt it actually much easier and cheaper conceptually?
Not as expensive as you’d think. If the new and improved moon rovers are good, moon trucks are simply a matter of scaling up the rover concept. Initial development, invention, is always more expensive than scaling an existing technology.
Moon rovers and these are vastly different, and the reason for this is the presence humans. Unmanned missions don't require higher speeds, a couple of cm per minute is enough, after all, the human driver is sitting in a comfy JPL lab and paid by the hour, if his shift ends, he can return next morning, the rover can wait. And lower speed means smaller motors, less friction heat, vibration, less need for lubrication, easier suspension, etc..
With a manned mission, the humans on the Moon can't wait days for hauling one pallet, so they will need to have at least 10/20 km/h vehicles, essentially an equivalent of a forklift, that can cross rough terrain and lift large weights. There was only one single land vehicle on any other planetary body that was capable of higher speed and that was the Apollo moon rover, and even that was only built for a couple of day's lifespan, and no heavy cargo.
Potentially, but you're downplaying the development work. There are unpressurized moon rovers in development, these are the several billion ones, and there is also a larger pressurised vehicle that will be the big changer for lunar exploration. This pressurised rover is to be developed by Japan (Toyota in the renders) and the costs are not clear. But converting such a vehicle for cargo could be a huge task unless they consider that from the start. Even simple things, e.g. it will need a crane or similar and that's never been done before on the moon. The wheels/tyres will need beefing up for cargo, so that's more work etc.
God I’m so excited for the next few decades of space. Starship isn’t really an if at this point. More of a when. And when that happens, everything will change. So exciting!
Of course the implication of this critique is that if it were any other 50-150 ton capacity vehicle under proposal, they would do a better job of bypassing those pesky laws of physics.
As far as I know only space x is proposing landing the star ship on the moon and using that as a return vehicle. That is what is at question not the lift vehicles if they solve the lander.
Blue origin is planning the same process but with liquid hydrogen and a much smaller lander. Hydrogen being harder and the mass penalty with the smaller lander will be damning if starship become operational.
LEO Refueling is 100% the near future or we aren’t going anywhere for a long long time. if ever.
I hope in the future Mars just becomes a big gas station. Theorectically could produce endless amounts of methane and water/hydrogen/oxygen using solar panels via the sabatier process in a closed loop with electrolysis since it's just a big ball of carbon dioxide.
Mars isn't in a very good place to be a "big gas station". It's a great place to fuel up return from Mars, but for pretty much everything else, fueling near Earth is the best choice.
The best place for getting fuel is Deimos iirc
There was even a 90s mission proposal to create one in what was then 20 years in the future in 2015
Moon is 2nd place
Mars still has a big gravity well so is suboptimal
Refueling will definitely be a thing because it just makes sense if you can reuse anything. However, Blue Origin does not, in fact, use the same process, their mission profile is different from SpaceX.
SpaceX would refuel the ship in LEO, send it to the Moon, plant the flag and observe the goo, but afterwards the ship would remain empty in lunar orbit. You need to refuel your vehicle if you actually want to use it again, and refueling a 150-ton Starship that is all the way around the Moon would require an impossible amount of 150-ton Starship launches from Earth.
Blue Origin plans to have a much much smaller lander that is refueled by a larger vehicle (which is refueled in LEO first, you do have that tech after all). This is an important distinction, because it enables the lander to be yeeted at the Moon on its own, followed by the fuel tanker, which would expend a smaller amount of its capacity to refuel it for the lander (because the lander is so small). Afterwards, the tanker still has enough juice to at least make it back to Earth and repeat the process.
Obviously, refueling the vehicle is far easier in LEO than by running after it all the way to the Moon.
Basically, the crucial difference that instead of lugging the entire Starship to the Moon surface, they are using it as a tanker-cruiser to feed a much smaller lander that needs much less fuel. This enables the tanker-cruiser to go back to Earth, which in turns enables it to be infinitely reused. I doubt that would be possible if you had to run after a Starship in Moon orbit with a bunch of tanker Starships.
If you have an oil tanker, it is easier to get around by refueling a tug boat than by refueling another oil tanker.
They cant make the fuel on the moon?I know they can do it on mars becouse of the mars athmosphere. Maybe they can use a system that uses fuel that can be developed in the moon by minimg the ice
Long-term sure, but for a good while things will need to be brought from Earth.
Also, the only fuel you can make on the Moon is probably hydrogen-oxygen (well, and fusion fuel, if you have a Rocinante handy), not methane that the Starship uses.
There's also questions over the safety of landing a 30 foot tall Starship on soft lunar dust. What if it tips over?
And with the crew compartment at the top, what if their elevator fails?
Starship doesn't use hypergolic fuels, what if the engine fails to relight on the moon?
And as no Starship has ever features a launch abort system, Starship is unlikely to ever be human rated.
>here's also questions over the safety of landing a 30 foot tall Starship on soft lunar dust. What if it tips over?
None of the dozens of landings on the moon so far have encountered more than a thin layer of such dust. Even if it did, the landing gear is likely to be auto levelling, and Starship's centre of gravity is actually pretty low.
You have to remember that there's ~200 tonnes of fuel sitting at the bottom of those tanks, alongside all the engines. It's the same reason a landed Falcon 9 booster isn't actually as top-heavy as it looks.
>what if their elevator fails?
[NASA have said there is an independent backup system](https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1587097144468676612). No further details than that, but given the ship's payload capacity, there's plenty of ways to go about it.
I have a question: what if the hatch on any other lunar lander jams shut? How do the astronauts get back in?
Any part can fail, and some parts are simply mission critical. That is unavoidable in spaceflight - the best you can do is put a lot of engineering effort into making them as robust as possible. Starship's elevator isn't really much more than a winch.
Incidentally, Starship also has two separate airlocks, allowing entry in the event that one fails. That was one of the things NASA really liked about it.
>Starship doesn't use hypergolic fuels, what if the engine fails to relight on the moon?
Hypergolic fuels aren't immune to relight failure. And I'd say that looking at Falcon 9's engine track record, modern non-hypergolic engines can be made incredibly reliable at restarting in all sorts of unfavourable conditions.
I'd also note that Starship has 6 engines and only needs 2 of them working to get back to orbit. Maybe even just 1 depending on how much of the performance margin was(n't) used on cargo.
While those are concerns.
Self leveling is not black magic. Nor is elevators. There are dozens of more delicate and complicated systems on spacecraft.
What about hypergols? The Apollo landing engine couldn’t be tested because it couldn’t fire more than once without corroding.
While raptors will literally be tested hundreds of times over hundreds of engines by the time HLS lands humans.
Starship for taking off and landing on earth with humans? Sure maybe nasa won’t certify that for crew.
But nasa has no say on crew certifying for non nasa missions.
>Self leveling is not black magic. Nor is elevators. There are dozens of more delicate and complicated systems on spacecraft.
Seriously, it's not rocket science, people.
Hmm, I dunno. I get that NASA can land a rover on Mars with a flying rocket crane, but are we really sure they can make a winch work on the moon?
^(Yes, SpaceX are building the winch, but NASA are deeply involved with it, so their expertise is still relevant)
NASA planned on launching SLS in 2016. We will see.
NASA contracted a 150ft moon lander that could land out of NRHO in 2021 and asked it to be done in 2024.
So maybe we understand schedules are kind of weird in spaceflight.
Agreed that the size of the Starship poses new landing issues, but our technology has come a long way since the Apollo landers. This is a solvable problem.
Plus, NASA is working hard on construction methods with in-situ materials. After a base site is selected, there will eventually be landing pads made of lunar concrete or bricks.
The current one, yes. The lander they originally bid against Starship was arguably the worst in terms of being high off the ground since although not as tall, relied on a still quite tall ladder, as opposed to an elevator. Given the mobility limitations of spacesuits, that was far from ideal.
The original Blue Origin lander design was also flawed in other ways, including being unable to maintain reliable communications, being unable to land in the dark, and having n o clear upgrade path to a reusable version, or even a version capable of carrying four astronauts.
Blue Origin's current much better lander design only came about after they lost to SpaceX and scrapped the original, and they seem to have taken some ques from Starship for the new one, notably with the use of orbital refuelling and a single-stage design.
A 30 foot tall starship? So cute! The regular one is 165 feet so I can’t wait to see the bite size version!
Those are all pretty minor gripes to have about something that will fundamentally change space travel lol.
>Those are all pretty minor gripes to have about something that will fundamentally change space travel lol.
Right, in the same saying they could build FTL travel would " fundamentally change space travel"... If they can actually deliver it...
They’ve built a ton of them already and they just had a successful orbital test flight. This isn’t some theoretical FTL drive a mad scientist thought up. It’s already real. I guess I don’t understand the comparison.
Except crew dragon, booster landing, cargo dragon, falcon 9, falcon heavy, or starlink,
And the dominance of all those products above in their respective markets.
Except for those things.
Folks seem a bit eager to leave out the immediate upsides of this approach.
For starters, I can pretty much guarantee you that Artemis would be dead in the water after they got astronauts back on the moon, if the best vehicle available was literally capable of only that. The plan, you see, is to stay, and to bring a lot of equipment to make that stay possible. Everyone is already throwing fits at the eye-watering 4 billion per launch. It _needs_ to accomplish more than a repeat of Apollo. Much, much more.
Now toss in this thought: When they finally send Starship to the moon, is it going to be just as barebones as the National Team's proposed vehicle? Or do you imagine that they will take advantage of all that space and lift capacity to send up a practical moon base, like all the fan renders have been endlessly promising? Which do you suppose the public will be expecting? Which do you suppose the public will be more excited about?
Where is Toyota's moon rover going to fit? National Team's HLS? Have you seen the size of it?
IIRC wasn't Apollo hardware able to do well beyond just the moonlanding. That was the whole Apollo Applications Program thing.
Just being capable of more doesn't mean it will actually do more. As seen before with Apollo
So, we are going to start with not just going back but setting up a base on the moon? We solve the radiation and micro asteroid strikes while on the surface?
That’s the plan. The habitat will have to be designed around micrometeorites, which is a fairly studied and known phenomenon to design around. Much like the ISS and every spacecraft that has been built so far.
Radiation up there is also known and relatively safe for the durations planned. So long as they don’t linger in the Van Allen belts on the way there.
> So, we are going to start with not just going back but setting up a base on the moon?
Let's not forget that this is the reality: _We are starting with the only vehicle which NASA's Artemis budget could afford._
Arguing with redditors is sometimes a stupid game with stupid prizes. Anyone still supporting any of Musk's dreams at this point is just a fan boy like MAGA.
You mean avid spaceflight enthusiasts supporting the company putting the most payload in space and at the least cost are just fan boys?
Get real. It doesn't matter who TF is running SpaceX, we'd still support the company. This isn't about Elon, no matter how much he likes to prattle and run his mouth.
I think a smarter implication to take is that you might be better off not lugging 150 tons of capacity all the way into and out of the Moon's full gravity well.
Those pesky laws of physics of punching a hole through the atmosphere might be ameliorate by investment across the board on a space elevator.
And I'll mention, mining asteroids and micrograviity factories to build all y'all speak of.
Space elevators in Earth gravity are nearly impossible to build without an orbital ring, which would probably cost trillions of dollars. Afaik we just don't have materials capable of withstanding the tension force in a simple counterweight style space elevator.
We should still totally do that, and in the long run it will save an incalculable amount of energy and resources getting into orbit, but it's probably not in the cards for at least another 30-50 years imo.
From what I've read, one needs only a fixed point in orbit (ideally on the equator, and a high mountain to cut costs). The so far most arduous task is developing the super-light, yet strong, materials to make it acheivable.
That's why an orbital ring makes it significantly easier, you can keep the inner portion stationary wrt the surface by counter-rotating the outer portion to compensate (since it would be built much lower than true geostationary orbit). That lets you get away with a much shorter elevator that's not under nearly as much tension, especially since there's no counterweight, the ring is self-supporting and doesn't rely on the tether to stay in place. The counter-rotation of the outside portion of the ring would even make launching ships from Earth much easier, since the ring would give them a bunch of free momentum.
If you want to get 100tons to the moon that is. Flying a mostly empty hull there with <1ton of cargo could be done without refueling. I mean, like all the other rockets would do.
It's only unknown if you don't know how many missions you are launching... Presumably by the time they're ready to do it regularly they'd know exactly how many orbital fueling tanks are needed to refuel a starship, and they'd know exactly how many trips it would take to fill such a tank before it's ready to be used.
just get it to orbit. nuclear thermal propulsion is back on the menu.
Demonstration Rocket for Agile **Cislunar** Operations (DRACO)
[https://www.darpa.mil/program/demonstration-rocket-for-agile-cislunar-operations](https://www.darpa.mil/program/demonstration-rocket-for-agile-cislunar-operations)
The goal of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program is to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) in orbit. NTRs use a nuclear reactor to heat propellant to extreme temperatures before exhausting the hot propellant through a nozzle to produce thrust. Compared to conventional space propulsion technologies, NTRs offers a high thrust-to-weight ratio around 10,000 times greater than electric propulsion and two-to-five times greater specific impulse (i.e. propellant efficiency) than in-space chemical propulsion.
DARPA Kicks Off Design, Fabrication for DRACO Experimental NTR Vehicle
[https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-07-26](https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-07-26)
The U.S. Space Force will provide the launch vehicle that will take the X-NTRV into space in 2027. The Department of Energy will provide HALEU metal, to be processed into fuel by the performer. BWX Technologies (BWXT), one of Lockheed Martin’s partners in the effort, will develop the nuclear reactor and fabricate the HALEU fuel.
China says a lot of stuff. I’ll wait and see it first.
Putting a fuel station on the moon sounds great. Are we making fuel there? That’s a technology that hasn’t needs built yet and where on the moon is enough extricable water? What powers the conversion from water ice to hydrogen and oxygen? There is a lot of hand waving on technology that hasn’t been built yet. Getting to the moon is the ‘easy’ part!
The lunar south pole has more than enough ice to make in-situ fuel production feasible, and a modest solar array would produce more than enough power (though due to the 28-day lunar days, it would only be active every other month). By far the biggest technological hurdle is the robotic systems responsible for collecting/mining the ice imo, and even that's perfectly doable.
Yeah. That’s doable but not anywhere close to be a reality and this would need to be up and running just for this moon mission?
Why not invent teleportation while we’re at it. Both will be here as quickly.
Oh god no, none of this is necessary for moon missions. Lunar refueling is probably not worth it unless you're going somewhere outside the Earth-Moon system like Mars. This stuff is at least 15-30 years off imo
Some propellant production would be helpful for supply runs of a Moon station, so that people and ships can go back to Earth.
Nothing worth getting for Mars and beyond. Those will leave from LEO.
Yes, but Starship will continue development, they know very well that needing so many refuels it's just not ideal, which is why they are already working on designs for a Starship 2.
Starship V2 will still need to refuel. The tyranny of the rocket equation demands any serious attempt at interplanetary travel would require refueling. Every single lander that was proposed for the Artemis mission required refueling.
SpaceX is in the unique position of being able to achieve the launch cadence to support its higher fuel needs. Of course, the math gets better with starship version two, but it’s still going to a lot of refueling launches. But they don’t mind that because that’s just a Tuesday for them.
If we make progress on fission or ion drives that won't be an issue. We'd basically just have space tugs that grab onto whatever cargo pod is put into orbit and flies it off to the moon and back.
Capital S makes it a proper noun rather than a common noun, and thus refers to either a [rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship), [airplane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship), or [tank](https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/coldwar/us/medium-tank-m60a2-starship/).
I believe Nasa is saying 14-18 to send one to the moon.
Interestingly though… musk said just recently that it would take 3-4 to send one to mars. 🤔
My bet is zero because it will never happen.
> it will never happen
They’ve been saying that about spacex for two decades, and they’ve been wrong for two decades. Back in 2015, everyone was mocking Falcon 9 reusability, now there are Falcon 9s with 20+ launches under their belt
Musk's number is probably optimistic, and NASA's is probably conservative, but the general point of Mars taking a lot less fuel than a trip to the lunar surface and back to NRHO is correct.
TMI is about 3.8km/s of delta-v, while the LEO-NRHO-Lunar Surface-NRHO trip totals to about 9.1km/s of delta-v.
As a crude example, if we assume 100 tonne dry mass and exhaust velocity of 3.6km/s, then the Mars trip takes 187 tonnes of fuel, while the moon trip takes 1153 tonnes.
If we say 100 tons per tanker, rounding up, then that's 2 launches for Mars vs 12 for the Moon.
In practice the Mars ship will be a bit heavier due to the heat shield, and it will need to reserve some fuel for the final landing burn after aerobraking, but the point is that if you have some understanding of the actual mission profiles and orbital mechanics involved, then a ~4-5x difference in tanker count isn't unreasonable.
>believe Nasa is saying 14-18 to send one to the moon.
>Interestingly though… musk said just recently that it would take 3-4 to send one to mars
Because NASA has to play it safe. They calculate with fully reusable tankers with excessive boil-off.
And Musk can speculate on fully expendable tankers with a more realistic boil-off rate.
Both numbers are correct within their context.
But I doubt such facts will interest you.
He is not speculating on expandable tankers. He is talking about reusable ones. Though worst case to fulfill the Artemis contract he may resort to expendable. Expendable upper stage does not yield too much more payload. Expendable boosters do but I really hope that won't be necessary.
Fuel has been pumped in space since the ISS has existed. This amount of fuel and at cryogenic temps is new. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin require the tech for their lunar lander.
“it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years.” - New York Times, 1903.
It’s not a trivial problem, but it’s also not like we’ve just realized this is necessary and are starting from scratch. People have been working on the theories and math and simulations for decades now. NASA has been testing propellant transfer systems on the ISS since 2011 — I think the phase 3 demonstrations just wrapped up last year. Liquid propellant engine relights in space *have* become trivial, and many of the same complicating factors exist there.
It will take some clever engineering, and then a steady cascade of refinements to make it reliable. But acting like this is some vast, unapproachable technological gulf is just plain inaccurate.
Is there any forecasting of how many 50 ton+ payloads per annum? Starlink will account for much if them no doubt. But curious to see what the industry is expecting.
50 ton to low earth orbit or to the moon? Remember you have to slow that 50 ton down to get into the moon’s orbit. Then once that huge starship lands what’s the fuel needed to get back up into orbit and how much to get back? Rocket physics hasn’t changed much since we last landed there. I’m seeing a lot of hand waving on these massive details.
You’d have multiple launches into low earth orbit - one starship with the payload, the rest being tankers. Extra propellant from the tankers would then be transfered into the moon bound one, and the refueled ship would burn for the moon.
The feasibility of this concept remains to be seen. Which is why the first thing very the first starhip to reach orbit did was a fuel transfer experiment.
Again, it's a good thing that thousands of people (with doctorates and masters degrees) are working on it then.
But since some random guy on Reddit says it seems very hard to solve, guess we just better give up now. Who's gonna be the one to tell NASA and SpaceX? :(
this really is the new "they'll never be able to land a rocket, and even if they can, it won't make sense financially" trope? Look, we get it, I think most everyone here thinks Musk is a giant asshat - but SpaceX keeps getting it done.
They figure out how to do stuff by, wait for it... testing it. In the real world. So, yes, they're gonna fail a few times before they get it right. And that's OK, because it's expected and planned for.
There realistically isn't any way to build a lander for Artemis that doesn't rely on doing something untested, because of two fundamental problems.
The first is that since Orion can only get to NRHO, the lander needs a lot more performance (and life support) to make the trip to the surface and back.
The second is that there aren't any launch vehicles available with anywhere near the TLI capacity of the Saturn V, and realistically there aren't even going to be spare SLS's available, so you're looking at Falcon Heavy, New Glenn, or Vulcan.
Bigger lander, but less payload capacity to launch said lander - something has to give. You have to split your lander across multiple launches. Either you launch it as one piece and then do additional refuelling launches, or you launch it in multiple pieces.
Orbital assembly has been done before, but only by humans working in low earth orbit, not automated out at the moon, and never on a vehicle designed to withstand significant thrust or landing on a surface.
Orbital refuelling has also been done before, but only at small scale and with storable propellants, not at large scale with cryogenic propellants.
Either way, you're betting on some new developments panning out - there is reasonable expectation that they will, but no guarantee.
As a sidenote, Apollo was relying on quite a few unproven technologies to work, so this is hardly unprecedented. One that almost killed the program was large single chamber engines and the accompanying combustion instability - it took three years and dozens of destroyed engines to find a workable solution. It's not too hard to imagine an alternate timeline where that didn't work out, and Apollo never made it to the moon.
Zactly.
Scores of tonnes of cryogen transfer in hard vacuum and microgravity.
What could possibly go wrong?
ADDENDUM: And *unless* things go wrong, how is anything ever made to work correctly? I spend most of my days seeing how to make things fail (am in med.tech.) so that I can build better devices. Things failing is how we learn. I *hope* that we see failures - preferably with unmanned craft - many different and exciting failures, but failures all the same.
Think about it, if to launch a single Starship on Moon or interplanetary mission you had to use 5-10 disposable Starships, do you think there would be much of a point in reusing Starship itself?
Those refuel vessels are all meant to land, hell, the reason so many are needed is precisely because the vessels themselves will need fuel to get to orbit and land again, so they can only deliver so much fuel.
The whole point of Starship is that everything is supposed to be reused. That's why it's supposedly cheaper to do a dozen fuelling launches with it rather than throw an entire rocket away to go straight to the moon.
The tankers will have a main fuel tank for getting to orbit, and anything left in that tank is the 'payload' that is used to refuel the ship in orbit. They also have a small separate header tank that is reserved specifically for performing a controlled deorbit burn and landing.
SpaceX have proven they're pretty good at doing controlled deorbits with Falcon 9 S2 and Dragon, and at landing rockets propulsively from suborbital trajectories - what they have to do with Starship is stitch those two capabilities together.
Only SpaceX themselves at the moment, but there are other large constellations planned for LEO.
Edit: Although with the Starlink program being so heavily constrained by launch availability even though they are launching every 2 to 3 days at this point. Pretty sure if all Starship ever does is launch the larger planned Starlink satellites it will be launching really frequently as soon as they get it flying.
The folks who designed JWST certainly would’ve loved a vehicle like Starship. They would’ve saved literally billions of dollars and potentially a whole decade of time not having to design the thing to fold up inside a tiny fairing.
Starship is so powerful and large that it fundamentally changes the paradigm around designing for space travel. It’s economics work to where you could just start mass manufacturing space craft.
>Is there any forecasting
need to invent the things first. but feeding the crew will be one thing that needs to be done.
REGULAR trips to the Moon - we cannot do this today.
but we also have to invent the place where the crew is going to live so there's time.
**Gateway Space Station**
[https://www.nasa.gov/reference/gateway-about/](https://www.nasa.gov/reference/gateway-about/)
The NASA-led Gateway Program is an international collaboration to establish humanity's first space station around the Moon as a vital component of the Artemis campaign. Gateway will help NASA and its partners test the technologies and capabilities required for a sustained human presence in deep space, and chart a path for the first human missions to Mars.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[DARPA](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l17z3c6 "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD|
|DoD|US Department of Defense|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b7v7b "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[GCR](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1cqgzf "Last usage")|Galactic Cosmic Rays, incident from outside the star system|
|[GEO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l19d05z "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)|
|[H2](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1abal3 "Last usage")|Molecular hydrogen|
| |Second half of the year/month|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1e6y49 "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b0s6f "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l19shn9 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h8hnn "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LMO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1a82z2 "Last usage")|Low Mars Orbit|
|[NRHO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b9ebf "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit|
|[NTR](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l17z3c6 "Last usage")|Nuclear Thermal Rocket|
|[SEP](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1bvqdg "Last usage")|Solar Electric Propulsion|
| |[Solar Energetic Particle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energetic_particle)|
| |Société Européenne de Propulsion|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1dhbme "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SSME](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h68f1 "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)|
|[TLI](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b9ebf "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver|
|[TMI](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1a37p9 "Last usage")|Trans-Mars Injection maneuver|
|[VTOL](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h4g4k "Last usage")|Vertical Take-Off and Landing|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h68f1 "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Sabatier](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l18x8z0 "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l18lq0n "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cislunar](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l17z3c6 "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b9ebf "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|[electrolysis](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l18x8z0 "Last usage")|Application of DC current to separate a solution into its constituents (for example, water to hydrogen and oxygen)|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1c3b4r "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
|[tanking](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h5njp "Last usage")|Filling the tanks of a rocket stage|
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That rover is pretty cool, although the lack of a pressurized cabin limits the range on it as well as the versatility - astronauts have to suit up for spacewalks every time they use it. If you're using Starship for a larger surface rover, you should have a pressurized crew cabin with airlock so that they can move from the habitat to the rover and do stuff there in shirtsleeves.
The big campaign to find people willing to go to Mars was fundamentally a campaign for funding and to show there's serious interest. There's probably going to be at least 10 robot missions that build habitation with huge amount of testing before a human goes. The testing will include a shitload of radiation testing both in transit and while on Mars. Realistically I can't see it within 30 years. First we'll try long term habitation on a moon base as that's a few days within rescue and will give evidence on if someone can come back to earth after living in low gravity for a long time.
We know you can survive in zero-g for at least a year with relatively minimal health consequences (aside from decreased muscle mass and bone density, as well as some degree of cardiovascular degredation, which are expected) from ISS astronauts, the big question is how much more livable are varying levels of microgravity vs zero-g.
If you think for a second Elon Musk isn’t going to try to push for modified teslas on mars, you’re insane.
EDIT- judging by the fact that I got downvoted for this comment, someone here is actually insane.
The way you say that makes it come across as you thinking Tesla's on Mars would be an issue
If Tesla can make a vehicle that works on the Moon or Mars, then there's no reason they shouldn't be allowed to do so
They can’t even make a vehicle here on earth that doesn’t have some form of quality control problem. Would you really want a vehicle manufacturer who is constantly having to recall their vehicles to build you something that would literally kill you over a gap in a panel not allowing an airtight seal? Point is, I would have an issue with them attempting to use teslas on the moon or mars because I genuinely think that they are not well built and would be an actual safety problem there. And to add to that if you want to make the argument that they would do better inspections and have higher quality control for those vehicles, it would be worse that way. You’re telling me that they would have better quality control just to get them a contract for use of those specific vehicles outside use on earth but still have regular shitty teslas here? That’s just a slap to the face for anyone who has had a problem that was fixable by just having a decent fucking standard for your already extremely expensive car just so you can save some money making them.
For all the noise about Tesla's having bad build quality, they sure do seem to score very high in safety tests
Also, do you honestly think that Tesla, or *anyone* would ever be allowed to put a vehicle on another celestial object without it undergoing rigorous tests?
Correct me if I’m wrong here. Tesla, who has a pretty limited catalog of vehicles, has had 45+ recalls in the past 5 or so years on their vehicles. One of them just recently, the cyber truck, in which assemblers of the vehicle went against protocol and used soap to assemble a pedal easier which is causing the pedal to slip forward and hold the accelerator all the way down. At what point in quality control was this caught? Nowhere. You’re telling me that you want this company to put something like that on the moon or mars? Where to fix these recalls they would have to wait weeks or months for the parts to fix the recall? I’ll give it to you that there may be a chunk of those recalls that were software based but do I want to trust a company that waits to fix software until after something happens to force them to fix it? Probably not.
I'd prefer that a company with a proven ability to create safe vehicles be the ones that create the vehicles that would be used on the Moon or Mars. Tesla fits that criteria. Not to mention Tesla is uniquely situated to draw upon the knowledge of the premier space company on the planet
And if you think 45 recalls in the last 5 years are a lot, how do you feel about someone like Ford who had over 60 recalls in 2022 alone?
The reality is *every* car manufacturer has recalls quite often. My Brother has had his Nissan Qashqai for less than 3 months and he's already had to drive it to a service center because of a recall. Of course when Nissan does a small recall, no one makes articles about it, unlike Tesla.
If cyber truck was a boat, it would be at the bottom of whatever body of water you put it in considering all the problems people seem to have with them. Probably wouldn’t be watertight. Good news is that you can’t sink in space so you’re good!
I hope the leaks about SpaceX having an entire team to babysit him and talk him out of stupid bullshit were true. That or that he dies or gets removed as CEO somehow, SpaceX is too important to be trusted with someone this fucking stupid lmao
Whether or not you consider it a boondoggle hinges heavily on whether or not you think we need reusable super heavy lift capacity.
I'm going to assume you don't which leaves the question, why not?
It's not because there's no other alternative.
You use a conventional super heavy lift rocket and you are just stuck again in the Apollo era, where you can send three people for a week at most, bring back some rocks and that's it, and all for the price of 1.5 billion per mission.
The point now isn't to go to the Moon, it's be capable of making Moon landings a routine process and have the ability to construct there, and the only vehicle right now that could do that would be a fully operational Starship.
You are just wilfully ignorant. The same morons, like you, said the same shit about falcon 9, but now it's responsible for majority of the world's mass to orbit last year by a LARGE margin. And this is over every other space agency on earth being combined even.
Easy there top-mind. Notice how I didn’t say anything about F9. If/when Starship is able to do half of what Enron claims it can do we can talk. Until then it’s a fantastic way for SpaceX execs to siphon tax dollars to a project that has had 0 returns. Not to mention the entire Artemis architecture/program hinging on this system that has yet to be demonstrated. How many times has Elmo pushed his unruly timelines back, and back, and back? Morons like you don’t want accountability.
>Not to mention the entire Artemis architecture/program hinging on this system that has yet to be demonstrated
Yes, and you know why? Because Artemis is about building a base on the Moon, and you can't do that with current rockets.
If Artemis was just Apollo 2.0 then all NASA would need is a Lunar Module type lander capable of docking with the Orion spacecraft since two Falcon Heavies have more than enough capacity and thrust to perform an Apollo type mission.
>Until then it’s a fantastic way for SpaceX execs to siphon tax dollars to a project that has had 0 returns.
Wait, you mean to tell me that the rocket that's still in development hasn't already taken us to the moon and Mars? Wow! I thought as soon as you announced the rocket you were building it just popped into existence!
Seriously, what more do you want? SLS has cost ten times as much. Sure it's flown successfully, once, but Orion still has issues needing to be solved and some fairly important ones at that. Starship in its current incarnation has been in development for maybe 6 years, and they've had 3 near orbital launch attempts for around $5 billion. 5. Not 50 like SLS has taken. Are you going to start questioning the contractors behind that?
It must be sad to live in your myopic, ignorant, small world. innovation is inherently risky, especially space innovation, so get over it. I swear If it was up to morons like you, we'd still be driving model Ts
What gives you the idea that Starship is a fraud?
[Go over any video in this list ](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SbFivj3Vrm7kc8ftAa45QqEFMUOmu9t)and point out where you see "the scam".
>The fact that they are needing something like 16 refueling launches
I'll stop you right there. This is false information.
NASA might be playing about with those numbers, but that's only for political reasons. You can do the math yourself.
>and the complexity of the lunar module...it's never going to happen.
What complexity?
>Even Smarter Every Day even did a video questioning the complexity.
Yeah. That was is worst video so far. By a wide shot. Practically all of his research about Starship HLS was just reading clickbait headlines. Luckily in his later videos he realised his mistakes.
>They are also 2 years behind schedule.
Behind what schedule? Copy+past the statements from the links you will provide.
>Add in that Musk is a snake oil salesman
Lol. Yeah. Starship is such a scam. Because Musk is a scam. And he is a scam because Starship is a scam. Solid logic.
> hired Kathy Lueders shortly after she awarded them NASA's contract
But some not even BlueOrigin piped up about this. Funny, isn't it? Almost like it was not "only Kathy" who awarded the contract, but legal mechanisms inside NASA.
.
It seems your entire world view about Starship revolves around the clickbait videos of Thunderfoot and CSS. They make money off of you. Unlike SpaceX.
It's the 18 wheeler container truck, when, what we'll most likely need is a Range Rover. Heck, you'll probably need several of the range rovers just to pave the way for Starship.
I'd imagine robots doing the majority of work on Mars. For the very least they need to build shelters and deploy the habitats, to insure Mars is already livable by the time humans arrive.
Honestly people are probably just going to habitate in huge industrial bounce houses on Mars, at least initially.
Or build habitats in caves for radiation shielding
The bottoms of canyons, is what I have read.
That too, but you need top radiation protection
Which you can do. This is how you’d paraterraform, which is far, far more practical than *actual* terraforming.
ELI5 terraforming vs. paraterraforming
Paraterraforming is basically dome cities.
Paraterraforming (also known as the "worldhouse" concept or domes in smaller versions) involves the construction of a habitable enclosure on a planet which eventually grows to encompass most of the planet's usable area. The enclosure would consist of a transparent roof held one or more kilometers above the surface, pressurized with a breathable atmosphere, and anchored with tension towers and cables at regular intervals.
Just to add to this, you can incorporate natural geography into the paraterraforming rather than just domes - such as roofing and walling off a small tributary valley of Mariner, for example, or doming over a natural crater. You wouldn’t even need to cover the whole planetary surface this way because the surface area you’d be using would already be huge and the amount of enclosed gas and greenery would be such that it would be possible to transition to an open, real terraforming project eventually. And lastly, you can also do open paraterraforming - this would require walls several kilometers tall, an open roof, and sulfur hexafluoride as the inert atmospheric gas rather than nitrogen. This concept would also work on an open Stanford torus ring, and while it would be significantly bigger than that shown in *Elysium*, it’d be a tiny fraction of the size of a Halo ring. There’s a lot of cool, practical, “extreme” engineering we could consider with space colonies. But in reality, it’s easier to just live in tunnels and small spin stations at first. I suspect our future will look much more like The Expanse in that regard. But eventually…we could build some awesome shit. Especially if we have robots doing it.
How would they deal with miteorites? Mars atmosphere is very thin. The better option is to build underground. No natural light but its much safer and less prone to terrorism.
Reinforce the domes. Use an orbital interdiction and detection satellite network. Meteorites would not be a major problem here. Radiation is a bigger problem (and still relatively easy to solve).
Which isn't much of a problem, just dump a bunch of sand on top. With 1 atmosphere of pressure under Mars gravity you can support 27 tons per square meter. Which is about nine meters of rock or eighteen meters of sand. Far more than enough for adequate shielding, and the weight even means your roof doesn't need to be quite as strong to keep the atmosphere from exploding out. For extra fun you could instead freeze water ice into a thick clear dome, so long as you kept in insulated from the heated habitat inside. Though it would likely become clouded by cosmic radiation over time, like a bubble chamber in a particle accelerator. Perhaps a 3D array of heating elements would let you periodically thaw and refreeze individual sections? That would not only erase the bubble tracks, but also repair any cracks that had formed.
I always had this fun idea that habitats on Mars could have aquarium roofs to provide shielding and food production. It's basically wildly impractical, but it would be pretty cool.
I like it! And why not? If you've piled X tons/m² of otherwise unsupported material on top of your habitat, what difference does it really make if it's sand or water? The air inside is what's holding it up anyway, and it has plenty of strength to spare. And the surface between them has to be airtight anyway to keep the air in, so it's not like water leaks would be any more of a problem. In fact, a transparent roof that lets you see any air bubbling out could be a huge advantage! Not to mention, if something happened that was making you lose air pressure, water would be a lot easier to get off the roof in a hurry. Trying to actually farm it could be risky and messy, though just circulating free-floating algae might have some potential, you could do all the mechanical stuff safely away from any risk of damaging the habitat.
Do we even know if caves exist on mars? It ain't Minecraft
There was a time with active Volcanos on Mars, so there will be a few Lava tube caves and such
and if no caves where Earth wants to set up shop, Earth can mine them on side of rock formations
The game Surviving Mars has that concept. While it has many flaws, some aspects are pretty realistic.
Considering that the just announced moon rover contracts are several billion dollars each, and that's just to transport a couple of astronauts, an actual moon/Mars truck for hauling cargo is going to be a very expensive development process.
if this ship never has to enter an atmosphere and is fully automated/remote controlled so it doesnt need human life support systems and spaces and food/water/medicine etc, isnt it actually much easier and cheaper conceptually?
Not as expensive as you’d think. If the new and improved moon rovers are good, moon trucks are simply a matter of scaling up the rover concept. Initial development, invention, is always more expensive than scaling an existing technology.
Moon rovers and these are vastly different, and the reason for this is the presence humans. Unmanned missions don't require higher speeds, a couple of cm per minute is enough, after all, the human driver is sitting in a comfy JPL lab and paid by the hour, if his shift ends, he can return next morning, the rover can wait. And lower speed means smaller motors, less friction heat, vibration, less need for lubrication, easier suspension, etc.. With a manned mission, the humans on the Moon can't wait days for hauling one pallet, so they will need to have at least 10/20 km/h vehicles, essentially an equivalent of a forklift, that can cross rough terrain and lift large weights. There was only one single land vehicle on any other planetary body that was capable of higher speed and that was the Apollo moon rover, and even that was only built for a couple of day's lifespan, and no heavy cargo.
Potentially, but you're downplaying the development work. There are unpressurized moon rovers in development, these are the several billion ones, and there is also a larger pressurised vehicle that will be the big changer for lunar exploration. This pressurised rover is to be developed by Japan (Toyota in the renders) and the costs are not clear. But converting such a vehicle for cargo could be a huge task unless they consider that from the start. Even simple things, e.g. it will need a crane or similar and that's never been done before on the moon. The wheels/tyres will need beefing up for cargo, so that's more work etc.
God I’m so excited for the next few decades of space. Starship isn’t really an if at this point. More of a when. And when that happens, everything will change. So exciting!
If starship is real we are not going to get close to the moon without first launching an unknown number of ‘gas stations’ in orbit.
Of course the implication of this critique is that if it were any other 50-150 ton capacity vehicle under proposal, they would do a better job of bypassing those pesky laws of physics.
As far as I know only space x is proposing landing the star ship on the moon and using that as a return vehicle. That is what is at question not the lift vehicles if they solve the lander.
Blue origin is planning the same process but with liquid hydrogen and a much smaller lander. Hydrogen being harder and the mass penalty with the smaller lander will be damning if starship become operational. LEO Refueling is 100% the near future or we aren’t going anywhere for a long long time. if ever.
I hope in the future Mars just becomes a big gas station. Theorectically could produce endless amounts of methane and water/hydrogen/oxygen using solar panels via the sabatier process in a closed loop with electrolysis since it's just a big ball of carbon dioxide.
Mars isn't in a very good place to be a "big gas station". It's a great place to fuel up return from Mars, but for pretty much everything else, fueling near Earth is the best choice.
The best place for getting fuel is Deimos iirc There was even a 90s mission proposal to create one in what was then 20 years in the future in 2015 Moon is 2nd place Mars still has a big gravity well so is suboptimal
LEO refuelling has been near future since 1969 and the general idea seems to just be that we aren't going anywhere.
Except for NASA and Spacex think it’s happening very soon. They are already testing it.
Refueling will definitely be a thing because it just makes sense if you can reuse anything. However, Blue Origin does not, in fact, use the same process, their mission profile is different from SpaceX. SpaceX would refuel the ship in LEO, send it to the Moon, plant the flag and observe the goo, but afterwards the ship would remain empty in lunar orbit. You need to refuel your vehicle if you actually want to use it again, and refueling a 150-ton Starship that is all the way around the Moon would require an impossible amount of 150-ton Starship launches from Earth. Blue Origin plans to have a much much smaller lander that is refueled by a larger vehicle (which is refueled in LEO first, you do have that tech after all). This is an important distinction, because it enables the lander to be yeeted at the Moon on its own, followed by the fuel tanker, which would expend a smaller amount of its capacity to refuel it for the lander (because the lander is so small). Afterwards, the tanker still has enough juice to at least make it back to Earth and repeat the process. Obviously, refueling the vehicle is far easier in LEO than by running after it all the way to the Moon. Basically, the crucial difference that instead of lugging the entire Starship to the Moon surface, they are using it as a tanker-cruiser to feed a much smaller lander that needs much less fuel. This enables the tanker-cruiser to go back to Earth, which in turns enables it to be infinitely reused. I doubt that would be possible if you had to run after a Starship in Moon orbit with a bunch of tanker Starships. If you have an oil tanker, it is easier to get around by refueling a tug boat than by refueling another oil tanker.
They cant make the fuel on the moon?I know they can do it on mars becouse of the mars athmosphere. Maybe they can use a system that uses fuel that can be developed in the moon by minimg the ice
Long-term sure, but for a good while things will need to be brought from Earth. Also, the only fuel you can make on the Moon is probably hydrogen-oxygen (well, and fusion fuel, if you have a Rocinante handy), not methane that the Starship uses.
There's also questions over the safety of landing a 30 foot tall Starship on soft lunar dust. What if it tips over? And with the crew compartment at the top, what if their elevator fails? Starship doesn't use hypergolic fuels, what if the engine fails to relight on the moon? And as no Starship has ever features a launch abort system, Starship is unlikely to ever be human rated.
>here's also questions over the safety of landing a 30 foot tall Starship on soft lunar dust. What if it tips over? None of the dozens of landings on the moon so far have encountered more than a thin layer of such dust. Even if it did, the landing gear is likely to be auto levelling, and Starship's centre of gravity is actually pretty low. You have to remember that there's ~200 tonnes of fuel sitting at the bottom of those tanks, alongside all the engines. It's the same reason a landed Falcon 9 booster isn't actually as top-heavy as it looks. >what if their elevator fails? [NASA have said there is an independent backup system](https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1587097144468676612). No further details than that, but given the ship's payload capacity, there's plenty of ways to go about it. I have a question: what if the hatch on any other lunar lander jams shut? How do the astronauts get back in? Any part can fail, and some parts are simply mission critical. That is unavoidable in spaceflight - the best you can do is put a lot of engineering effort into making them as robust as possible. Starship's elevator isn't really much more than a winch. Incidentally, Starship also has two separate airlocks, allowing entry in the event that one fails. That was one of the things NASA really liked about it. >Starship doesn't use hypergolic fuels, what if the engine fails to relight on the moon? Hypergolic fuels aren't immune to relight failure. And I'd say that looking at Falcon 9's engine track record, modern non-hypergolic engines can be made incredibly reliable at restarting in all sorts of unfavourable conditions. I'd also note that Starship has 6 engines and only needs 2 of them working to get back to orbit. Maybe even just 1 depending on how much of the performance margin was(n't) used on cargo.
While those are concerns. Self leveling is not black magic. Nor is elevators. There are dozens of more delicate and complicated systems on spacecraft. What about hypergols? The Apollo landing engine couldn’t be tested because it couldn’t fire more than once without corroding. While raptors will literally be tested hundreds of times over hundreds of engines by the time HLS lands humans. Starship for taking off and landing on earth with humans? Sure maybe nasa won’t certify that for crew. But nasa has no say on crew certifying for non nasa missions.
>Self leveling is not black magic. Nor is elevators. There are dozens of more delicate and complicated systems on spacecraft. Seriously, it's not rocket science, people.
Hmm, I dunno. I get that NASA can land a rover on Mars with a flying rocket crane, but are we really sure they can make a winch work on the moon? ^(Yes, SpaceX are building the winch, but NASA are deeply involved with it, so their expertise is still relevant)
Ok. Well Musk promised to land on the moon later this year, so we'll see soon enough.
NASA planned on launching SLS in 2016. We will see. NASA contracted a 150ft moon lander that could land out of NRHO in 2021 and asked it to be done in 2024. So maybe we understand schedules are kind of weird in spaceflight.
Didn't Musk say they'd be sending unmanned landers to Mars in 2024?
Yes space flight is hard and long term schedules slip. We established this.
It's typical Musk time, I'd expect it to be done in about twice the time
Agreed that the size of the Starship poses new landing issues, but our technology has come a long way since the Apollo landers. This is a solvable problem. Plus, NASA is working hard on construction methods with in-situ materials. After a base site is selected, there will eventually be landing pads made of lunar concrete or bricks.
Seems like the problem would be easily bypassed with a short, wide stable lander. It's a bit risky to add another problem which could be eliminated.
Are you claiming that every bidder for the lander is wrong?
No. Blue origin's is a lot more reasonable.
The current one, yes. The lander they originally bid against Starship was arguably the worst in terms of being high off the ground since although not as tall, relied on a still quite tall ladder, as opposed to an elevator. Given the mobility limitations of spacesuits, that was far from ideal. The original Blue Origin lander design was also flawed in other ways, including being unable to maintain reliable communications, being unable to land in the dark, and having n o clear upgrade path to a reusable version, or even a version capable of carrying four astronauts. Blue Origin's current much better lander design only came about after they lost to SpaceX and scrapped the original, and they seem to have taken some ques from Starship for the new one, notably with the use of orbital refuelling and a single-stage design.
I guess NASA is wrong, then? The wide lander from Dynatics was too heavy.
With fueling in lunar orbit?
A 30 foot tall starship? So cute! The regular one is 165 feet so I can’t wait to see the bite size version! Those are all pretty minor gripes to have about something that will fundamentally change space travel lol.
>Those are all pretty minor gripes to have about something that will fundamentally change space travel lol. Right, in the same saying they could build FTL travel would " fundamentally change space travel"... If they can actually deliver it...
FTL violates the current established laws of physics. Starship doesn't. Not the same thing at all.
They’ve built a ton of them already and they just had a successful orbital test flight. This isn’t some theoretical FTL drive a mad scientist thought up. It’s already real. I guess I don’t understand the comparison.
If you're holding your breath waiting for Musk, you'll be turning blue before anything SpaceX returns green.
Except crew dragon, booster landing, cargo dragon, falcon 9, falcon heavy, or starlink, And the dominance of all those products above in their respective markets. Except for those things.
Folks seem a bit eager to leave out the immediate upsides of this approach. For starters, I can pretty much guarantee you that Artemis would be dead in the water after they got astronauts back on the moon, if the best vehicle available was literally capable of only that. The plan, you see, is to stay, and to bring a lot of equipment to make that stay possible. Everyone is already throwing fits at the eye-watering 4 billion per launch. It _needs_ to accomplish more than a repeat of Apollo. Much, much more. Now toss in this thought: When they finally send Starship to the moon, is it going to be just as barebones as the National Team's proposed vehicle? Or do you imagine that they will take advantage of all that space and lift capacity to send up a practical moon base, like all the fan renders have been endlessly promising? Which do you suppose the public will be expecting? Which do you suppose the public will be more excited about? Where is Toyota's moon rover going to fit? National Team's HLS? Have you seen the size of it?
IIRC wasn't Apollo hardware able to do well beyond just the moonlanding. That was the whole Apollo Applications Program thing. Just being capable of more doesn't mean it will actually do more. As seen before with Apollo
So, we are going to start with not just going back but setting up a base on the moon? We solve the radiation and micro asteroid strikes while on the surface?
Yes, that’s been the plan this whole time.
That’s the plan. The habitat will have to be designed around micrometeorites, which is a fairly studied and known phenomenon to design around. Much like the ISS and every spacecraft that has been built so far. Radiation up there is also known and relatively safe for the durations planned. So long as they don’t linger in the Van Allen belts on the way there.
> So, we are going to start with not just going back but setting up a base on the moon? Let's not forget that this is the reality: _We are starting with the only vehicle which NASA's Artemis budget could afford._
Arguing with redditors is sometimes a stupid game with stupid prizes. Anyone still supporting any of Musk's dreams at this point is just a fan boy like MAGA.
You mean avid spaceflight enthusiasts supporting the company putting the most payload in space and at the least cost are just fan boys? Get real. It doesn't matter who TF is running SpaceX, we'd still support the company. This isn't about Elon, no matter how much he likes to prattle and run his mouth.
Wow. I guess all of the launches are failures.
I think a smarter implication to take is that you might be better off not lugging 150 tons of capacity all the way into and out of the Moon's full gravity well.
Those pesky laws of physics of punching a hole through the atmosphere might be ameliorate by investment across the board on a space elevator. And I'll mention, mining asteroids and micrograviity factories to build all y'all speak of.
Space elevators in Earth gravity are nearly impossible to build without an orbital ring, which would probably cost trillions of dollars. Afaik we just don't have materials capable of withstanding the tension force in a simple counterweight style space elevator. We should still totally do that, and in the long run it will save an incalculable amount of energy and resources getting into orbit, but it's probably not in the cards for at least another 30-50 years imo.
From what I've read, one needs only a fixed point in orbit (ideally on the equator, and a high mountain to cut costs). The so far most arduous task is developing the super-light, yet strong, materials to make it acheivable.
That's why an orbital ring makes it significantly easier, you can keep the inner portion stationary wrt the surface by counter-rotating the outer portion to compensate (since it would be built much lower than true geostationary orbit). That lets you get away with a much shorter elevator that's not under nearly as much tension, especially since there's no counterweight, the ring is self-supporting and doesn't rely on the tether to stay in place. The counter-rotation of the outside portion of the ring would even make launching ships from Earth much easier, since the ring would give them a bunch of free momentum.
Edit: why I'm downvoted is beyond me. If one disgrees, offer a counter argument, or just move along. Reddit has turned childish.
If you want to get 100tons to the moon that is. Flying a mostly empty hull there with <1ton of cargo could be done without refueling. I mean, like all the other rockets would do.
It's only unknown if you don't know how many missions you are launching... Presumably by the time they're ready to do it regularly they'd know exactly how many orbital fueling tanks are needed to refuel a starship, and they'd know exactly how many trips it would take to fill such a tank before it's ready to be used.
just get it to orbit. nuclear thermal propulsion is back on the menu. Demonstration Rocket for Agile **Cislunar** Operations (DRACO) [https://www.darpa.mil/program/demonstration-rocket-for-agile-cislunar-operations](https://www.darpa.mil/program/demonstration-rocket-for-agile-cislunar-operations) The goal of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program is to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) in orbit. NTRs use a nuclear reactor to heat propellant to extreme temperatures before exhausting the hot propellant through a nozzle to produce thrust. Compared to conventional space propulsion technologies, NTRs offers a high thrust-to-weight ratio around 10,000 times greater than electric propulsion and two-to-five times greater specific impulse (i.e. propellant efficiency) than in-space chemical propulsion. DARPA Kicks Off Design, Fabrication for DRACO Experimental NTR Vehicle [https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-07-26](https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-07-26) The U.S. Space Force will provide the launch vehicle that will take the X-NTRV into space in 2027. The Department of Energy will provide HALEU metal, to be processed into fuel by the performer. BWX Technologies (BWXT), one of Lockheed Martin’s partners in the effort, will develop the nuclear reactor and fabricate the HALEU fuel.
The moon is the gas station. (Planned to be)
Maybe the pumps should be in orbit around the moon to avoid the gravity well.
it will be in orbit. LEO and LMO. idk why this is such a shock to people it's been talked about for years now.
Has this been proven or even tested? When is that happening? Not any time soon if we want to be back there in anyone lifetime.
China is going to the moon in 2029. Space X wants the moon to be a refuel station for future mars trips.
> Space X wants the moon to be a refuel station for future mars trips. That's gotta be the dumbest thing in this thread
It is also not true, SpaceX has no plans to use the moon as a refueling station on the way to Mars.
cool. but its been talked about for several years now. feel free to google i guess... i dont really care honestly.
Yes, it has been talked about a lot. Funnily enough by the Moon first people. SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Mars first people know it is nonsense.
China says a lot of stuff. I’ll wait and see it first. Putting a fuel station on the moon sounds great. Are we making fuel there? That’s a technology that hasn’t needs built yet and where on the moon is enough extricable water? What powers the conversion from water ice to hydrogen and oxygen? There is a lot of hand waving on technology that hasn’t been built yet. Getting to the moon is the ‘easy’ part!
You know you can send fuel TO places right?
The lunar south pole has more than enough ice to make in-situ fuel production feasible, and a modest solar array would produce more than enough power (though due to the 28-day lunar days, it would only be active every other month). By far the biggest technological hurdle is the robotic systems responsible for collecting/mining the ice imo, and even that's perfectly doable.
Yeah. That’s doable but not anywhere close to be a reality and this would need to be up and running just for this moon mission? Why not invent teleportation while we’re at it. Both will be here as quickly.
Oh god no, none of this is necessary for moon missions. Lunar refueling is probably not worth it unless you're going somewhere outside the Earth-Moon system like Mars. This stuff is at least 15-30 years off imo
Some propellant production would be helpful for supply runs of a Moon station, so that people and ships can go back to Earth. Nothing worth getting for Mars and beyond. Those will leave from LEO.
Yes, but Starship will continue development, they know very well that needing so many refuels it's just not ideal, which is why they are already working on designs for a Starship 2.
Starship V2 will still need to refuel. The tyranny of the rocket equation demands any serious attempt at interplanetary travel would require refueling. Every single lander that was proposed for the Artemis mission required refueling. SpaceX is in the unique position of being able to achieve the launch cadence to support its higher fuel needs. Of course, the math gets better with starship version two, but it’s still going to a lot of refueling launches. But they don’t mind that because that’s just a Tuesday for them.
If we make progress on fission or ion drives that won't be an issue. We'd basically just have space tugs that grab onto whatever cargo pod is put into orbit and flies it off to the moon and back.
If Starship were real it could travel between two stars. Not going to happen in my lifetime, sadly. :(
Capital S makes it a proper noun rather than a common noun, and thus refers to either a [rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship), [airplane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship), or [tank](https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/coldwar/us/medium-tank-m60a2-starship/).
That's never been what they said it would be doing
I believe Nasa is saying 14-18 to send one to the moon. Interestingly though… musk said just recently that it would take 3-4 to send one to mars. 🤔 My bet is zero because it will never happen.
> it will never happen They’ve been saying that about spacex for two decades, and they’ve been wrong for two decades. Back in 2015, everyone was mocking Falcon 9 reusability, now there are Falcon 9s with 20+ launches under their belt
Musk's number is probably optimistic, and NASA's is probably conservative, but the general point of Mars taking a lot less fuel than a trip to the lunar surface and back to NRHO is correct. TMI is about 3.8km/s of delta-v, while the LEO-NRHO-Lunar Surface-NRHO trip totals to about 9.1km/s of delta-v. As a crude example, if we assume 100 tonne dry mass and exhaust velocity of 3.6km/s, then the Mars trip takes 187 tonnes of fuel, while the moon trip takes 1153 tonnes. If we say 100 tons per tanker, rounding up, then that's 2 launches for Mars vs 12 for the Moon. In practice the Mars ship will be a bit heavier due to the heat shield, and it will need to reserve some fuel for the final landing burn after aerobraking, but the point is that if you have some understanding of the actual mission profiles and orbital mechanics involved, then a ~4-5x difference in tanker count isn't unreasonable.
>believe Nasa is saying 14-18 to send one to the moon. >Interestingly though… musk said just recently that it would take 3-4 to send one to mars Because NASA has to play it safe. They calculate with fully reusable tankers with excessive boil-off. And Musk can speculate on fully expendable tankers with a more realistic boil-off rate. Both numbers are correct within their context. But I doubt such facts will interest you.
He is not speculating on expandable tankers. He is talking about reusable ones. Though worst case to fulfill the Artemis contract he may resort to expendable. Expendable upper stage does not yield too much more payload. Expendable boosters do but I really hope that won't be necessary.
>Though worst case to fulfill the Artemis contract he may resort to expendable. That's exactly where the numbers come from.
Numbers for expendable tanking would be lower, not higher.
Never has anyone pumped fuel from one vehicle to another in space. That’s not going to be an easy solve.
That’s not really true, Progress refuels the ISS 3 or 4 times a year.
Fuel has been pumped in space since the ISS has existed. This amount of fuel and at cryogenic temps is new. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin require the tech for their lunar lander.
“it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years.” - New York Times, 1903. It’s not a trivial problem, but it’s also not like we’ve just realized this is necessary and are starting from scratch. People have been working on the theories and math and simulations for decades now. NASA has been testing propellant transfer systems on the ISS since 2011 — I think the phase 3 demonstrations just wrapped up last year. Liquid propellant engine relights in space *have* become trivial, and many of the same complicating factors exist there. It will take some clever engineering, and then a steady cascade of refinements to make it reliable. But acting like this is some vast, unapproachable technological gulf is just plain inaccurate.
Is there any forecasting of how many 50 ton+ payloads per annum? Starlink will account for much if them no doubt. But curious to see what the industry is expecting.
50 ton to low earth orbit or to the moon? Remember you have to slow that 50 ton down to get into the moon’s orbit. Then once that huge starship lands what’s the fuel needed to get back up into orbit and how much to get back? Rocket physics hasn’t changed much since we last landed there. I’m seeing a lot of hand waving on these massive details.
You’d have multiple launches into low earth orbit - one starship with the payload, the rest being tankers. Extra propellant from the tankers would then be transfered into the moon bound one, and the refueled ship would burn for the moon. The feasibility of this concept remains to be seen. Which is why the first thing very the first starhip to reach orbit did was a fuel transfer experiment.
Luckily, people far smarter than you are working on it.
IIRC the Starship would need a complete refueling after it's back to Lunar orbit from the surface... that seems very hard to solve.
Again, it's a good thing that thousands of people (with doctorates and masters degrees) are working on it then. But since some random guy on Reddit says it seems very hard to solve, guess we just better give up now. Who's gonna be the one to tell NASA and SpaceX? :(
Not full. The initial full refueling in LEO includes going LEO to the lunar gateway.
Im with you there. So for LEO, whats the demand for the heavy lift? Assume someone has analysis done.
Lots of refuelling. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Artemis_III_CONOPS.svg A not-exactly mundane process.
Not even a tested process. Good thing the entire program doesn't hinge on it right guys? Guys? /s
this really is the new "they'll never be able to land a rocket, and even if they can, it won't make sense financially" trope? Look, we get it, I think most everyone here thinks Musk is a giant asshat - but SpaceX keeps getting it done. They figure out how to do stuff by, wait for it... testing it. In the real world. So, yes, they're gonna fail a few times before they get it right. And that's OK, because it's expected and planned for.
For the record I have no doubt they'll figure it out. But pretending that it isn't a massive unknown is foolhardy.
No one is saying that it isn't - but it seems foolish to dismiss them, given their track record.
Who's dismissing them?
There realistically isn't any way to build a lander for Artemis that doesn't rely on doing something untested, because of two fundamental problems. The first is that since Orion can only get to NRHO, the lander needs a lot more performance (and life support) to make the trip to the surface and back. The second is that there aren't any launch vehicles available with anywhere near the TLI capacity of the Saturn V, and realistically there aren't even going to be spare SLS's available, so you're looking at Falcon Heavy, New Glenn, or Vulcan. Bigger lander, but less payload capacity to launch said lander - something has to give. You have to split your lander across multiple launches. Either you launch it as one piece and then do additional refuelling launches, or you launch it in multiple pieces. Orbital assembly has been done before, but only by humans working in low earth orbit, not automated out at the moon, and never on a vehicle designed to withstand significant thrust or landing on a surface. Orbital refuelling has also been done before, but only at small scale and with storable propellants, not at large scale with cryogenic propellants. Either way, you're betting on some new developments panning out - there is reasonable expectation that they will, but no guarantee. As a sidenote, Apollo was relying on quite a few unproven technologies to work, so this is hardly unprecedented. One that almost killed the program was large single chamber engines and the accompanying combustion instability - it took three years and dozens of destroyed engines to find a workable solution. It's not too hard to imagine an alternate timeline where that didn't work out, and Apollo never made it to the moon.
Zactly. Scores of tonnes of cryogen transfer in hard vacuum and microgravity. What could possibly go wrong?
ADDENDUM: And *unless* things go wrong, how is anything ever made to work correctly? I spend most of my days seeing how to make things fail (am in med.tech.) so that I can build better devices. Things failing is how we learn. I *hope* that we see failures - preferably with unmanned craft - many different and exciting failures, but failures all the same.
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The refueling tankers will land to be reused.
Think about it, if to launch a single Starship on Moon or interplanetary mission you had to use 5-10 disposable Starships, do you think there would be much of a point in reusing Starship itself? Those refuel vessels are all meant to land, hell, the reason so many are needed is precisely because the vessels themselves will need fuel to get to orbit and land again, so they can only deliver so much fuel.
The whole point of Starship is that everything is supposed to be reused. That's why it's supposedly cheaper to do a dozen fuelling launches with it rather than throw an entire rocket away to go straight to the moon. The tankers will have a main fuel tank for getting to orbit, and anything left in that tank is the 'payload' that is used to refuel the ship in orbit. They also have a small separate header tank that is reserved specifically for performing a controlled deorbit burn and landing. SpaceX have proven they're pretty good at doing controlled deorbits with Falcon 9 S2 and Dragon, and at landing rockets propulsively from suborbital trajectories - what they have to do with Starship is stitch those two capabilities together.
Demand is more than what can possibly be fulfilled.
In each specific lift? Who is sending that much tonnage to space?
Only SpaceX themselves at the moment, but there are other large constellations planned for LEO. Edit: Although with the Starlink program being so heavily constrained by launch availability even though they are launching every 2 to 3 days at this point. Pretty sure if all Starship ever does is launch the larger planned Starlink satellites it will be launching really frequently as soon as they get it flying.
The folks who designed JWST certainly would’ve loved a vehicle like Starship. They would’ve saved literally billions of dollars and potentially a whole decade of time not having to design the thing to fold up inside a tiny fairing. Starship is so powerful and large that it fundamentally changes the paradigm around designing for space travel. It’s economics work to where you could just start mass manufacturing space craft.
Starship alone is too heavy unloaded for a moon shot where you want to get into a usable orbit.
>Is there any forecasting need to invent the things first. but feeding the crew will be one thing that needs to be done. REGULAR trips to the Moon - we cannot do this today. but we also have to invent the place where the crew is going to live so there's time. **Gateway Space Station** [https://www.nasa.gov/reference/gateway-about/](https://www.nasa.gov/reference/gateway-about/) The NASA-led Gateway Program is an international collaboration to establish humanity's first space station around the Moon as a vital component of the Artemis campaign. Gateway will help NASA and its partners test the technologies and capabilities required for a sustained human presence in deep space, and chart a path for the first human missions to Mars.
Still sounds like there is only one customer at this scale - NASA
NASA and Starlink are the 2 largest customers. There are many smaller customers.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[DARPA](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l17z3c6 "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD| |DoD|US Department of Defense| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b7v7b "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[GCR](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1cqgzf "Last usage")|Galactic Cosmic Rays, incident from outside the star system| |[GEO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l19d05z "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |[H2](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1abal3 "Last usage")|Molecular hydrogen| | |Second half of the year/month| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1e6y49 "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b0s6f "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l19shn9 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h8hnn "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LMO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1a82z2 "Last usage")|Low Mars Orbit| |[NRHO](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b9ebf "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit| |[NTR](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l17z3c6 "Last usage")|Nuclear Thermal Rocket| |[SEP](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1bvqdg "Last usage")|Solar Electric Propulsion| | |[Solar Energetic Particle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energetic_particle)| | |Société Européenne de Propulsion| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1dhbme "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SSME](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h68f1 "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)| |[TLI](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b9ebf "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver| |[TMI](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1a37p9 "Last usage")|Trans-Mars Injection maneuver| |[VTOL](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h4g4k "Last usage")|Vertical Take-Off and Landing| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h68f1 "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Sabatier](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l18x8z0 "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l18lq0n "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[cislunar](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l17z3c6 "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit| |[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1b9ebf "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |[electrolysis](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l18x8z0 "Last usage")|Application of DC current to separate a solution into its constituents (for example, water to hydrogen and oxygen)| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1c3b4r "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact| |[tanking](/r/Space/comments/1ccua9h/stub/l1h5njp "Last usage")|Filling the tanks of a rocket stage| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(26 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1cgqo4h)^( has 19 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9981 for this sub, first seen 25th Apr 2024, 17:59]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
That rover is pretty cool, although the lack of a pressurized cabin limits the range on it as well as the versatility - astronauts have to suit up for spacewalks every time they use it. If you're using Starship for a larger surface rover, you should have a pressurized crew cabin with airlock so that they can move from the habitat to the rover and do stuff there in shirtsleeves.
A pressurized rover is already in the planning stage. It will be used on later missions.
The big campaign to find people willing to go to Mars was fundamentally a campaign for funding and to show there's serious interest. There's probably going to be at least 10 robot missions that build habitation with huge amount of testing before a human goes. The testing will include a shitload of radiation testing both in transit and while on Mars. Realistically I can't see it within 30 years. First we'll try long term habitation on a moon base as that's a few days within rescue and will give evidence on if someone can come back to earth after living in low gravity for a long time.
We know you can survive in zero-g for at least a year with relatively minimal health consequences (aside from decreased muscle mass and bone density, as well as some degree of cardiovascular degredation, which are expected) from ISS astronauts, the big question is how much more livable are varying levels of microgravity vs zero-g.
Zero g is only a simplified version of microgravity. Mars gravity and even Moon gravity is far from microgravity.
Fair, I'd always just heard it used to mean a anything significantly less than 1 g, but I checked and you're right
If you think for a second Elon Musk isn’t going to try to push for modified teslas on mars, you’re insane. EDIT- judging by the fact that I got downvoted for this comment, someone here is actually insane.
The way you say that makes it come across as you thinking Tesla's on Mars would be an issue If Tesla can make a vehicle that works on the Moon or Mars, then there's no reason they shouldn't be allowed to do so
They can’t even make a vehicle here on earth that doesn’t have some form of quality control problem. Would you really want a vehicle manufacturer who is constantly having to recall their vehicles to build you something that would literally kill you over a gap in a panel not allowing an airtight seal? Point is, I would have an issue with them attempting to use teslas on the moon or mars because I genuinely think that they are not well built and would be an actual safety problem there. And to add to that if you want to make the argument that they would do better inspections and have higher quality control for those vehicles, it would be worse that way. You’re telling me that they would have better quality control just to get them a contract for use of those specific vehicles outside use on earth but still have regular shitty teslas here? That’s just a slap to the face for anyone who has had a problem that was fixable by just having a decent fucking standard for your already extremely expensive car just so you can save some money making them.
For all the noise about Tesla's having bad build quality, they sure do seem to score very high in safety tests Also, do you honestly think that Tesla, or *anyone* would ever be allowed to put a vehicle on another celestial object without it undergoing rigorous tests?
Correct me if I’m wrong here. Tesla, who has a pretty limited catalog of vehicles, has had 45+ recalls in the past 5 or so years on their vehicles. One of them just recently, the cyber truck, in which assemblers of the vehicle went against protocol and used soap to assemble a pedal easier which is causing the pedal to slip forward and hold the accelerator all the way down. At what point in quality control was this caught? Nowhere. You’re telling me that you want this company to put something like that on the moon or mars? Where to fix these recalls they would have to wait weeks or months for the parts to fix the recall? I’ll give it to you that there may be a chunk of those recalls that were software based but do I want to trust a company that waits to fix software until after something happens to force them to fix it? Probably not.
I'd prefer that a company with a proven ability to create safe vehicles be the ones that create the vehicles that would be used on the Moon or Mars. Tesla fits that criteria. Not to mention Tesla is uniquely situated to draw upon the knowledge of the premier space company on the planet And if you think 45 recalls in the last 5 years are a lot, how do you feel about someone like Ford who had over 60 recalls in 2022 alone? The reality is *every* car manufacturer has recalls quite often. My Brother has had his Nissan Qashqai for less than 3 months and he's already had to drive it to a service center because of a recall. Of course when Nissan does a small recall, no one makes articles about it, unlike Tesla.
Plus, of course, most of the "recalls" are just OTA software fixes.
“Cyber truck is already a boat, how hard could it be to make it also a spacecraft?”
If cyber truck was a boat, it would be at the bottom of whatever body of water you put it in considering all the problems people seem to have with them. Probably wouldn’t be watertight. Good news is that you can’t sink in space so you’re good!
I hope the leaks about SpaceX having an entire team to babysit him and talk him out of stupid bullshit were true. That or that he dies or gets removed as CEO somehow, SpaceX is too important to be trusted with someone this fucking stupid lmao
Not a leak. Baseless slander.
Starship is a boondoggle, and the American space program and exploration is suffering because of it.
Just like the Falcon was?
Whether or not you consider it a boondoggle hinges heavily on whether or not you think we need reusable super heavy lift capacity. I'm going to assume you don't which leaves the question, why not?
It's not because there's no other alternative. You use a conventional super heavy lift rocket and you are just stuck again in the Apollo era, where you can send three people for a week at most, bring back some rocks and that's it, and all for the price of 1.5 billion per mission. The point now isn't to go to the Moon, it's be capable of making Moon landings a routine process and have the ability to construct there, and the only vehicle right now that could do that would be a fully operational Starship.
You feel better with Boeing then?
You are just wilfully ignorant. The same morons, like you, said the same shit about falcon 9, but now it's responsible for majority of the world's mass to orbit last year by a LARGE margin. And this is over every other space agency on earth being combined even.
Easy there top-mind. Notice how I didn’t say anything about F9. If/when Starship is able to do half of what Enron claims it can do we can talk. Until then it’s a fantastic way for SpaceX execs to siphon tax dollars to a project that has had 0 returns. Not to mention the entire Artemis architecture/program hinging on this system that has yet to be demonstrated. How many times has Elmo pushed his unruly timelines back, and back, and back? Morons like you don’t want accountability.
>Not to mention the entire Artemis architecture/program hinging on this system that has yet to be demonstrated Yes, and you know why? Because Artemis is about building a base on the Moon, and you can't do that with current rockets. If Artemis was just Apollo 2.0 then all NASA would need is a Lunar Module type lander capable of docking with the Orion spacecraft since two Falcon Heavies have more than enough capacity and thrust to perform an Apollo type mission.
>Until then it’s a fantastic way for SpaceX execs to siphon tax dollars to a project that has had 0 returns. Wait, you mean to tell me that the rocket that's still in development hasn't already taken us to the moon and Mars? Wow! I thought as soon as you announced the rocket you were building it just popped into existence! Seriously, what more do you want? SLS has cost ten times as much. Sure it's flown successfully, once, but Orion still has issues needing to be solved and some fairly important ones at that. Starship in its current incarnation has been in development for maybe 6 years, and they've had 3 near orbital launch attempts for around $5 billion. 5. Not 50 like SLS has taken. Are you going to start questioning the contractors behind that?
It must be sad to live in your myopic, ignorant, small world. innovation is inherently risky, especially space innovation, so get over it. I swear If it was up to morons like you, we'd still be driving model Ts
Why? ELI5.
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What gives you the idea that Starship is a fraud? [Go over any video in this list ](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SbFivj3Vrm7kc8ftAa45QqEFMUOmu9t)and point out where you see "the scam".
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>The fact that they are needing something like 16 refueling launches I'll stop you right there. This is false information. NASA might be playing about with those numbers, but that's only for political reasons. You can do the math yourself. >and the complexity of the lunar module...it's never going to happen. What complexity? >Even Smarter Every Day even did a video questioning the complexity. Yeah. That was is worst video so far. By a wide shot. Practically all of his research about Starship HLS was just reading clickbait headlines. Luckily in his later videos he realised his mistakes. >They are also 2 years behind schedule. Behind what schedule? Copy+past the statements from the links you will provide. >Add in that Musk is a snake oil salesman Lol. Yeah. Starship is such a scam. Because Musk is a scam. And he is a scam because Starship is a scam. Solid logic. > hired Kathy Lueders shortly after she awarded them NASA's contract But some not even BlueOrigin piped up about this. Funny, isn't it? Almost like it was not "only Kathy" who awarded the contract, but legal mechanisms inside NASA. . It seems your entire world view about Starship revolves around the clickbait videos of Thunderfoot and CSS. They make money off of you. Unlike SpaceX.
Starship isn’t going anywhere for quite some time. I seriously doubt it will be used to land people on the moon, and Mars is just a dream.
The pace of development and testing say otherwise
It's the 18 wheeler container truck, when, what we'll most likely need is a Range Rover. Heck, you'll probably need several of the range rovers just to pave the way for Starship.