Rakaydos

The problem is that battery technology requires maintaining a reasonable temperature, or it bricks itself. Without power to run the heaters, there's no battry left to run the heaters, and it becomes a braindead zombie rover that only walks in the day.

Solar panel degredation wasn't part of the conversation concerning Opportunity- Randal Munrow joked about Opportunity lasting another hundred years. Depending on the isotope, the solar panels actually held up better than some of the lighter radiothermal generators, that use shorter half lives. As for your car not having as good of parts as NASA... why not?

The rover is dead because it hasn't been to a mechanic in 15 years. How long would YOUR car last without maintinance?

Oh. And here I thought you were describing a simple "crew payload module" for the chomper. the problems of which center on getting the chomper door out of the way. But now it seems you're going back to the "saw Starship in half and make 1 of the halves a mini starship" plan.

Sounds reasonable, if you ignore the elephant in the room for any abort system. What kind of explosive bolts work when you need it, but not when the thing they're attached to is 1200 degrees? The Hot Structure design (where needed heat shield performance is reduced by using structural members as a heat sink) means SPaceX is using pure mechanical systems... but can a mechanical system be fast enough to handle an abort scenerio?

Between the higher angle of attack and the empty fuel tanks, it has both more area and less density. Shuttle ditched the primary fuel tank just short of orbit- the rest of the shuttle is packed full.

And it sounds like they're testing throttle responce, too.

At a million dollars per launch and 100 tons of mixed cargo, the transport costs are $10 per kg. That's probably the upper bound of when point to point cargo starts making sense.

Amazon 2-day delivery, for one.

If there's enough of any one thing for a dedicated flight, they can make a dedicated cargo for it. Intermodal is all about mixed cargos.

The whole point of the Intermodal shipping standard is that it really doesn't matter.

a 100 ton capacity BFS has the radius to fit 3x 20' intermodal shipping containers side by side, which if fully loaded mass 91.2 tons.

So I re-raised the idea of escape capsules over on NSF. You might be interested in the views of people who are a little more serious about it than people who follow a space-themed computer game. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=47052.msg1908823#msg1908823

The stainless steel hopper is scheduled to fly every other day, so daily flight probably arnt as far away as you think.

Note that I specified 21st century accident rates for a 26th century rocket. Airliner reliability will no doubt improve as well.

It's easier to give an aquatic creature a G tank. Plays hell with the mass budget though.

Do you really think SpaceX will stop iterating and improving until rockets get to airliner reliability? Not saying the 2024 mars rocket will have that reliability, but by 2599, if spaceX hasn't gone the way of Rocosmos, their rocket flights will be safer than a 21th century airliner flight.

Luddite. :p

The "40 pumps" (it's actually 76 pumps, 2 pumps per engine) let Starship be less than 1/4 the size of Sea dragon. Those pumps are expensive, but that doesn't actually matter when you can just land it and refuel.

Sea Dragon was designed to be built 100% in a naval shipyard in the 60s/70s by unskilled workers. That includes the massive engine, which meant that the engine really couldn't be that complex. A pressure fed bipropellant engine is about two steps up from a bottle rocket/cold gas thruster in complexity, and something the designer thought was manageable at shipyard tolerances, instead of rocket-science tolerances. Mueller isn't building Raptor in a marsh in texas, though Elon may for the rest of the rocket. It's small enough to be put on a truck, so there's no problem building it elsewhere and installing it there. He can design it to be the best reusable rocket engine, not just in the world, but the best that an experienced early 21 century rocket engineer is capable of designing with effectively unlimited design funding. "Merlin has the best TWR in the world, but Raptor is coming."

Technically, they only needed to match falcon 9's absolute accuracy- the larger superheavy means the RELATIVE accuracy is much smaller. Missing by a meter is 1/3 a falcon, but 1/9 a starship, after all.

less ability to land in rough earth weather, so point to point is out till the RCS is upgraded. Certantly no landing in launch clamps for Superheavy.

During hoverslam, the Starship is already subsonic. Abort thrusters can easily zero vertical velocity that and rotate for parachute deployment. it may not be gentle, but we're talking requirements for NASA here, not civilians willing to sign a waiver.

So the best you can come up with is that it MIGHT not be enough?

Pair of OTS Dragon2 capsules mounted in the Starship's main cargo hatches, to carry the 14 passangers of the DearMoon mission, or equivilant flights. Emergency Life support for the entire trip, reentry capability, orbital maneuvering ability, and the ability to horizontally abort in the event of a launch failure, using the Superdraco thrusters. (programmed to curve the trajectory upward if they deploy without the altitude for parachutes)