RCgothic

I wonder if the skirt could also be dumped on an expendable version as an interstage Saturn S-II style. ... And immediately I've talked myself out of that idea because for best effect it'll still need refuelling in LEO or higher and that's where the gear's kept.

And oldish tweet, but thought I'd leave this here so as not to further derail the blue origin thread with discussion of starship.

Well they may not seek to demonstrate the next milestone if they haven't been paid for the last. It'll make no difference to Starship's general development, agreed.

If NASA can't make the payment milestones because of funding not released by Congress, progress will slow down. Some in Congress would then seek to pin the delay on SpaceX.

I'm not completely convinced it means 100+mt of pure payload as opposed to payload + residual fuel. Very few rockets actually lift their nominal payload to LEO. But 100t to LEO fuel inclusive? Dead cert.

Yes, BO are literally planning to try and hit a moving target.

The endless frontiers bill is specifically about maintaining US technical leadership over China. Therefore references to China are relevant to the main bill topic. The amendment relating to HLS is actually pretty legislatively off-topic.

Launch integration tower is about to start growing pretty darn quick.

They also couldn't test fire any of the actual engine flight articles for N1. They were one-use items. Individual engines were tested, but not any that would fly, and not any together. Raptor gets extensively prefired at McGregor before it ever gets near Starship/Superheavy. And whilst Superheavy won't have any *full duration* static fires before flight, we do still expect to see static fires. Plus modern computational fluid dynamics is *way* better than what they had in the 60s.

Well.

Artemis II requires at least a 20 month minimum turnaround because it's reusing Artemis I's avionics. Assuming a March 2022 launch of Artemis I, that's pushing A-II towards 2024.

Loads of cranes around now, it's hard to keep track!

Seen some speculation on r/spaceX that a second high/midbay may be about to begin construction, based on RGV aerial flyover and concrete slab production. Would make sense, the current high bay is pretty congested.

Exactly. Mars may not be for everyone. We're also going to need space stations and moon bases and deep space expenditions. But are those ever going to happen? Without something like Starship they won't.

Bottom line, SpaceX do want to colonize Mars, and they're aware that will take millions of tons of downmass. They've designed a system that will be capable of that. Whether or not that actually happens, the Earth-centric uses of such a capable system will be transformative.

When they can reuse the booster stages might be determined by availability of Phobos and Deimos. Alternatively, they may be allowed to attempt to land at Starbase after demonstrating a successful soft landing in the gulf. Starship / Booster pairings are probably just planning for the worst case. If they start managing to recover boosters I'm sure the pairings will change.

At the risk of further derailing the thread, I'm amazed how slow US road speeds are despite being such a gigantic place. In the UK single carriageway roads have a limit of 60mph, with dual carriageways 70mph. These limits are regularly disregarded by a large proportion of the population (they're only half-heartedly enforced, mostly by fixed cameras). Traffic allowing, it's common for vehicles to travel 15mph over that limit, and any motorway trip will usually have at least someone doing 100+.

Here's an estimate, keeping in mind that there's a version 4m longer that's in the Starship customer guide. Still not sure whether the nominal 100-150t payload is actual solid payload or inclusive of residual propellant though. Also this:

Wow, what a frankenrocket.

The problem with cross-feed has always been seamless switchover between tanks, and it just occurred to me that there is a company that knows how to do that. SpaceX swaps the final raptor on starship from main to header tanks before cutoff.

Also Elon stating what we'd all figured out already:

The orbital launch mount is getting some extra extensions it seems:

Robert Zubrin was very critical of Dynetics: "3. While clearly better on a conceptual level than the National Team offering, the Dynetics design never really had a chance, because the team behind it was not credible enough to be given responsibility for something of such central importance to the space program. Rather, they were given a nice chunk of change in order to assure a wide base of support for Artemis." So a better idea, but not credibly going to acheive success due to the team (as was born out in NASA's selection document).

Looks like Vostok did actually complete a full circle though (the ground track moves), and had to retrofire to get down.