sh1pman

10 million tons to orbit per year is enough material to build a Stanford torus in just one year. You know, an orbital megastructure with artificial gravity for 10,000 people.

It’s probably the closest thing to a proper alien invasion that we have a chance to ever experience. Unless the Knights of Titan decide to launch their Great Crusade first. Moon flights make sense only if they include landing and surface stay, otherwise it’s no different to LEO. For tourism the Moon needs infrastructure like landing pads, habitat, etc. Wouldn’t want to just land in the middle of nowhere. So, it’s likely not in the near future.

LEO tourism, hopefully. Bigelow can get involved, building even larger inflatables. LEO internet will be monopolized for the foreseeable future. Things like space burial or reentry-cremation. Near Asteroid mining for valuable metals - maybe. P2P - can’t really see it happening. Mars stuff - probably won’t create any markets for a looong time.

Yes, I should’ve specified that I meant total cost, including vehicle cost and dev cost.

In a war with Russia you won’t need tanks, though. Yea, makes oldspace look ridiculously bad. Still, in order to have such a low price it needs to fly A LOT. Starlink helps quite a bit here.

https://spacenews.com/elon-musk-space-pitch-day/

A warning would sound really silly. “To enemy military command: we’ve launched a suborbital rocket into your territory, but it’s only a special forces company, no nukes! Promise!”

The artist was underpaid.

NASA had a chance to lower the SLS rocket’s cost—but it stuck with Boeing https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-rejects-blue-origins-offer-of-a-cheaper-upper-stage-for-the-sls-rocket/

I understood it as frequent daily flights from the same spaceport (Starport? ), which is mind blowing.

Frequent daily flights?.. Come on, that’s crazy talk, even for someone like Elon Musk.

Good, light Angara is useless anyway.

thicc

Elon mentioned that the next gen rocket after Starship will be 18m wide. I wonder how they’re going to solve the TWR problem.

Unrelated: are there factors that are negatively affected by square-cube law when scaling up rockets? I can only think of one: TWR. A rocket that is scaled up by a factor of n in all dimensions will have its wet mass increased by ~n^3, but surface area available for mounting engines will only increase by a factor of n^2. So in order to maintain constant TWR you’ll need engines with more thrust/m^2 or some kind of widening base for mounting even more engines.

On the other hand, developing several smaller Starship-derived aerospace vehicles will cost more, take longer, and not necessarily make the whole enterprise easier. We’ll see.

Hard to tell. I’ve never done anything like that, so you’ll have to experiment a bit more.

Yeah, I have some criticism of his analysis, but not his calculations, which are the interesting parts. His TLI and LEO variants require the development of a completely new 100+ ton spacecraft, massively reduce payload to Mars, over exaggerate the problem of needing 2-3 more tanker flights (not a problem with reusable system) and that Mars Starships can’t be reused for at least 2.5 years (also not a problem, as there won’t be that many Mars ‘ships compared to tankers and sat lifters). But the biggest problem with his vision is that Musk’s plan is to have “one ship to rule them all”. A single rocket with few specialized upper stage variants to do everything from LEO sat lifting to Mars colonization.

Radiators don’t work like that, they only dissipate core heat from things like drills and ISRU parts, not reentry heat. Battery is very light, which means very low thermal mass, which makes it heat up or cool down very quickly. Try sticking something a bit heavier in there.

Don’t know if it was posted here or not, but Robert Zubrin wrote a paper titled “Mars Direct 2.0” describing different Starship Mars mission variants. Very interesting reading, lots of calculations. Starship specs may be just slightly off (from the latest info), but it shouldn’t affect the results. http://www.pioneerastro.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Mars-Direct-2.0-How-to-Send-Humans-to-Mars-Using-Starships.pdf

I think they overheat because of regular heat transfer from the hot heat shield. Try putting something else between the heat shield and the ladders. Maybe a girder or a structural panel or something like that.

Elon said ITS was going to be 12m wide, but now we’re getting a 9m wide Starship! What is this nonsense!? ELON LIED TO US!!!

Right, not even a competition for SpaceX.

It’s 50M now (for a reused rocket), and we have no idea how much they spend on one such launch. Maybe it’s 25M. Then there’s room for further price reduction.

No boom: didn’t push hard enough