totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[magnemoe]

58 minutes ago, Flying dutchman said:

It would be awesome if they put some kind of barge out there for a future launch. It can land om the skirt i think. It won't be pretty but they'll at least have a post reentry starship to examine.

Guess you would get lots of over pressure on touchdown.  Now having some sort of open framework to land on and it probably work if dense enough for the skirt to land on but open enough to avoid over pressure. 
Probably some perforated plate held up by an frame. 

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

Current thinking is that direct aero to landing won’t work for crewed without capture burn, iirc.  G forces I think?

For sure aero-capture before going in for landing seems like a must for safety margin if no other reason. Might even be worth transferring to a purpose-built reusable lander in mars orbit rather than trying to land the interplanetary transfer stage? 

Edited 5 hours ago by Pthigrivi

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

For sure aero-capture before going in for landing seems like a must for safety margin if no other reason. Might even be worth transferring to a purpose-built reusable lander in mars orbit rather than trying to land the interplanetary transfer stage? 

My thought to,  have return ship stay in Mars orbit. its also set up for zero-g living, lander is it and an temporary base. 
ISRU is the main objective but not needed for return flight. 

[darthgently]

Not sure if posted yet:

“…automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt”

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-6

 

[Pthigrivi]

Exactly. I have real doubts about the economic viability of a mars colony but I think starship if it works presents above all the opportunity for high-mass, high-redundancy in space, given these initial missions to the moon and mars are funded by the US government. It becomes a pleasant face for spending billions in taxpayer dollars on dominance in space and maybe between starlink and some private contracts that accounts for the demand-need starship's PE investors are depending on for realized returns. Boeing is basically done and Bezos is not much better so there's a strong case for merging the SX monopoly with government in a way they think will be competitive with China's regulatory attitude toward its own space endeavors. I think given the pretty clear advantage they have in terms of cost/mass to orbit even if the US administration changes they're well positioned--unless they do something stupid and kill a bunch of people. Hopefully not.

But let's say given a chaotic future starship remains publicly and privately funded and we have orbital payload, tanker, and moonlander variants. At this point we're launching dozens of starships into space. You'll need first a proof of concept, unmanned lander on mars. Great. Maybe that even happens in 2026 or maybe the aerobrake fails and it blows up. Eventually you want multiple ISRU variants, unmanned equipment delivery variants, probably Mars orbital station component delivery, potentially more efficient reusable NERVA or NSWR transfer systems... like at what point is Starship honestly best suited as a simple mass-to-orbit platform and all of the actual to-mars equipment maybe based on a different platform and starship is just delivering THAT platform to orbit? Like originally Dragon was advertised as a mars lander. That was... not it. Maybe Starship aint it either? Just a means to an end?

Edited 3 hours ago by Pthigrivi

[darthgently]

1 minute ago, Pthigrivi said:

Exactly. I have real doubts about the economic viability of a mars colony but I think starship if it works presents above all the opportunity for high-mass, high-redundancy in space, given these initial missions to the moon and mars are funded by the US government. It becomes a pleasant face for spending billions in taxpayer dollars on dominance in space and maybe between starlink and some private contracts that accounts for the demand-need starship's PE investors are depending on for realized returns. Boeing is basically done and Bezos is not much better so there's a strong case for merging the SX monopoly with government in a way they think will be competitive with China's regulatory attitude toward its own space endeavors. I think given the pretty clear advantage they have in terms of cost/mass to orbit even if the US administration changes they're well positioned--unless they do something stupid and kill a bunch of people. Hopefully not.

But let's say given a chaotic future starship remains publicly and privately funded and we have orbital payload, tanker, and moonlander variants. At this point we're launching dozens of starships into space. You'll need first a proof of concept, unmanned lander on mars. Great. Maybe that even happens in 2026 or maybe the aerobrake fails and it blows up. Eventually you want multiple ISRU variants, unmanned equipment delivery variants, probably Mars orbital station component delivery, potentially more efficient reusable NERVA transfer systems... like at what point is Starship honestly best suited as a simple mass-to-orbit platform and all of the actual to-mars equipment maybe based on a different platform and starship is just delivering THAT platform to orbit? Like originally Dragon was advertised as a mars lander. That was... not it. Maybe Starship aint it either? Just a means to an end?

Wot?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 hours ago, AckSed said:

accelerated look

The impressive thing for me is the buoy cam; tells everyone they hit their mark.

25 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Maybe Starship aint it either? Just a means to an end?

Entirely possible.  But as a "Get tons of stuff to space" platform - I'm guessing we can all agree that the capability is there (for expendable stage, if not yet routine reuse).  Still, this is the 'farthest along' of any 'land massive stuff on Mars' program.  Possible that SS won't be the final product.  Imagine the excitement, however, once they start trying to land there.

From a "gotta start somewhere" perspective - this is pretty much 'somewhere'.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Entirely possible.  But as a "Get tons of stuff to space" platform - I'm guessing we can all agree that the capability is there (for expendable stage, if not yet routine reuse).  Still, this is the 'farthest along' of any 'land massive stuff on Mars' program.  Possible that SS won't be the final product.  Imagine the excitement, however, once they start trying to land there.

From a "gotta start somewhere" perspective - this is pretty much 'somewhere'.

Oh for sure. Its basically already 2 generations ahead of the competition. The heatshield  may prove a bugaboo for true second stage reusability “like an airplane” but a lot of progress has been made and I have high hopes for version 2. Time will tell. My real worries for starship are economic. Starlink is cool but the vast majority of the world’s population is already being more affordably served by terrestrial fiber optic and cell service. It’ll be interesting to see starlink’s market penetration beyond rural and beyond-last-mile customers. Same with private big-mass to orbit customers. Maybe the demand is there or maybe its not. This is all very build it and they will come and its either the internet or its 3d tv, or AR, or self driving cars. Potentially revolutionary or maybe its DoA or perpetually 10 years from breaking out. Either way Starship really needs those fat government contracts to the moon and beyond as a reliable income stream to justify the overhead in the short term. Hence the marketing and the campaign finance bribes. 
 

Like its weird we’re not talking about starship and asteroid mining, which has some actual long term economic viability. The reason we’re not talking about that is it would need to pass actual quantitative muster on investment horizons.  If it did that would be the pitch in Spacex’s PE funding rounds, but its not.  Instead we’re talking about Mars because your average US senator is prone more to legacy and vanity than ROI. The attractiveness Starship presents to Goldman and Saudi Arabia is that it’s kind of got lock on US space contracts both military and civil, and maybe some upside on Starlink and private launch contracts. SpaceX potentially assuming the lion’s share of US taxpayer investment in space over the next few years  probably looks like a decent fallback.

 

Edited 1 hour ago by Pthigrivi