> The fully integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle will be approximately 400 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.
For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top.
It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.
There have been ships made of concrete which I always found interesting. Ferrocement (I believe) is a form of boatcraft that can be done in your backyard without any special tools.
I've walked along the length of the rocket at NASA in Houston. It's massive and to think it took all that power to get that tiny capsule to the moon with a few men. Pretty amazing...
The Starship is designed to carry 100 people. SpaceX will be able to send more people to the moon in one mission than all the moon landings ever sent. Wow...
There's another Saturn V you can walk the length of in Huntsville, AL. It made quite an impression on me -- on first sight from below it's like that opening scene in Star Wars IV when the Star Destroyer hoves into view.
Also one in Florida at the Cape. Amazing perspective to see it in person. I've never seen a picture that came close to the impression from seeing it in person.
More than that actually, it takes I think 3 tankers to fully top up a Starship in orbit, and the Lunar model needs to go into an elliptical orbit towards the moon and have at least one more top up again before having enough fuel for the rest of the mission.
It’s interesting. Going to the moon, propulsive my landing, and propulsively taking off and returning to Earth takes more dV than just a boost to Mars. If you think about it boosting to Luna and Mars aren’t much different in dV, but then you have lunar landing and takeoff again to do. Even with a very thin atmosphere, you can still shed the vast majority of your interplanetary velocity with aero braking at Mars.
As a result the Lunar variant actually needs a lot more fuel delivered to it than the Mars version. Even one full refuel in LEO isn’t enough, and it needs to boost part way to an intermediate elliptical orbit and get another top up.
Genuine question, how will tankers get into space? If most of the ship's size is already dedicated to fuel that's burnt, that seems to leave little left for fuel payload. I also assume fuel payload would be much heavier than other types of payload, requiring more ship fuel to launch it, further taking up space.
It seems like for every full refill you could provide in space it'd take an additional 3-4 ships just to get it up there?
The tyranny of the rocket equation, combined with Earth's deep gravity well, and the higher efficiency of rocket engines in vacuum makes it seem much worse than it is.
E.g. for a lunar mission: it takes 9.4 km/s Δv to get to low Earth orbit (LEO), but only 5.5 km/s Δv to get from there to the Moon [1]. Raptor (the engine used on Starship) has an exhaust velocity of 3.2 km/s on Earth, and 3.7 km/s in vacuum [2]. Plugging those numbers in the rocket equation, to get to LEO you need about 19x your payload mass in fuel. However, to get from LEO to the moon surface, you only need 4x your payload mass in fuel. So while a tanker can indeed only bring a small fraction of its launch mass as fuel to orbit, once you're in orbit you don't need that much fuel to get to the moon.
In reality the numbers to get to LEO are lower because of staging and the vacuum engines on Starship which can be used in the upper atmosphere, and you also need fuel to get back from the moon, but it probably won't add up to a full Starship.
About that yes, but remember that a fully loaded starship in orbit can land on any solid surface in the solar system and return to earth (except for Venus)
Starship’s usable volume is over 100 times that of an Apollo lunar lander.
You could also add 3-4 extra stages and put an even bigger tanker into space. But I guess there will be diminishing returns due to the crushing weight. It would probably be cheaper to make many smaller unmanned vessels and boost them via an electromagnetic rail, then assemble it in orbit.
Why not launch a bunch of larger payload tanker bays, empty, then link them together in orbit and then send Many smaller multiple regular trips to fill it up such that you have an orbital fueling station?
My layman’s understanding is that doubling the payload quadruples the fuel requirement. So it is much more efficient to launch multiple rockets with a small amount of fuel than one big one with all the fuel you need. It’s the difference between O(n) and O(n^2).
I never noticed this, but after thinking about it for a few minutes it seems that in standard usage there is a difference between attributive adjectives and predicative adjectives.
As an attributive adjective, "foot" is indeed correct, e.g. "a 130 foot yacht."
As a predicative adjective, "feet" is correct, e.g. "the yacht was 130 feet long."
Occasionally, in certain regional variations, you may hear "foot" used in the second case: "the yacht was 130 foot long."
They've already done it[0], and it was a complete success until a propellant pressure issue resulted in lower than needed thrust, and a hard impact on the pad.
It oriented almost perfectly. I'm truly amazed at what SpaceX has accomplished so far. Just need to stick that landing a few dozen more times. It's quite a reorientation.
Curious why does it need to wait so long to reorient? I thought it was going to crash and in last few hundred feet, it flipped! Can it orient straight - way up in the air like Falcon boosters?
Reorienting requires the use of main engines. You want to relight them only once, to ensure that the header tanks and the "downcomer" remain full. Additionally you want to burn off as much speed as possible with the bellyflop, so flipping vertical as late as possible. All combined this means combining the landing burn with the flip is best, as close to landing as possible.
It actuallyoriented perfectly, but due to the flip, fuel pressure was lost leading an oxygen rich exhaust eating away the engine (becoming what's known as engine rich exhaust) before it was able to complete the landing burn. They should just have to fix the fuel pressure problem to have a complete success.
Real rocket science teams really use phrases like this, including this one. Is it a joke? Yeah, kind of. Is it what they would say if they had no sense of humour? No, probably not. Is it still a thing the experts actually say to actually talk about what's going on? Yeah, it is.
a few more examples:
"Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" : explosive destruction of the rocket
"Lithobraking" : it's like aerobraking, but with less aero and more litho
The rocket weighs quite a bit less at the end, having used most of its fuel, so only two engines are needed to land. The engines cannot be throttled down more than ~50% (as all rocket engines), so a third one would add too much thrust.
Falcon 9 does the same, relighting 3 engines (out of 9 total) for the boostback burn, 3 for the entry burn and then just 1 for landing.
For that flight the engines are even too powerful for the ascent (it wasn't fully fueled, I think) and as soon as they couldn't throttle any lower, an engine was turned off instead.
They didn’t launch humans on the Falcon 9 for the first 10 years either. Lots of time to iron out the kinks (though it will likely be much less than 10 years this time)
My guess would be it will still have a launch escape system for the passenger variant. So if the belly flop doesn't look right or if it doesn't stick the landing it just ejects the crew.
Well Everyday Astronaut did a long article and YouTube video about why starship won’t have a launch abort system. [1] I don’t believe I’ve watched the video but I remembered it exists so I thought I’d share.
Where would you put a 100 person LES? I don’t think a solid rocket escape system would work in the belly flop position anyways since you wouldn’t gain any altitude, you’d actually be making it more dangerous since you’d be increasing horizontal velocity. Airliners don’t have ejection seats or parachutes.
All of standalone LES activation ever in the history of human spaceflight had been successful in saving all occupants' lives.
Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.
So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.
Which manned abort in 1963 is that specifically? Why are you trying to skew discussion into some direction?
Note: LES stands for Launch Escape System, usually a small solid rocket that activates in case of a failure during ascent to take the manned capsule away from exploding rocket under it, perhaps equivalent to airbags in a car.
People gets hurt by airbags all the time trying to service them. That doesn’t tell if it’s worth having them in actual situations they’re designed for, nor whether the situations are worth preparing for.
It is relevant. If (giving an extreme example to make the point), statistically two humans were killed servicing airbags for every life saved by airbags, cars wouldn’t have airbags (with possible exceptions for cars of the super rich and super important such as the POTUS)
Also, an escape system adds weight to a rocket. That weight could be used for other stuff that makes the rest of the system more reliable (slightly stronger fuel tanks, redundant pumps, whatever). Designing the escape system also takes resources away that could be used to improve the safety of the primary system.
For rockets, it’s not easy to decide what’s the best choice; we launch too few of them, and the ones we launch change too often to gather reliable statistics. Getting real-world data on the reliability of escape systems definitely is hard, as it requires numerous rocket failures or elaborate test setups (a full test must include high speed and an explosion that may throw material through the engine of the escape capsule)
> All of standalone LES activation ever in the history of human spaceflight had been successful in saving all occupants' lives.
> Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.
> So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.
Is this supposed to be a recursion joke? Sorry if I'm not getting it.
It's often used for a "trivial or minor fact" but by comparison with planetoid (something like a planet but not a planet) or cuboid (like a cube but not an actual cube) or asteroid (looks like a star but is not a star) or humanoid / android (having the form of a human or man while not actually being one), you can see what the 'correct' usage should be.
Trivial fact would perhaps be better as 'factette' or 'microfact'.
I have also heard people use it to describe a "bite sized fact". The "oid" part of the word, for some people, seems to mean "small" or "compartmentalized".
In this incorrect usage of the word, take the following sentence: "Nice little factoid!", could also be written as "Nice little nugget of info!"
I live on a partly forested hill that towers about 250 ft over the river valley where the railway is. When I go to the railway station and wait for a train, the hill is really dominant on the near horizon.
And whenever I realize that the full Starship + SuperHeavy stack is going to be much taller than that hill, I am just speechless. That is one big freaking rocket, one big trampoline for mankind, so to say.
Yes it is. Starship, the part that will end up in orbit is longer than the truss section, which is the longest section of the ISS and has the solar panels on it. At the crash sight of SN8 watching the people walk around the wreckage, it gave a good indication of scale.
Starship alone (the orbiter) is 50m. The truss of the ISS is 109m[1] long. While massive, Starship will still be dwarfed by the station (other than planned habitable volume or individual modules/elements).
2001 predicted we'd be permanently living in the moon with orbital space hotels two decades ago, and no one ever thought they were being unreasonable if we kept the same momentum as the 60s, so yes it's sad. But we have to take things for what they are and what spacex is doing is definitely progress.
Yeah in some ways the Saturn program is the more amazing. Technology finally caught up to the amazing accomplishment of the Saturn rocket program, if that makes sense.
The Apollo program was indeed amazing. Government bureaucracy and mediocrity is responsible for 50 years of regression. What SpaceX is doing with Starship is also amazing on so many levels (Raptor engine, reusable, goal of Mars, etc).
Government bureaucracy also made the Apollo program.
What got in the way was politics.
What revived space tech was competition.
Politics and bureaucracy can plague private enterprise and competition can be had between or at the behest of government institutions.
It's not as simple as government bad, private good. In fact that simplification can be quite dangerous if it leads to the erosion of government as policy.
Almost not at all... something like 50 million so far for a program whose costs are probably in the low billions. Mostly spacex is paying for it with its capital raises
It can actually land. The Saturn V cost absurd amounts of money and used gigantic amounts of army of people.The Starship program also wants to solve many problem that the Saturn V or even Apollo didn't.
Nope, cause it didn’t have a second stage they could refuel in orbit, a reusable second stage they could use as a tanker, or a reusable first stage that provides the cadence to do in orbit refueling.
Because of in-orbit refueling each Starship will land over ten times the payload on Mars as each Apollo mission landed on the moon.
> Still, that is multiple Starships. [...] Also, the Saturn V came back.
Since we're nitpicking: The Saturn V didn't come back – the tiny command module came back, and it wasn't reusable. In fact, the only reusable part of the Saturn V were the astronauts.
> Actually, going to the moon and back is not that far off a one way trip to Mars.
You're moving the goalpost. This is getting ridiculous. What are you even arguing about? Starship + Super Heavy will be a much more capable rocket, superior to the Saturn V in almost every way. That doesn't detract from the incredible engineering of the Saturn V, which was developed 55 years earlier, in record time, with slide rules (!), and which first launched 10 years after the first artificial satellite (!!) That is impossible to beat, and there's no need for a pissing contest.
They are two completely different vehicles. One is made for a return mission, the other made is made for a one way mission, while the other is reusable.
That being said, that rocket alone isn't going to be more capable than the Saturn V in moving a payload around. It will be less capable. If you have many rockets then you'll have the capacity to move that payload around as a far as a Saturn V.
A single SuperHeavy can put a loaded Starship weighing roughly 360,000 total pounds into low earth orbit, SaturnV could only put 310,000 lbs total payload into low earth orbit.
> The Saturn V can carry those 3 people way further, though.
Saturn V: 3 people to the Moon; Starship: 100 people to Mars (unproven, of course). Mars is a little further than the Moon. Granted, that's with in-orbit refueling.
The Saturn V would be three people to the moon and back. Starship is 100 people more or less around GTO. Multiple starships are needed to go to Mars. It's a pretty ridiculous comparison.
Isn’t excluding comparisons that include refuelling, when contrasting a refuel-able and a non refuel-able vehicle, somewhat ridiculous? Starship is refuel-able , that’s one of its capabilities. Nobody on these vehicles going to Mars will care about you sitting there complaining that is doesn’t count.
If you only care about one way travel then any refuealable vehicle technically has infinite delta v.
People on these vehicles going to Mars are mostly going to complain about not being able to go back, as any kind of return mission will be Non-reusable.
> People on these vehicles going to Mars are mostly going to complain about not being able to go back, as any kind of return mission will be Non-reusable.
What are you talking about? Starships will be refueled on Mars and will return back to Earth. Why shouldn't they be reusable after their return?
An interesting thing here is SpaceX are building TWO launchpads. Which will definitely help prevent delays if an when there is an AMOS-6 [1] or Orb-3 [2] type explosion that destroys the launchpad.
It may also help for rapidly testing orbital refueling in 2022, though the plan is to do orbital refueling with 1 launch pad, 1 Super Heavy and 2 Starships (1 standard, 1 refueler) with 1 hour turnaround times between launches (and 5-6 launches) before Starship is ready to depart for the journey to Mars.
It's best shelter possible to have + it can allow fast travel between long-distances (faster than the 1,223 kmph Elon's referenced before with Hyperloop here on Earth due to gravity being lower on Mars).
Got lost in a rabbit hole after reading this news. Most incredible thing to me was that due to the reusability the per launch costs may end up being $2M (vs $185 million in 1969–1971 dollars - $1.23 billion in 2019 value for the Saturn V).
Note that the $2M is to launch a fully loaded (100 tons of payload) Starship into low earth orbit (LEO). Launching it further, such as to the Moon or Mars, requires refueling while in-orbit. I've seen estimates from Musk that it would take 6-7 launches of a tanker variant of Starship to deliver enough fuel to fill an empty Starship (it could be stockpiled in an orbital depot ahead of the main payload launch). So the total launch cost might be more like $15M for a fully-loaded ship. Which is still crazy cheap compared to SLS ($2B/launch), and Falcon 9 costs $15M just to get 13 tons into LEO.
ask any astronomer what they could do with extra $150M per launch and watch them salivate. also, this thing could lift JWST pretty much without that complex unfolding mechanism. genuinely exciting.
I've always wondered whether payloads weren't super-expensive precisely because the launches were, too.
I mean, if you are spending hundreds of millions to launch something, that something better work once up there, right? So you spend 20 years engineering a "perfect" payload, the costs do what they always do, and now you have a billion-dollar payload.
But if a launch was $2M and bookable with a month's lead time, you'd just de-risk the whole thing by having a simple-to-build, likely-to-work payload. Or ten.
(This might not apply to something like the JWST specifically, since even a terrestial mirror of that size is a huge challenge. But I bet a lot of other kinds of science payloads will be built very differently a decade from now.)
The mirror of JWST is too wide - you'd still need the complex folding mechanism.
edit: it's actually the mirror plus the sub shield that's too wide - the mirror by itself would even fit into an Ariane 5 fairing.
Fuel costs per launch will be about $500K, the remaining costs are dependent upon how many times both stages can be reused, maintenance costs, and launch/pad costs.
The FAA recently updated this page as part of the new Environmental Assessment at Boca Chica which is required before SpaceX can be approved for orbital flights.
Their current approval is good for testing (vertical) flights of Starship and Superheavy, but does not currently permit orbital flight from Boca Chica as I understand it.
They are currently in a public comment period thru Jan 22.
What's the environmental impact delta between a 12km launch and landing and an orbital launch and landing? I can't imagine the difference to the ground environment is that significant.
In addition to the other comment (a lot more engines in the first stage of a full stack than the test hopper), there's also the impact of mishaps - an exploding fully fueled full stack would have dramatically larger impact than the partially-filled test hop.
Then there's he environmental impact of more frequent launches (originally the area was approved for 12 falcon 9 flights a year) - sound impacts on wildlife, habitat impact of larger construction areas, more staff around reduces habitat quality for wildlife, etc.
The Super Heavy Booster has an order of magnitude more engines than the Starship prototype that did the 12km hop. I don't think Starship can reach orbit without the booster (it can reach space, but not orbital velocity)
Sounds levels in particular will be extreme at launch (as in, deadly even outside the blast radius). And there's a lot more fuel that could potentially explode over populated areas on the way into orbit.
For this reason, I think the intent is for Superheavy launches to be mainly done far out at sea. But Boca is needed in the interim for testing purposes.
> And there's a lot more fuel that could potentially explode over populated areas on the way into orbit.
Isn’t that why launch complexes are usually on coasts? They immediately point out over the ocean, and if it’s off course the flight is “terminated” (i.e. exploded) before it reaches populated areas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety
> Sounds levels in particular will be extreme at launch (as in, deadly even outside the blast radius)
Though that's generally true, Everyday Astronaut watched the SN8 launch up "close" and reported the sound was (relatively) mild. Indeed the raptors sounded differently, with less of the violent "cracking up". There may be a bit of a surprise coming here.
the full stack will have 30ish, full throttle, perhaps even above 100% current. the sound is going to break rocks apart. i wonder what the suppression system will look like.
Calculations over at NSF made it clear that SN8 had sufficient delta-v on the pad to reach the Karman line, if they hadn't throttled back and turned off engines as it ascended. So SN8 could already have reached space. (With the assumption that the nose could have taken the pressure of going supersonic relatively low.)
Similar calculations state that a Starship with full tanks and 6 or 7 engines might just be able to make it into orbit on it's own, assuming it doesn't have any payload or heatshield.
Since that's useless and wastes the ship, they will never do it. But it still boggles the mind that they are using a craft that is almost a SSTO ship ... as a second stage, on top of a massive first stage. The Raptor engines are freakishly good, near the top in both efficiency and thrust.
That would require very good mixing of the fuel and oxidizer before explosion, which is unlikely to happen during a launch failure. IIRC for the N1 falling back on the pad after a few seconds of flight it is estimated that only a fraction of the fuel load was exploded and unburnt kerosene was raining for many minutes.
Is there not piped water? Is it just another eco friendly sounding thing to put in the plan? Is it to hedge against newspaper headlines saying how much water spacex is wasting?
Desalination has to be more expensive than piped water (both financially and environmentally).
"There are no shops or restaurants or amenities of any kind around, including municipal water pipes; Cameron County regularly trucks in gallons of water, which is stored in outdoor tanks."
Take a gander at Google earth, Boca Chica is far enough away from Brownsville that I doubt it has municipal water or would ever be serviced. Salt water and steel don’t mix well so I’d assume they want to stop trucking it in.
When launching rockets on land you need flame diverter trenches to deal with exhaust and water deluge systems to deal with the sound (the water droplets absorb sound). When launching on water, dealing with the exhaust is more straightforward, but sound travels much better in water than in air, so it's a much bigger problem (mostly for marine life). One idea is to create a curtain made out of air bubbles that effectively blocks sound. The bubbles force sound waves to transition from water to air and back into water, and as you know from putting your head underwater in a pool, sound waves don't like doing that in either direction.
If rocket damage is a concern, why don’t such rockets destroy themselves right after leaving the launchpad? At that point the water suppression is no longer relevant but the sound waves are just as powerful. It can’t just be that the ground reflects sound waves, since that would only be a ≈3dB (2x) increase in sound energy. Rockets with >2x more thrust seem to use the same sound suppression, so rocket damage can’t be the main reason for installing such systems.
My guess is that water systems are needed to reduce damage to the launch pad.
Larger rockets use water as part of the overall suppression system yes, but that doesn't make the whole system the same. The size, depth and shape of the flame pit, the rate of water delivery and the design of the spay system, etc will all make a difference.
The issue is that the sound waves bounce off the pad back towards the rocket. Once the rocket has left the pad, the sound waves proceed behind it and there's no risk of them hitting the body.
Mostly, yes. Some of it is used for protecting the structure (ablative armor, essentially). But that requires much less water than is actually used. This is why Sea Launch's launch platform also had a water deluge system. They're far enough out that the only people that can really hear it are the control ship, but they have the deluge to help keep the exhaust from scorching the launcher.
Similarly, the Saturn V MLP had "rainbirds" to wet it down, even though the vast majority of the water used was down the exhaust trench for sound suppression.
Is it? I'd guess putting the brine back far enough in the water, away from the seafloor, would provide plenty of dilution. I'm doubtful that they'd desalinate at such a rate that would drastically change local conditions where they return the brine.
I'm just guessing here, but that's my half informed idea.
Yup. Salinity would be 36 ppt, so for every 1000 tonnes of water they need, they'd produce 2 truck loads of salt (so say maybe 20 truckloads of brine). It's a lot easier to truck out and dispose of 20 loads of brine, than to source and truck in 250 loads of fresh water
Not, there is not. All water is currently delivered, and the nearest municipal water is over 15 miles away.
Arranging for a water pipeline would not be cheap, but moreover would take a lot of time. Desalinization plant is plug and play; pipe is going to require a lot of bureaucracy besides a pretty fair capital investment.
Desalination uses a lot of energy, so if energy is cheap, then so is desalination.
Both solar and wind power have gotten incredibly cheap (~ $15/MW), and more importantly will continue to get much cheaper over the next decade. Boca Chica has lots of wind & sun.
Desalination can also handle the variability of wind & solar quite well: just use water from a big water tank when both wind & solar aren't available. Expensive batteries not required. And to a first approximation it's always windy in Boca Chica, so not much storage is required anyways.
OTOH, piping water from Brownsville to Boca Chica is probably a 9 figure project.
Boca Chica is a relatively isolated location wedged between the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico itself. Texas is a big place, and if you want fresh water you might just have to make it yourself.
Even for orbital launches on the production Falcon 9, schedules are subject to change due to technical glitches or just bad weather. Test launches are subject to both, with technical glitches being nearly part of the plan. For starship launches, there's a nearby town where residents usually get something like 24 hours' notice of an attempt, in case they want to be elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen.
Often, tests aren't announced until just before they happen. Musk's twitter seems to be the primary source for this kind of information from SpaceX. Otherwise, some unofficial/fan sources[0] have pretty good information.
While it will be fun to see humans on Mars, the really interesting stuff is further out. Where large lifters like this will really shine is in allowing automated mining factories to be sent to various space rocks in order to allow further, larger projects to be built in place. Musk has been piggybacking technologies to fund future projects — I don't see Mars as an endpoint for his vision, and Mars will be a cash sink instead of a cash generator for some time to come. Look for the next moneymaking (and project-fostering) step.
> Mars will be a cash sink instead of a cash generator for some time to come
The wildcard for profit here is government. No doubt China and possibly Russia, EU and India will want to race for position when the see America claiming stake here.
I could see huge government funds from US and even allied countries coming through to support the development and get the fast claims.
I don't see why any earthly government would want to pour a lot of money into Mars. From what history has shown us the Mars colony will likely declare independence from any earthly government once they are self-sustaining which would void any "claims".
> While it will be fun to see humans on Mars, the really interesting stuff is further out. Where large lifters like this will really shine is in allowing automated mining factories to be sent to various space rocks in order to allow further, larger projects to be built in place.
The way I see it, a lot of interesting things are closer than Mars. There's plenty of space rocks near Earth, that could be nudged into Earth orbit and mined, ultimately enabling orbital construction. I'm hoping a whole economy in cislunar space will eventually take off. That would go a long way towards making servicing Mars cheaper, too.
There would be, but it can be minimized. It would take a major mistake (or intentional action) to fail an orbital capture maneuver in such a way the asteroid would hit Earth instead. Most possible failures would just leave it hurtling through space, or orbiting the Earth in a suboptimal way. A correctly executed capture does not, at any point, pass through the state in which asteroid's trajectory would make it hit the planet - so one of the best mitigations would be designing the mission in such a way that engines fail safe, and any kind of deviation from mission parameters leads to engine shutdown.
Of course, the very capability of altering trajectory of asteroids creates risks of its own, similar to the capability of splitting atom.
How so? The dark side of Mercury is frozen and Mercury rotates very slowly (one day on mercury is 2 months on earth). If you had a rolling home base you maybe able to avoid the extreme heat.
Mercury has near-zero axial tilt, and massive craters on the poles. There glaciers on Mercury's south pole alone hold more water than all of Mars.
They are of course in eternal darkness, but if want an artificial sun, just raise a diffuse reflector over the crater rim. If you need more concentrated energy, raise a mirror.
I don't think so. 50km up in Venus's atmosphere, the pressure and temperature are suitable for humans (though the atmosphere is not breathable), and human-suitable atmosphere is a lifting gas (like helium on Earth), so floating stations or cities are probably possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus
Mercury on the other hand swings in temperature from uninhabitably cold to about as hot as Venus's uninhabitable surface, and it has essentially no atmosphere. Not necessarily impossible, but it definitely seems more difficult. A little info here, but it doesn't seem to have been looked at in nearly as much detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization#Mercury
People who bring this up seem to miss that there is likely no practical way out of the Venus clouds. You'd be stuck until some next generation rocket tech comes along.
Remember Venus has about 91% of earth mass, so a significant rocket would be needed to get into orbit. Maybe Starship could be a capable single stage LVO transporter, but I have difficulty seeing it floating in the clouds, fully topped up, tethered to a balloon.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but I think it would be easier than Mercury. Even getting to Mercury is hard.
I think getting off Venus from 50km up wouldn't be too bad. If you've got enough flotation to carry a research station or city or whatever, with water supply, food production, life support, etc., you can carry a fuelled up Starship and Super Heavy (if your base is smaller, use a smaller rocket [1]). Launching them seems like it would be doable: drop in belly flop orientation, it glides a bit away as it falls, then starts the main engines and pivots to upright, and away it goes. "Landing" or whatever arrival would entail seems more complicated, but you might be able to make a platform a bit like landing on a barge (but one that can go down to cushion the landing).
[1] A fully fuelled up Falcon 9 weighs more than the ISS, so we're talking a big research station for this to be feasible.
That's tiny compared to a city though. This whole colonisation idea is predicated on super large balloons. Since breathable air is a lifting gas, it seems like the people would probably live inside them.
Due to very thick atmosphere, giant airships should be doable on Venus. You'd get atmospheric radiation shielding, same pressure as on Earth (although obviously unbreathable air), ample sunlight and plenty of materials (=carbon and oxygen) in the form of Venusian atmospheric gasses.
Although hydrogen would be hard to come by, the atmospheric concentration is very low. That said, I doubt there's that much hydrogen on Mercury either.
So who knows, maybe Venus is a better place for a human base than Mercury?
I agree. IIRC, the atmosphere at the Earth-standard-pressure level isn't corrosive, so we could park our bases there, and there's an ISRU possibility through extending scoops (or sending drones) to lower atmosphere and siphoning some of the more resource-rich air there.
I find it a little weird that FAA handles space stuff. I think they should coordinate, but basically they are for aircraft. There should be a FSA that handles space traffic.
There's really just not enough commercial space traffic yet to warrant its own agency.
I think that's becoming less true with LEO megaconstellations of satellites, but it's still probably too low volume for now to warrant an entirely separate federal agency.
Rockets into space have to transit through the airspace used by regular aircraft, so it kind of makes sense that it would be handled by one agency rather than having two agencies that have to coordinate with each other.
I disagree. Space is a whole other domain. I don't know FAA mandate but they probably have an altitude cap. All their systems and procedures will not work above a certain zone. We should not put more pressure on them. They have full hands as it is. They should focus on the things they do well.
There should be a FSA that FAA coordinates with for the low altitude region of launch, and above that the FSA handles all sorts of space traffic, satellites, etc.
I don't know anything about this, but probably each launch has to mix between doing their own space window and launch path monitoring, and leaning on some group like NASA. This seems non-ideal. FSA could become the source of this.
I don't think the coordination would pose a blocking challenge. And I think the scope of the space domain warrants its own agency.
There are exactly three other countries with the supply chain, manpower, funding, and infrastructure to build large scale commercial access to space. Not a single one of them are members of NATO. Space X doesn't really have many options.
France and ESA has a space port in French Guiana where at least Ariane is doing commercial launches.
When launching to space you would want to launch to the east to get assistance from the earth rotation. You would want to launch over ocean so any debris/stages don't crash into populated areas. There's not that many places that is suitable.
China has due to geo politics and secrecy three space ports deep inland and it's not unusual that launch stages crash into populated areas. Probably why they've started to launch from ocean platforms.
You may be forgetting a bunch of other countries that do space together, and as a group they have "the supply chain, manpower, funding, and infrastructure to build large scale commercial access to space", and are members of NATO. That said, I haven't seen as much interest in commercial space launch vehicles over here as I'd like to.
I hope the European version of Musk/SpaceX attempts a non-rocket based launch system. Whoever eventually surpasses SpaceX almost certainly won’t be doing so by chasing after SpaceX‘s strengths.
Do we have any feasible non-rocket options to do on Earth, though? Air-breathing first stage is all I can think of (but it's essentially still a rocket). Skyhooks and space elevators will have to wait for advances in materials science and will require orbital manufacturing capabilities. Launch loops seem to be too complicated either. Mini launch loops / big guns / other constructs that provide all kinetic energy at ground level won't work because of atmosphere density, and even if you had magic materials that'd survive hypersonic shocks and G forces, it'd still be a ridiculous waste of energy compared to rockets.
At this point I think we don't need anyone surpassing SpaceX, we just need more people copying them. In of itself, it'll drive launch costs further down.
> Do we have any feasible non-rocket options to do on Earth, though?
Not yet, no — but a decade ago we didn’t have powered landing and rapid reuse of first stages either. While that observation doesn’t guarantee future tech could (or should) be made, I am an optimist when it comes to tech.
One is an iteration on a proven design. One is a completely unknown new design. I’m not being defeatist, just pointing out that I’m not sure the latter is easier than chasing SpaceX’s strengths.
We had air-dropped spaceships [1] in the early 1960s. It's how some of the first American astronauts were made. It's proven tech but just hasn't had a practical application in the last half-century. Some kind of air-dropped passenger ferry could be imagined that gets people to something like a Starship in orbit, or maybe a space hotel.
There are a couple of projects along these lines right now, both involving Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites [2,3].
Stratolaunch went through several iterations of spacecraft, at one point I believe it was even going to drop a SpaceX rocket! With Paul Allen's passing not sure what the plans are currently.
What are the odds of Starship working? It seems really complex.
And that last phase where the ship flips vertical from the bellyflop, looks insane for human passengers inside. How many G’s is that maneuver pulling?
SN8 appears 90% successful, but I’m wondering if that remaining 10% is the killer.
As they say: You spend 10% of your time, solving 90% of your problem. And then you spend 90% of your time, solving the last 10% of your problem.
Between high speed re-entry, and thermal protections, I wonder how well the Starship design was modeled, to handle hypersonic re-entry speeds. It appears to be a very large spacecraft that’s re-entering the atmosphere at very high speeds.
If it succeeds, then maybe it’ll open up space travel and make it cheaper. If not, then well, nice try. Back to the drawing board.
But maybe, we’ll see results soon enough, with SN9.
I don’t mean to trivialize what SpaceX is accomplishing, but maybe we are overestimating the degree of difficulty of building rockets in the 21st century, given the advances in technology over the past few decades? With the immense improvement in compute power, materials, accelerometers, welding techniques, etc.. since the 60s, maybe SpaceX was the first to recognize that building rockets is not as hard as it used to be?
Well, we actually have a large amount of companies trying to do it. Like 40-60 different companies. Not to mention government projects.
Of all of those, only RocketLab has managed to do it, and their rocket is basically as tiny as you can build a orbital rocket.
SpaceX did an orbital rocket bigger then RocketLab in 2008. RocketLab doesn't yet have real competition, despite many billions invested.
SpaceX at the same time went from the tiny Falcon 1 to a gigantic Starship program more ambitious then Saturn V and Apollo.
I think we do our self a dissevers by just saying 'well, we have computers now so its easy'. Given how many people have tried and how many have failed or taken many, many years longer then they thought, it is clearly not easy at all.
And mass producing them reliably is even harder.
SpaceX and Elon Musk are clearly special and unique. Something we have never seen before.
ULA is not new, its basically Boeing and Lockheed Martin getting together to form a monopoly. The rockets themselves have a lot of legacy going back 60 years. These rockets were developed for the US government and ULA itself has never created its own rocket.
I also didn't talk about China or Indian launch who are also doing it.
SN8 was more like 99% successful. it only failed because the fuel mix became a bit too engine-rich. SN9 supposedly has a fix for that.
the biggest risk was the reverse belly flop and that went flawless to everyone's surprise. to quote musk, the crater is in the right place, and it didn't even properly explode anyway - the nose cone was more or less intact :) if the fuel pressure issue really is fixed and SN9 lands on the pad, it'll be a mark of a new age of space industry - and not that long after the previous one set by the same company! the most recent NRO mission flew on a booster used four times previously; fifteen years ago you'd be laughed out of the room for just suggesting the possibility of launching a national security payload on a used rocket.
Gs come from acceleration, either straight line or centripetal. I don't think there is enough control authority in starship's fins to create much centripetal acceleration the way a fighter jet's wings can. If the rocket is capable of it, it would do the same whether it was belly-flopping or dropping straight down the whole way. Any passengers will certainly get an inner-ear workout, but I can't imagine how the flip, more or less around the rocket's own axis, could contribute significantly to G-loading.
You’re still spinning violently and then snapping to a stop. I wonder if the payload could be designed to counter that in some way? If it was suspended in a liquid, that might work, but that’s unrealistic.
Depending on the g-load, they may make a less radical flip when handling passengers. Once they figure it out, it's just a matter or refining the parameters.
Why? Their Texas facility is hundreds of miles inland, not exactly a location you'd want to launch enormous, experimental rockets that tend to explode from.
Also, Blue Origin is just an expensive hobby compared to SpaceX. They're older, but have never flown anything to orbit, compared to the 100+ missions SpaceX has performed.
>Also, Blue Origin is just an expensive hobby compared to SpaceX.
Who cares? They are building interesting stuff too. We are in an amazing time for Space tech.
Why do Musk fans talk of "supporting the mission" out of one side of their mouth, and denigrate the competition every chance they get out of the other? It happens with Tesla and EVs too. Toxic communities.
Nothing wrong with Blue Origin per se, redundancy is great (and pretty essential to become a spacefaring civilization -- as demonstrated by the back-to-back Antares and Falcon failures a couple of years ago).
However, saying SpaceX, the established company, should relocate to be next to Blue Origin, the new start-up that hasn't shown much yet, for unspecified reasons just doesn't make any logical sense.
Also, I think part of the reason space enthusiasts don't like Blue Origin is that it has had a terrible return-on-investment so far. There's a limited amount of money that will put into space, and it's great that Jeff Bezos wants to spend a billion a year on it. It would just be great if there was more to show in return for that money. For example, Elon Musk claims SpaceX has spend about a billion on reusability for the Falcon 9. Just imagine such a leap forward every year.
Another reason Blue Origin gets a bad rep is that they don't exactly try to play fair. As mentioned by a sibling comment, they tried to patent something (landing on a ship) that's at best just common sense. When NASA wanted to lease LC-39A to commercial providers, Blue Origin tried to block NASA from leasing it exclusively to SpaceX on the basis that it'd be unfair to them, even though they hadn't flown anything that could use the pad yet (and still haven't). They landed their New Shepherd after a suborbital flight to 100.5 km just weeks before SpaceX landed their first Falcon 9 booster -- claiming to be the first to land a rocket propusively. That would be fine, except Bezos then tweeted "Welcome to the club" to Musk, ignoring the fact that orbital rockets are much, much harder (as evidenced by the fact that they still haven't launched, let alone landed one, 5 years later).
Because Blue Origin is a toxic company. They tried to patent landing on a barge at sea even though SpaceX had already done it. They have also never flown anything to orbit, yet try to bid on orbital missions
I see spacex fans hating blue origin, not the competition. most spacex fans are also huge supporters of rocket lab, orbital sciences, etc. they hate blueorogin because bezos plays more politics then builds rockets, and when there is limited money, people and contracts, it hurts the entire industry.
In another article about Tesla VW CEO described them as having ‘essentially unlimited resources’. I guess spaceX probably falls under a similar category. Unlimited resources + not wasting ANYTHING is a killer combo.
Lots of places seem like they should have unlimited resources. I would have thought VW would be pretty high on that list - but they have their resources tied up. SpaceX / Tesla seem to be more free to use their resources in daring ways.
There's tons of places with effectively unlimited money. But very few places that have nearly unlimited resources. Some key resources are usually inversely correlated with money: decision-making latency and throughput, clear focus, and iteration speed. That's because money buys headcount, not good leadership.
Tesla can seemingly issue new shares and the public market just buy them all up at a huge valuation; I think that's what is meant by "unlimited resources".
That may be mixing up causality. One reason people love to invest is because they see what amazing things are possible. I personally would love to invest with SpaceX.
I don’t think you’re right about many others having unlimited resources. This situation is a novelty in the post-cold-war era. Admittedly in the Cold War military projects probably did have unlimited resources.
This made me chuckle. SLS is a bloated joke, survives due to political favoritism for job generation. SpaceX does everything at a radical discount by comparison.
He said ‘other competitors’ or something like that and I assumed he meant Tesla despite it being at the time of Apple launch - building gigafactories takes a lot more resources than anything Apple has done so far. Word is Apple won’t even manufacture the whole car anyway like Tesla does.
You inspired me to do some Googling and arithmetic. From the Apple website, an iPhone is about 0.5 lbs. There have been approximately 1.3 billion iPhones sold.
TL;DR: Cars are heavy. The total mass of the vehicles Tesla has delivered in the past six quarters exceeds the total mass of all the iPhones that Apple has ever sold.
I don't think you need 6 quarters. Using your numbers, 1.3 billion iPhones is 650 million pounds. At 4000lb each, it only takes 163000 model 3s to outweigh the iPhones - about 5 months of production, or two quarters.
The thing is, how much of that did apple produce VS TSMC + suppliers. I don’t think apple have any manufacturing capability at all. Tesla make a lot of things themselves - well the battery at least.
For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top.
It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.