[LINK] SpaceX Starship

[Stephen Loosley]

CASEY HANDMER'S BLOG

SpaceX Starship is Still Not Understood

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/ (snip)


Two years ago the SpaceX Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece..

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids.

It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured.

It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift ..

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year.

By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship.

Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a  base at the Lunar south pole.

The fact that Starship flown expendably would be perhaps 10 times cheaper, in terms of dollars per tonne, than even Falcon is not relevant..

For the last two years, space community responses to Starship can often be summarized as “Starship would be awesome! I can customize one or two and do my pet mission for cheap.” This is true, but it misses the point.

First, SpaceX is unlikely to spend a lot of engineering effort doing custom one offs for otherwise obscure science missions..

Find a way to fit the mission in the payload fairing and join the queue with everyone else trying to burn down their manifest as quickly as possible.

Starship will change the way we do business in space, and now is the time to start preparing..

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