> I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it.
If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?
And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?
I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.
I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.
But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.
When Korolyov worked on N-1 rocket in 1960-s, some plans included building a hydrogen upper stage. http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html Hydrogen is rather hard to keep cold, but that stage was designed to work for over 11 days.
Falcon-9 flies almost every other day, about 3 times per week. Methane is way more storable than hydrogen. Of course we'd like to compare numbers, but, given that Starship is way bigger than than N-1 stage - about 15 times, and there is the law of squares-cubes, which for our case says the bigger the tank the less percent of boiloff per unit of time, and it's methane, and we can afford to lose a little and top off with another tanker...
Now, how many tanker flights we'll need? That's a favorite riddle in Musk's plans :) . Korolyov, again, had some early ideas for 5 tankers - https://graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/p/sever-the-bridge-... ... For Starship - if you have 1500 tons of fuel in the Starship, and 150 tons of payload in a tanker, you need 10 flights. You can probably optimize, or be disadvantaged by some obstacles - so, 8-12 flights? That many can fly in less than a month. We can also use additional measures to reduce boiloff - better protection from the Sun, active cooling, maybe more permanent orbital refueling depot - but still, with our today's Falcon-9 flight rate we may consider one Starship per month refueled on LEO. Even if some refueling flights won't be successful, the replacements could be sent.
I personally suspect Starship will fly much more often than Falcon-9. We're so much better in rendezvous and docking these day than we were during Apollo flights, the reliability is so much higher - just take a look how many Falcon-9 flights in a row are successful - so I don't think operationally LEO refuelling will present a significant problem. And I'm sure we need maybe a couple of years to see first examples of that.
Space is hard, yes. But we're getting better, for sure.
Theres a huge difference between sending up a stage full of H2 and transferring H2 from one stage to another with acceptable losses at cryo temperatures.
NASA is actually further ahead with space refuelling tech than SpaceX. But either way the tech is unlikely to work at scale this decade.
In 1992 I watched a car parallel park itself in NYC on Today, on nbc before I went to school. My mind was reeling, automated car technology is right around the corner! That technology did not ship for 20 years.
It is easy to say we are getting better, that doesn’t mean we will see, in this case, starship fly in the near future. And while I have the utmost confidence in Gwynne Shotwell, I am not holding my breath that we see starship launch with any meaningful payload in this decade.
They are already past the point that they could have expended Starship and just reused Super Heavy and launched payloads successfully. It is only their own goals to have a fully reusable system that is preventing it.
SpaceX is the undisputed king of launch cadence. Falcon 9 just flies every other day nowadays.
If anyone can take "we need 14 launches per mission" and make it work, it's SpaceX.
Boil off isn't somehow unsolvable. We know cryogenics can work in space, and SpaceX's approach is actually less aggressive than Blue Origin's requirement of zero boil off on LH2.
> But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed
If only Starbase was located somewhere near abundant gas pipelines, within spitting distance of of the Texas Shale Oil boom…
All of SapaceX rockets waste close to half their payload capacity on extra fuel for landing, extra equipment for landing, and they still have a 100% failure rate on every super-heavy launch they've ever attempted. SpaceX has blown up more rockets in the last year than NASA has in its entire history. NASA's super heavy rockets have been working successfully since 1967. NASA did build the first single-stage-to-orbit rockets that also successfully landed, but it immediately realized that was a huge waste of resources. Instead, they put parachutes on rockets and then refurbished them instead. So NASA gets double the payload capacity for free. The boosters currently strapped to the SLS that's about to go to the Moon are the same ones that previously took space shuttles to orbit in the 90s. NASA has been to the Moon and Mars; SpaceX has never made it to either, and just last week Elon said they've officially given up on going to Mars, and they're hoping to make it to Moon in another decade instead. NASA is going next month. SpaceX is just vaporware being run by a drug addict whose only goal is to sell it to the public markets before the house of cards comes down.
It would be great to have some actual numbers. How did reuse work out for Falcon 9? How much does the reused boosters for SLS cost? What's the cost and performance of an expendable Starship vs SLS?
Surely the could put a traditional upper stage on Super Heavy and just go directly to the moon, no? I’m not sure what the obsession with second stage reuse is, because you lose almost all your margin.
Space X cares way more about reusability than the moon, they're not actually in a race to the moon. Step 1: build the best general solution. Step 2: do everything
If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?
And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?
I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.