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Starship is still not understood

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Re: Starship is still not understood

#71

Post by himinlomax »

ncallaway wrote: post #11
theshadowknows wrote: post #6

I know that going into space is sexy and nerdy and cool and that it’s a difficult problem. What I don’t get is why so many people think about going to space and spend so much money on it when there are people in the US who drink water that catches on fire..and people elsewhere who don’t have access to water at all. Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than the ones that are basically “just go u…

If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem? I agree that we should invest more into safe drinking water (though lead seems like much more of a problem than catching fire). But I don’t think it would be wise to dedicate 100% of our nation’s resources into the problem. Some amount of R&D seems like a worthwh…

> If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem?

If I were to sum it up less charitably, I'd say that OP is arguing that if he can't walk and chew gum at the same time, humanity can't either.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#72

Post by gene-h »

A big part of the cost of space missions is not making things as light as possible, but developing the scientific instruments. More upmass doesn't always make designing sensitive scientific instruments easier.

If said scientific instruments need to go on a rover, mass still matters. More mass can limit rover mobility and at some point the rover requires more power than can be provided with RTGs or solar cells.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#73

Post by Atreiden »

coldtea wrote: post #40
wokwokwok wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a difficult argument to argue with because it doesn’t have any constraints. Instead of doing X why don’t we do any of the Y other things we could do? Surely, at least some subset of Y is more important than X, right? …but, is it? Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields…

> Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields and grow more food? And, with the crumbling infrastructure, declining middle class, poverty stricken working class, and so on, how's that worked out for us?

We've been _under_ investing in scientific research, especially in regards to space, for decades.

What spending we do have is usually focused on militaristic applications.

How does this reflect poorly on space travel research? If you're using the current status quo to argue that spending priorities are broken, you're not arguing against NASA funding. You're arguing against the military-industrial complex.

If important research is done through public agencies, the public reaps the benefits of this research. If private industry is allowed to take the reins, corporate interests and shareholders are the ones who benefit.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#74

Post by panick21_ »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #59
ncallaway wrote: post #8

I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that Starship is, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises, they to fundamentall…

They're happy enough to put all their eggs in the even more untried SLS basket. I've read that the fundamental problem for NASA is that they are a political football. They have at most 8 years of one administration before the next comes in, and Congress can change hands several times even in that span. As such, the only way to create a program that won't be announced to great fanfare one year and cancelled the next,…

> to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it,

There are always other people who think 'maybe those Alabama $ could go to Texas instead'.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#75

Post by NikolaeVarius »

pjc50 wrote: post #56
vanattab wrote: post #41

>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows. So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 laun…

Would anyone like to estimate the CO2 emissions produced by that?

This hand wringing about CO2 Emissions by rockets is the weirdest ongoing trend I've seen. If you want to complain about environmental issues, at least complain about something interesting like how sound at the launch pad disrupts the breeding patterns of an animal or something.

At least that can cause interesting discussion other than , BUT CO2 and WARMING.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#76

Post by panick21_ »

vanattab wrote: post #63
ceejayoz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time you're sending a thousand Starships in one go, the fuel's probably coming from an orbital refinery processing chunks of captured comets, not Earth launches. Or they've been replaced with some big Aldrin cyclers built using Starships.

That's exactly my point. This guy is pissed that NASA is not planning properly because Starship will unlock the ability to send millions of tons all over the solar system but in realty starship is only one of hundreds (thousands?) of advancements that will need to be made before we can think of sending 100's of millions of tons around the system.

The whole point is that Starship actually allows you to start thinking of the very problems you speak of.

Before you had it, suggesting mining a asteroid was just pointless and insane. Now you can actually think about.

And that is what NASA should do. Now getting stuff to LEO is 'solved' what can you actually do.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#77

Post by kiba »

h2odragon wrote: post #47
panick21_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They've got Musk's "laws don't apply" card shielding them, or something, to explain how they've managed to innovate this far and this fast. People will quite literally use any excuse to not give them Musk credit. Apparently the reason SpaceX can land rockets and build Starship is that they somehow don't follow the law. It couldn't possible by the the company is well managed, have great engineers and is lead by a gr…

Beg pardon, no denigration of SpaceX accomplishments intended at all. They've put awesome efforts into getting these awesome results and Musk's celebrity shadows the work of some modern heroes who should be further celebrated. However, all of that wouldn't have been allowed to succeed, without Musk's unaccountable aura of burrocratic avoidance. In my opinion.

I don't see what you mean. The bureaucracy in the last ten years had been supportive of SpaceX.

Yes, SpaceX engineers deserve the credit, and Elon Musk on one or more occasion credited them.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#78

Post by qayxc »

altcognito wrote: post #66
vanattab wrote: post #41

>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows. So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 laun…

Blue Origin said it would be 16, Musk has claimed it won't be more than 8. https://wccftech.com/musk-rejects-blue-origins-claim-of-16-s... It ends up being ~100,000 launches over 10 launch windows. Elon has talked about building 1000 starships (presumably you would need less boosters) https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/1000-starship... Anyway, it's absolutely the case that transferring a million tons of c…

Even 90,000 launches over 10 launch windows is 9,000 launches per window. Launch opportunities are about 30 days max per window (depending on the flight profile) so that'd be 300 launches per day or over 12 launches per hour .

I'm not saying this is bonkers, but this is completely ridiculous and it doesn't matter whether it's 90,000 or 180,000 or even "just" 45,000 launches - it's completely impractical.

Not to mention that proponents always act as if it's no biggie to just crank out thousands of metric tons of useful equipment for a permanent Mars settlement in just a couple of years.

You, know, including R&D and engineering and paying for all that.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#79

Post by mytailorisrich »

pjc50 wrote: post #56
vanattab wrote: post #41

>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows. So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 laun…

Would anyone like to estimate the CO2 emissions produced by that?

Starship contains a total of 3,400 + 1,200 = 4,600 tons of propellant [1]. The propellant being methane and oxygen.

So, someone can do the math to work out how much CO2 is generated by burning that much of that mix. In any case, that is very small compared to the overall emissions of human society.

That being said, methane can be produced a number of ways, for instance digestion of food waste. Therefore, they could source methane in a way that would allow to claim (quite reasonably) that they are carbon-neutral.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

Re: Starship is still not understood

#80

Post by Gravityloss »

pjc50 wrote: post #56
vanattab wrote: post #41

>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows. So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 laun…

Would anyone like to estimate the CO2 emissions produced by that?

100 tons of payload. Rockets are typically about 2% payload so 5000 tons fully fuelled. Fuel and oxidizer combine to H2O, OH, CO and CO2. So, not all the exhaust product is CO2. But some of the CO released is combined with atmospheric oxygen to CO2, so that increases the mass of CO2 besides direct propellant mass.

We could as first guess say that it's about 5000 tons of CO2 per launch. So 1000 launches would be 5 million tons.

US CO2 emissions per capita are about 16 tons per year, so it would be equivalent to the yearly emissions of 300,000 Americans or one thousandth of the country's yearly emissions.

10,000 launches would be 1% of US total emissions.

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