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Its 4.5 years to the end of 2024. Not a crazy deadline, but not easy either.

Maybe with this, SpaceX will focus more on development of their actual Starship+SuperHeavy, rather than mostly focusing on mass production set-up.

Anyway, this it really exciting news.

Remember that the SLS is what will be used to launch the Artemis missions. Starship & Superheavy are not in the picture at all for this work, even though they would be able to do the job and at a much lower price.

Additionally, I doubt that Starship or SuperHeavy will be ready by 2024; flying, maybe, but reliable enough for manned missions? I don't think so.

>* the SLS is what will be used to launch the Artemis missions*

That seems overly optimistic for a system that is now a year and a half past it's original target launch date and has a current target date of late next year.

The original launch for SLS was supposed to be 2016. But I agree, the dependency on SLS is not great.

I expect there will be more than one launch system and more than one moon landing system, provided by private companies.

Seems to work great for satellite launch and ISS supply mission. Why not for moon transport?

The article says that the SpaceX submission is for Starship.

I think that’s doable in 4.5 years. They expect to fly and land an unmanned prototype upper stage this year. A manned upper stage up to 4 years later doesn’t seem unreasonable. They reckon the upper stage is that hardest part, the first stage should be much simpler.

A lot depends on the ability to refuel in orbit. To do that they’ll need multiple starships flying, and to have worked out the kinks in orbital refuelling. It might sound trivial, but it’s never been done before.

There is a reason SpaceX is not just designing one 'bespoke' rocket. Elon has said over and over again that the real challenge is producing these in large numbers and cheaply.

They will actually have to prove out refueling pretty soon under the NASA contract.

And SpaceX bid also includes flying the system many times until 2024.

So SpaceX will have to do a lot of flights and demonstrate all this stuff to have a shot at this. So it is good that they are going right into mass production that is the only way they can prove all these different things until 2024.

When the project management at the top level is committed to unrealistic deadlines, it makes realistic engineering hard at all lower levels. Given that nature cannot be fooled, this combination of factors tends toward failure.

Kennedy committed to reaching the moon within 8.75 years in March of 1961, when the USA had a total of 15 minutes of experience in human spaceflight, all suborbital. They hadn't even decided what architecture would get them there.

They succeeded, and this is far less ambitious.

The Apollo program also killed people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

Taking risks is reasonable, but in the end this is still a vanity project. IMO, figuring out how to do self sustaining spaceships / habitats is much more useful long term than going back to the moon using giant chemical rockets, stored food and oxygen etc. Even just orbiting Mars and coming back without landing would be a new achievement.

Well, if you want to know whether it's worth the risk, I think the best people to ask are the astronauts, and they are chomping at the bit to go.

As far as I can see, there isn't much point to going around Mars just to go. You could just go to a high Earth orbit (or Lagrange point), and gain similar experience, with better communication. The ISS has spent 20 years in low-earth orbit; we're not going to learn much more from it or a similar station.

Apollo 8 and 10 both went to the moon without landing, doing that on a multiple year mission does seem wasteful. However, there are a host of things to test.

From an engineering perspective going to mars orbit means far less sunlight which means a host of new problems. An engine and fuel system to get there would be new and could also be used to send a lander for future missions.

IMO, the Moon might be closer, but Mars is a much better target for long term colonization due to an atmosphere, shorter day, higher gravity, etc.

You meant lower gravity, right? Mars is smaller then Earth.

Sounded like his comparisons were for Mars vs. the moon.

The Moon could be the starting point for Mars colonization. Also, it would make a huge difference if the new Moon missions took advantage of the ISS, which the Apollo missions couldn't count on. One thing is bringing all crew, supplies and equipment from Earth in one trip, and a whole different thing is sending everything on/around the ISS using unmanned cargo missions, then assemble the lunar mission ships up there and send the Moon astronauts when necessary. In other words: Earth<->ISS, then ISS<->Moon<->Mars and/or ISS<->Mars.

For Mars you want people to go up last so they minimize the time spent in zero g. Docking supplies on the ISS is also pointless.

The ISS is not in a useful orbit for a Mars trip and whatever your sending there can make the trip in the same thing you send into orbit. Trying to shoehorn in the ISS just make the trip more expensive and complex.

I agree that Mars is better, but Starship is for Mars. If NASA pays for development, that is moving much closer.

Chemical rocket are the right technology for the inner solar system. And big one and specially reusable have advantages and we know nothing that could potentially be cheaper.

Part of this whole moon approach is absolutely about sustaining the long term. Have you ever read the Artemis program concepts? It is very much about using commercial capability to develop moon resources.

You can't start with producing food, if you make the system depended on that it will fail. One you can actually land on the moon or mars with SIGNIFICANT payloads you can actually start to test out system for large scale food growing and things like that.

Getting to Mars on chemical rockets is not that bad, especially if you can accept a launch window every 15 years. Getting people to and back from low Mars orbit with chemical rockets on a more flexible schedule takes a lot more fuel. It’s clearly viable, but for that kind of DeltaV across such a long trip, solar powered Ion thrusters have several significant advantages.

As to growing food, for on a single mission it’s not that critical, but if you’re sending several missions to Mars unused supplies from one mission can be used on the next mission. Further, the difference between survival and comfort adds up to a lot of food.

Cheap Mars launch windows are every 26 months, not 15 years.

Cheap is relative, Earth years and Mars years don’t evenly divide, so the 26 month cycle is fairly good but not optimal if your willing to wait.

You can go every 26 month. If you can produce fuel on Mars going back is way easier then going from Earth to Mars. You don't go from Mars Orbit, you take of from the surface directly to earth where you aerobrake. No Orbit operation on Mars needed.

> It’s clearly viable, but for that kind of DeltaV across such a long trip, solar powered Ion thrusters have several significant advantages.

Not really. The only potential use for ion thrusters is for cargo transport that is not time depended. If you do that you need to figure out how to do the landing, so the complexity is just higher. The thrust is just to low compared to a few powerful chemical engines. If you can refuel in earth orbit for cheap you are gone be way better off with chemical.

If you move on from chemical, nuclear thermal is by far the best option.

Food is really not the problem. The mass of food needed for humans is pretty small. Clearly you want to produce food on Mars eventually but its not a priority for the first 5 to 10 years. Refuel on Mars is by far the biggest mass saver.

Individual ion engines have been built up to 1.1 lbf for 100kw. Over 2 weeks that’s 9.8m/s * 60 * 60 * 24 * 14/ mass that’s 1.2 km/s for a 10,000 lb spacecraft. And nothing says you can’t use more for a larger spacecraft.

For comparison the ISS’s solar panels are over a decade old and still generate 240kW in direct sunlight. So, you could easily reuse those panels for multiple trips, though power output is cut in half near Mars.

The US also devoted up to 4.5% of its federal budget for the task (https://storage.googleapis.com/dbc2017/April/April%2011%20NA...) when the current budget is half of a percent. The priorities are definitely not the same

Whenever somebody uses % of budget as an argument I just shake my head.

% of budget is a good proxy to estimate intentions

You don't buy rockets with intentions.

You don't go to the moon in less 4 years if you don't really commit to it, especially if you haven't been there for 40 years

Committing to it could be done within the NASA budget. This currently is not even the majority of the NASA budget. Its only bit more then half of the human budget.

So the argument that 'you can only do this when the government gives NASA military budget' is just nonsense.

Mass production of Starship is essential to their strategy. The way in which you build a one-off rocket is totally different from how you build an assembly line of rockets. This is more true of rockets than any other industry. I'm talking about what materials are used, how they are shaped, etc. Look at all the "weird" stuff SpaceX is doing with Starship (stainless steel tanks, the types of welds they're doing, etc.) and you wouldn't want to be doing it that way unless you were manufacturing a rocket assembly line.

So it seems smart to say, "why don't they just build and test one, then figure out how to manufacture it at scale?" But to do that would be even harder because you'd have to redesign everything from scratch the second time around, while maintaining component compatibility... much smarter to design for manufacturing from the get-go and treat the test articles as expendable.

BTW, ULA is doing something similar with Vulcan & Centaur V. The design of the rocket itself is deeply related to the assembly line they are producing.

Agreed... Mass production needs to be designed-in and developed with the whole system.

Related question: Just how many Starships do you think will be necessary to fulfill all our launch demands? Given that it's designed to be reusable and it has a huge payload capacity, perhaps there is less need to mass-produce them, since fewer vehicles will be able to do the same job as many expendable vehicles...?

That's a question about demand. My goal is to move all resource extraction and heavy industry off-Earth, and to open the space frontier to permanent and self-sufficient human settlements. For that many, many Starships will be required.

Note that the killer feature of Starship, IMHO, is in-space refueling. This isn't a Earth-based heavy-life vehicle... it's a re-configurable spaceship able to explore the entire solar system through fuel depot staging (with Starships themselves serving as both tankers and fuel stations).

It's not just re-usability, but turn around time as well.

I think launch demands might expand to fit the capacity. It’s hard to predict what uses people will put a new technology to.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Plan is to get a million people to Mars within a few decades. You can only fly every other year when orbits sync up. Initially, I imagine many Starships will stay on Mars as shelter and raw material.

Then there is the idea of using Starships for very fast transport on earth. Fly from NYC to Sydney in half an hour. If that catches on, they may be replacing part of the airplane fleet.

Then there is lunar shuttle services, satellite transports and asteroid mining.

My guess is: a lot.

> Mass production of Starship is essential to their strategy.

Yep, but if a "quickly" built Starship lander makes SpaceX a few billions, so they can invest it into the Mars program, then that may be a good option. For the same reason they are doing the Starlink network.

On the other hand if spacex gets massproduction and reusability right then they can provide any number of rides for NASA/the other participants while only paying for fuel costs and pocket the difference.

If Spacex can get Starship flying in the next three years, I would think they could meet this deadline. Unlike Mars, there aren't the same launch window requirements.

Even if Starship isn't flying, Falcon Heavy is the best we have today. It would seem that if anyone is going to meet this deadline, it'll be Spacex.

AFAIK you could do it with multiple Falcon Heavy launches (with in orbit rendezvous) and something to put a Dragon on top of that would act like the Lunar descent stage. Then you could use Dragon as the ascent and return stage. You'd probably have an orbital module too since going to/from the Moon in just a Dragon would probably be too cramped.

Everything but the Dragon and the Falcon boosters would be expendable, but that's more reusability than Saturn V.

> It's 3 years away!

Or closer to 5 years away ( rounded up ) if you consider that 2024 also includes a december 31st as well as a january 1st.

> It's even crazier when you consider that the lander hardware has not even been designed, let alone built, tested, certified and man-rated.

You are talking about a technology that's more than 50 years old.

This isn't a time or technology issue. There's plenty of time and moon landings have been done before. It's really a business issue. It seems like the industry has come up with a business case for it ( I'm guessing space tourism initially followed up by mining perhaps ).