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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Starship has a real potential to be accelerated beyond the schedule given because of the return to the moon.

NASA gave SpaceX a lump of cash a couple of months ago to fully spec out a Moon-lander variant of Starship, along with two other companies. It's outlandishly large compared to its competitors, but SpaceX has this knack for doing things cheaply.

Imagine what happens if NASA looks at all three plans and says "They're all equal in terms of meeting our goals, except that Starship has many times the payload capacity and is cheaper than the others". Add in SpaceX's pretty good record for success, and it could make the decision interesting.

If they are selected, suddenly there would be a lot more money in SpaceX's hands dedicated to developing Starship even faster. They could blow up 2 prototypes per month instead of just 1.

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I really want to see the Starship full stack launch but can't Falcon Heavy get to the moon now? I mentioned in a thread a couple months ago that they could probably strap the Blue Origin lander to the top of FH and call it done.

EDIT: oh yeah, and what is it with all the exploding starships? Are the interns in charge of testing or something?

/ to the interns on HN, only kidding. you could probably do it better than us old folks anyway hah

You want to get all the exploding done before you launch the rocket with crew aboard.

Saturn V could lift 140 tonnes to low earth orbit. Falcon Heavy can lift 54 tonnes to low earth orbit. I think that means it could get a mission to the moon as long as it weighed 38% of what Apollo did. That doesn't sound like a fun trip.

Unless you assemble the moon ship in earth orbit first. Falcon Heavy can launch Orion on its own, or the European Service Module that it requires. I imagine it could launch a lunar lander too. You would also need a booster to send the combination to the moon - the Saturn final stage that did that weighed 100 tonnes, twice what Falcon Heavy can launch. So, maybe you launch an empty booster, and send up a couple of tankers to fuel it on orbit? It's a lot of launches, and a lot of work to do in orbit. That's not impossible (and is cool as hell), but there would be a lot of work to do to make it possible.

> Saturn V could lift 140 tonnes to low earth orbit.

Just to be pedantic, remember, that the only thing Saturn-V brought to LEO and left there was Skylab, with mass 77 tons. Other than that you counting parts of Saturn-V itself as part of payload, which is inconsistent - you don't count mass of Falcon-9 second stage as part of payload, for example, even though it gets to orbit.

Saturn-V is better characterized by the mass it leaves on translunar orbit, which is 48,6 tons. For LEO it's awkwardly lopsided with mass of 3rd stage and remaining fuel.

In other words, if you have a 140 tons satellite, you couldn't get it to LEO with Saturn-V. So the comparison is wrong.

Good points. I think the reason this is complicated is that the Apollo missions included one stage, the S-IVB, which was used twice, for getting into low earth orbit, and for departing for the moon. You have to count some fraction of that as mass lifted to orbit, but i don't know how much.

> Falcon Heavy can lift 54 tonnes to low earth orbit. I think that means it could get a mission to the moon as long as it weighed 38% of what Apollo did

You can launch the lander first, park it in lunar orbit, then launch the crew on a second Falcon Heavy, each having 38% of an Apollo worth of mass. With a little more creativity, you can launch the ascent vehicle on another Falcon Heavy and land it before the other two so that astronauts can rest assured that, unless they kill themselves during the landing, there is a ride back up waiting for them.

With that you can have 3 separate chronograms and each mission is simplified in relation to a single Apollo.

If you are unhappy with the mass budget, you can launch yet another series of missions with supplies and equipment to be landed before the ascent vehicles are landed. And, since in this case whatever lands doesn't even need to be pressurized, or delicate, landing it should be much easier too.

Now we are at 1.52 Apollo masses per mission. It took 4 launches to get there but, still, it's a lot of stuff for our astronauts to work with. Also, if any one launch fails, you can always try again.

One think to note is that if you use cryogenic proplants for your lander or lunar tug, you might face issues with fuel and oxidizer boiling off over time (unless you go for very good isolation or use active cooling, both rather heavy), reducing your time window to have everything launched & used.

You can opt for hypergolic propellants that won't boil off, but you sacrifice performance and make ground handling more expensive and dangerous due to these being highly toxic.

You can use cryogenics for the landers and depots that don't stay parked in lunar orbit for long, but any assets with long shelf life should use hypergolics.

And now my mission profile has two different landing modules, one using cryogenics, one using hypergolics. Oh well... We can always go hypergolic if the mass budget is not a big issue.

Requiring the astronauts to execute a cross country EVA from the lander to the ascent vehicle seems like a huge risk. What if they land just slightly too far away?

They can land the Falcon 9 first stage in the middle of the drone ship. Any reason they can’t locate a perfect spot on the moon and land there exactly?

Earth orbiting GNSS provides excellent position information near the surface of the Earth but poorer position information near the surface of the Moon. That said, the Falcon 9 is equipped with a decent inertial navigation system.

Yep, not sure about the high altitude flight, but terminal guidance is certainly not GPS based. I think it's mostly radar & they even painted their landing zone with some special paint a while ago to get better radar returns.

Eh. Apollo 12 landed within 200 meters of Surveyor 3 with 1960s-era technology and after manually evading a bunch of boulders. These days, SpaceX can land a booster on a ship in the middle of the ocean after a hypersonic return. I think they could manage a precision landing on the moon.

The thing is that if you are landing a two stage rocket (or a rocket with enough delta-v for ascent) you can abort the landing back to orbit (unless you are crazy enouh to do direct ascent from earth without entering lunar orbit).

Apollo basically had a switch + sensor based tigers to start an automatic segvence that shuts down and drops the first stage, starts the seconds stage and flies it back to lunar orbit.

If you don't have an ascent stage or enough delta-v, you have to land, potentially many kilometers of course or even crash if something goes very wrong.

That's a very good point. A lander without an ascent module can't abort to space. Once you do your deorbit burn, you will land no matter what.

That's a good reason to have multiple supply/equipment depots on the surface before you even land the ascent vehicles. Walk up to the nearest one, then drive the rest of the way.

Also that's one good reason to have spare ascent craft (or supply depots) parked on low lunar orbit that could be directed to pick up any stranded astronauts.

A last option is a LESS-like lifeboat assembled from lander components. Surface to orbit on a convertible has some appeal.

>A last option is a LESS-like lifeboat assembled from lander components. Surface to orbit on a convertible has some appeal.

Already considered in Apollo days:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_escape_systems

A very simple "rocket chair" using residual fuel from the LEM. There were also variants for regular use during exploration using only leftover propellant from the descent stage.

Flown manually all the way to lunar orbit due to guidance computer being to heavy back then:

"Guidance in typical LESS designs was simple: an 'eight-ball' to show spacecraft attitude, a clock to show time since liftoff, and a planned pitch program. The Apollo Guidance Computer used as an autopilot for the CSM and LM had a mass of around a hundred pounds and consumed a significant amount of power, so computer controlled flight was out of the question. This would be one of the few cases where an astronaut flew a rocket manually all the way to orbit, and with far less instrumentation than normal."

Planning to land in a designated area is easy. Ruling out any deviations is a challenge. SpaceX knows booster landing on earth, but that may not be the the same on the moon. Moreover, it can afford to lose a booster every know and then here, but there it can't.

It can be done, but can it be guaranteed?

> but that may not be the the same on the moon

True. No wind or waves, everything standing perfectly still.

I'd say it's much easier.

Principal negative as I can imagine it is the constitution of the regolith. I remember reading that one of the concerns about the original lunar programs was how soft and deep the regolith might be at the landing site - if it's loose and silty and 6' deep, then that's going to get tricky.

Sure, we have much better radar and composition maps of the lunar surface these days, but it strikes me that it's still not as 100% as landing on a barge's [presumably] metal surface or concrete and Cape Canaveral.

The tiny landing legs (more like landing pinkies) of Starship concern me a lot, but whatever would be going to land with this approach would have reasonably robust landing legs with feet that can handle soft surface.

I'm more worried about sandblasting the surroundings.

Aye, that's it! The huge and wonderful mass of a Starship plonking down three spindle-thin legs onto and into luna incognita.

I'm sure smarter people than I have thought about this, but it was a thought that struck me when I saw the mockups in the NASA lunar bid vid a wee while back.

Well... At least it's more than 3.

Still, by then the ship should be somewhat top-heavy and those six landing pinkies do not inspire much trust.

OTOH, the people designing this are smarter than we are and much more experienced than me in rocket design, so they may know one or two things I don't.

I remember reading somewhere the astronauts noted Surveyor 3 looked sandblasted, presumably because of the LM's ejecta. That's why the ascent vehicle should probably not be the first thing to land and, perhaps, should be located not too close to the crew landing spot.

This could be made into a movie. Astronauts stranded on the moon have to figure out how to survive until they can travel to the ascent vehicle.

There is a 1968 movie about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(1968_film)

And American astronaut is launched in a hurry due to the space race in a one-way Gemini based lander, lands off course and needs to find the shelter/ascent vehicle with limited supply of air. And at the same time the Soviet mission he was effectively racing with goes silent...

> Saturn V could lift 140 tonnes to low earth orbit. Falcon Heavy can lift 54 tonnes to low earth orbit. I think that means it could get a mission to the moon as long as it weighed 38% of what Apollo did. That doesn't sound like a fun trip.

While I haven't yet seen anything concrete, SpaceX's definitely wants to have orbital refueling. If I recall, that's actually one of SpaceX's requirements for Starship.

Orbital refueling would mean that lift capacity to LEO doesn't translate directly the range beyond LEO.

orbital refueling makes a lot of sense, do you know if there are plans to manufacture the fuel in orbit? That would be somewhat good practice for producing fuel on Mars. At lease they would know not to forget anything, no making a quick trip to Home Depot while in orbit.

Manufacturing fuel in orbit requires sending the plant in orbit, extracting the raw materials, packaging them then bringing them up there and also involves sending a ship every time a maintenance is needed, unlike Mars where the raw material (water, CO2) are already nearby. ISRU (in situ resource utilization) is the best way to go, i.e. you bring the plant to Mars but at least you use the local raw materials.

I've heard about approaches for manufacturing fuel on the Moon, but I can't imagine how you might manufacture it in earth's orbit. What are the leading ideas around this approach?

edit: i know we can launch more fuel into orbit, and I really emphasize the "manufacturing" in orbit part.

The main problem would be getting the necessary atoms to your factory. It likely would be easier to construct fuel on earth or on the moon and send it up. (If your rocket exploded the ‘BOOM’ might be a bit louder if its cargo were rocket fuel instead of raw materials for rocket fuel, but the practical difference would be zero)

Your best bet would be to use mass that’s present in space, but unfortunately (1), there isn’t that much in orbit. In theory, one could scope up cosmic dust, tiny meteorites, and old satellites in orbit. It would be a challenge to scale that up, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_(spacecraft) didn’t catch kilograms of stuff, even though it explicitly went for a comet.

Capturing a larger meteorite would work, but larger meteorites are harder to catch.

If you’re extremely ambitious, build a solar powered particle accelerator in space, use it to create electrons, neutrons and protons (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_creation), turn those into atoms, and build fuel from those (apart from the practical problem of scaling that up, there are ‘a few’ Ph.D’s to be earned there.)

(1) or fortunately, as having lots of mass there would make space flight dangerous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris)

Collect a water-ice asteroid or cometary nucleus or some such, park it in orbit, and electrolyse it.

I'm not aware of a less outlandish plan!

Now, if you want oxidiser, you could skim air off the top of the earth's atmosphere. I have no idea if that has been considered outside of science fiction [1], though.

[1] okay, here they're skimming nitrogen, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction...

If you were electrolyzing water ice, wouldn't you get both hydrogen (fuel) and oxygen (oxidizer), by definition?

Yes. But if you only wanted oxidiser, you could skip the awkward "capture a cometary nucleus" step by scooping air. Since oxygen is much heavier than hydrogen, this could save you a lot in mass launched from the Earth.

Also if you had enough power (solar or possibly nuclear) you could use the captured gases directly for slightly inefficient propulsion by heating them NERVA style or accelerating them by a modifiedion engine.

I remember some concepts for very low altitude satellites that compensate for drag by running a solar powered ion ramjet. :)

About 80% of the methalox propellant used by the Raptor engine is oxygen. If you manage to scrub oxygen from the very low earth orbit (VLEO), and then bring it to LEO, you are in business. The Japanese Space Agency put a satellite in VLEO in 2019 [1].

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

Oxygen can be obtained from regolith on the moon.

I'm in-favor of robots on the moon bootstrapping a fuel and solar-furance refinery of materials construction plant. The speed of light delay is annoying, but not fatal for higher level remote supervision and planning of automated processes.

Two things:

(1) no one's used methane on a rocket before, so there's not a lot of experience in ground handling it, and its properties are rather different than other fuels.

(2) Making large lightweight steel pressure vessels is also rather novel.

Those two account for most of the destruction; the rest are the sorts of errors usual to a rocket test program. It's an industry famous for blowing things up due to low margins and lots of potential energy.

Given those two statements, how much testing ($$$$) are agencies like NASA going to require before attaching self-loading cargo to the ship?

A large part of SpaceX’s success in winning commercial crew approval is because the stack is actually very traditional. The primary innovation is first stage recovery which arguably doesn’t add any risk to the crew.

Fully new materials and propellants completely change the game when it comes to risk. I hope the succeed and I think they can succeed. It’s just that this round is going to take a little more money than the Falcon/Dragon program and I hope they’re able to find enough of it.

There is a lot of innovation in Falcon 9 compared to other crewed rockets - pneumatic separation systems, subcooled propelants, propelant loading with crew on board, liquid abort engines on Dragon and of course the stage 1 recovery systems.

As for human rating Starship - I think the best bet is to launch them as many times as possible unmanned to demonstrate it is safe, kinda like the thousands of flight hours needed to certify a new airliner. This should be perfectly doable on the fully reusable Starship + Super Heavy combo.

Thanks for pointing out the other aspects. I was aware of the propellant loading with crew onboard and liquid abort engines but just forgot about them. You’re right. There are a substantial number of other innovative aspects.

Yep - also the computers. AFAIK they are both much more powerful (which is actually needed for the first stage to compute the best landing trajectory) as well as using relatively commodity hardware and and normal (IIRC C++) programming languages.

I'm not saying rad hardened aerospace computers and specialized programming languages (ADA and co) are bad - there was a time where they were absolutely the best (any only) choice, but thankfully today there are often better options.

IIRC for the Dragon computers I remember an article that mentioned that if they went with aerospace computers, even just a devkit would have cost >150 thousand dollars, severely limiting available resources for developers and the flight hardware would have lead time in years.

So they went with redundant (IIRC 5 times) x86 with Linux on top & each engineer working on the code can have effectively flight hardware on their desk for use during development.

As the other commenter pointed out, the Falcons have some innovation in there. But Starship's has even mroe. It uses SpaceX's new Raptor engines, which are full-flow CH4/LOX engines. No full-flow staged combustion cycle (FFSCC) rocket engine has ever been used to deliver a payload to LEO (or even used in an actual rocket at all, AFAIK). This is somewhat surprising (and indicative of the difficulty of manifesting the design), given that the design has been around since at least the 1960s and has a lot of benefits over other rocket engine designs.

In that regard, FFSCC rocket engines actually remind me of LFTR-type MSRs:

1. been around for decades

2. clear benefits to the design

3. hasn't managed to be used viably

So I would say Starship + Super Heavy is definitely a riskier investment than NASA has made with Falcon.

Quite a lot, I imagine, but given they're (supposed to be) fully reusable, the idea is that testing will be $$ instead of $$$$.

The Blue Origin lander is pretty big and would need to be launched in pieces. The Dynetics lander, on the other hand, is much smaller and could definitely fit in Falcon Heavy with the extended fairing (that SpaceX is already developing for Air Force payloads).

I'm a big fan of the Dynetics lander. It's small for its capability and just a single stage (plus drop tanks) so should have low development and build costs. Video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFBeVQ3STZ0

You can get an F9 to the moon if your payload is only a few hundred kg...

New Glenn has deep cryo hydrolox upper stage, same as proposed lander? Like they were made for each other.

His stated goal is to create to start mass producing Starships, he personally wants 1,000 of them with relaunch time of 1 hour for each vehicle, I believe allowing 2-3 launches per vehicle per day.

> Imagine what happens if NASA looks at all three plans and says "They're all equal in terms of meeting our goals, except that Starship has many times the payload capacity and is cheaper than the others".

Isn't the more likely hypothetical outcome in that case that all three plans arrive on a similar timeframe regardless of how well SpaceX can underbid simply: "The Congressmen from Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas have all agreed to disqualify SpaceX's bid so that the SLS can move forward unopposed."?

SLS is not in competition with Starship, as this post[0] from Everyday Astronaut front page nicely outlines.

[0] https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/

Thanks for the article, a lot of interesting details. They definitely are not in competition today, and certainly not in competition technically where they are taking very different approaches and currently have very different end goals.

I was responding to the hypothetical situation of the above poster where if Starship comes in under budget and better specced than SLS in the Artemis timeframe for Moon mission lunar lander designs and the SLS teams came in with one over budget (and Sierra Nevada does whatever they do probably somewhere in the middle) ["all three plans"], the SLS is still likely to win in the political competition (for so very many reasons including those for why the SLS is nicknamed the "Senate Launch System"). Keep in mind the whole point of the Artemis "land a person on the moon again in our lifetimes" is a political gambit to curry favor with US taxpayers that their "money is well spent" with a pat on the back that NASA and probably (and maybe even especially) that the SLS have been useful uses of taxpayer money. (Even if NASA has done plenty of things between the last moon landing and today, and even if NASA is just as equally involved in the commercial space projects, Artemis and SLS are as much political symbols as space projects.)

I don't see Starship landing on the Moon. It's just too big and unwieldy and will likely topple upon touchdown.

The lunar lander variant they submitted to NASA has terminal landing thrusters at about >half of it's height (so about >25 meters high) for fine guidance during last stages of landing & to reduce the amount of dust and rocks sent flying by the rocket exhaust when landing on an unprepared spot.

Can be seen on picture in this article: https://spacenews.com/nasa-evaluation-sees-spacex-lunar-land...

Are you an aerospace engineer? Because the credibility of your comment hinges on that.

Hey, Kerbal Space Program is a perfectly valid alternative to a degree in Aerospace engineering!

EDIT: Obviously kidding.

Resume: -Designed and simulated entire spacecraft and rocket system for hypothetical moon landing. -Simulated thousands of spacecraft lithobraking events to assess spacecraft durability

Lithobraking might well become viable with some combination of tethers and electromagnetic accelerators to mediate.

No, but a friend of mine is and he said exactly the same thing.

Lots of it’s weight is in its butt. It will land fine.

Not really. The passenger and cargo area are on top and the fuel tanks are at the bottom, which will be mostly empty after landing.

IIRC Starship has a cargo capacity of 100 metric tons, all of it topside. The Raptor engines at the bottom will counterbalance this somewhat but it will still be top-heavy.

IIRC at least in some iterations starship has cargo pots at the bottom inside the "skirt" next to/between the vacuum optimized outer engines. That could help weight distribution & makes the pods easily acessible once you drop them to the surface post landing.

That’s my point. Those Raptors are heavy.

Not that heavy. A Raptor weighs 1500kg (1.5 metric tons) so 6 of them makes 9 metric tons while the weight at the top of Starship should be almost 100 tons.

That's actually a good remark. Dr. Zubrin argues that a full-sized version of Starship cannot land on the Moon unless it uses a landing pad, as it would create a large crater [1] and thus topple, and would also blow up the lunar rocks and dust in orbit [2], which would endanger any object orbiting the Moon (and Lunar dust is also quite corrosive).

One can speculate that's one of the reasons why the NASA proposal uses a mini-starship version.

[1] https://spacenews.com/op-ed-toward-a-coherent-artemis-plan/

[2] https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459...

SpaceX already offered a solution: separate thrusters a few dozen meters off the ground. Current plan is for Raptors to be off for landing.

It's disappointing that Zubrin didn't mention that.

Zubrin has a recurring tendency to ignore things that don't support what he plans to say.

Fortunately, NASA does. That's why they accepted SpaceX's proposal bid to design a full version.

Gravity differences will make things very different from an intuition point of view.

To me it’s the huge distance astronauts would have to travel from the ship to the surface that seems like a serious demerit.

Given the low gravity, could they abseil down and just climb back up?

Ladders are hard. Proposal is elevator

Or a crane?

https://comicpunch.net/reader/mangas/The%20Adventures%20Of%2...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/I91epbDCEioqEofHg7FK...

And what if the lift fails? How are they gonna climb up 40 meters with a huge and bulky Moon suit?

It would be bummer if you had to die on the Moon because you couldn't climb back up into your spaceship.

The proposal has two separate crew access airlocks with their own lifts, two separate cargo cranes that can be used in an emergency, and presumably some rope on board that the crew remaining in the vehicle can jury-rig to drag the EVA team up if necessary.

The sheer scale of Starship is stupefying. If it ever gets there, it will in one go transport tens of times the payload of every previous lunar mission put together. The scale of what it can do will allow it to be quite a bit less efficient about things than everything else has to be, and so it can spend some mass on redundancy of important systems.

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