For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top.
It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.
The ability to lift that into orbit (minus most fuel and booster) with both halves still able to land is an insane feat.
The Starship is designed to carry 100 people. SpaceX will be able to send more people to the moon in one mission than all the moon landings ever sent. Wow...
As a result the Lunar variant actually needs a lot more fuel delivered to it than the Mars version. Even one full refuel in LEO isn’t enough, and it needs to boost part way to an intermediate elliptical orbit and get another top up.
It seems like for every full refill you could provide in space it'd take an additional 3-4 ships just to get it up there?
Starship’s usable volume is over 100 times that of an Apollo lunar lander.
To land that with Apollo would take 100 launches of a single use craft.
Each would be launched atop the common Super Heavy booster.
Depending on the trip, a passenger Starship would do an on-orbit refuelling from the tanker variant.
E.g. for a lunar mission: it takes 9.4 km/s Δv to get to low Earth orbit (LEO), but only 5.5 km/s Δv to get from there to the Moon [1]. Raptor (the engine used on Starship) has an exhaust velocity of 3.2 km/s on Earth, and 3.7 km/s in vacuum [2]. Plugging those numbers in the rocket equation, to get to LEO you need about 19x your payload mass in fuel. However, to get from LEO to the moon surface, you only need 4x your payload mass in fuel. So while a tanker can indeed only bring a small fraction of its launch mass as fuel to orbit, once you're in orbit you don't need that much fuel to get to the moon.
In reality the numbers to get to LEO are lower because of staging and the vacuum engines on Starship which can be used in the upper atmosphere, and you also need fuel to get back from the moon, but it probably won't add up to a full Starship.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
As an attributive adjective, "foot" is indeed correct, e.g. "a 130 foot yacht."
As a predicative adjective, "feet" is correct, e.g. "the yacht was 130 feet long."
Occasionally, in certain regional variations, you may hear "foot" used in the second case: "the yacht was 130 foot long."
A nice combination of SF and fantasy in one picture :-)
Why is it efficient? [https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2z534g/...]
Real rocket science teams really use phrases like this, including this one. Is it a joke? Yeah, kind of. Is it what they would say if they had no sense of humour? No, probably not. Is it still a thing the experts actually say to actually talk about what's going on? Yeah, it is.
a few more examples:
"Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" : explosive destruction of the rocket
"Lithobraking" : it's like aerobraking, but with less aero and more litho
Falcon 9 does the same, relighting 3 engines (out of 9 total) for the boostback burn, 3 for the entry burn and then just 1 for landing.
It’s called a RUD: Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
If you can reuse it, great, if not, well, it's a rocket.
They didn’t launch humans on the Falcon 9 for the first 10 years either. Lots of time to iron out the kinks (though it will likely be much less than 10 years this time)
That looks like an awful lot of G’s that this maneuver is pulling there.
This suicide burn is just to try to recover the rocket to save money.
This sounds even crazier than the bellyflop-swivel-to-suicide-burn (BSTSB).
So the Starship system is some type of 3 piece mechanism? Where the 3rd piece is the human module?
And they’re going to land this with parachutes? Where? In the ocean?
Won’t this kill the reusability of the plan, for quick turn around time?
Granted, if the BSTSB is to only be used for transporting inorganic materials, like fuel, then G-forces does not matter for human usage.
Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.
So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.
In 1963 a LES killed someone, in 1983 it saved lives.
Which manned abort in 1963 is that specifically? Why are you trying to skew discussion into some direction?
Note: LES stands for Launch Escape System, usually a small solid rocket that activates in case of a failure during ascent to take the manned capsule away from exploding rocket under it, perhaps equivalent to airbags in a car.
People gets hurt by airbags all the time trying to service them. That doesn’t tell if it’s worth having them in actual situations they’re designed for, nor whether the situations are worth preparing for.
Also, an escape system adds weight to a rocket. That weight could be used for other stuff that makes the rest of the system more reliable (slightly stronger fuel tanks, redundant pumps, whatever). Designing the escape system also takes resources away that could be used to improve the safety of the primary system.
For rockets, it’s not easy to decide what’s the best choice; we launch too few of them, and the ones we launch change too often to gather reliable statistics. Getting real-world data on the reliability of escape systems definitely is hard, as it requires numerous rocket failures or elaborate test setups (a full test must include high speed and an explosion that may throw material through the engine of the escape capsule)
> Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.
> So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.
Is this supposed to be a recursion joke? Sorry if I'm not getting it.
[1]: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-r... "Largest rocket"
I remember being amused the first time a flight attendant said "we'll be taking off momentarily".
Trivial fact would perhaps be better as 'factette' or 'microfact'.
In this incorrect usage of the word, take the following sentence: "Nice little factoid!", could also be written as "Nice little nugget of info!"
And whenever I realize that the full Starship + SuperHeavy stack is going to be much taller than that hill, I am just speechless. That is one big freaking rocket, one big trampoline for mankind, so to say.
I've adjusted my expectations quite a bit due to the lack of mobility progress since then.
That of course is biased towards the contracted projects, but still provides cashflow and leverage for capital.
What got in the way was politics.
What revived space tech was competition.
Politics and bureaucracy can plague private enterprise and competition can be had between or at the behest of government institutions.
It's not as simple as government bad, private good. In fact that simplification can be quite dangerous if it leads to the erosion of government as policy.
Saturn V: 3 people to the Moon; Starship: 100 people to Mars (unproven, of course). Mars is a little further than the Moon. Granted, that's with in-orbit refueling.
People on these vehicles going to Mars are mostly going to complain about not being able to go back, as any kind of return mission will be Non-reusable.
What are you talking about? Starships will be refueled on Mars and will return back to Earth. Why shouldn't they be reusable after their return?
I care about actual practical capabilities and achievable mission profiles. What do you are about?
(Apparently the aircraft launched from an aircraft carrier aren't really airplanes, either!)
Because of in-orbit refueling each Starship will land over ten times the payload on Mars as each Apollo mission landed on the moon.
Also, the Saturn V came back. That requires quite a bit more delta v. Actually, going to the moon and back is not that far off a one way trip to Mars.
Since we're nitpicking: The Saturn V didn't come back – the tiny command module came back, and it wasn't reusable. In fact, the only reusable part of the Saturn V were the astronauts.
> Actually, going to the moon and back is not that far off a one way trip to Mars.
You're moving the goalpost. This is getting ridiculous. What are you even arguing about? Starship + Super Heavy will be a much more capable rocket, superior to the Saturn V in almost every way. That doesn't detract from the incredible engineering of the Saturn V, which was developed 55 years earlier, in record time, with slide rules (!), and which first launched 10 years after the first artificial satellite (!!) That is impossible to beat, and there's no need for a pissing contest.
That being said, that rocket alone isn't going to be more capable than the Saturn V in moving a payload around. It will be less capable. If you have many rockets then you'll have the capacity to move that payload around as a far as a Saturn V.
There, is that the comparison you wanted?