Science upside for Starship
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
Every satellite today is at the end of a long production chain with lots of bottlenecks, finding funding for launch being only one of them. We'll need assembly lines of them to feed this rocket.
SpaceX is already in the spot they cannot utilize Falcon capacity - if you look at their earlier plans, they were expecting to lunch them more than once per week long time ago. Instead, even with a bulk of their launches being internal ones, they are still way below that goal.
Assuming Starship can deliver on their design goals, we’ll see if another price cut will actually drive up the demand.
But it is starting to have an affect already. There are multiple companies talking about launching and maintaining satellite "constellations", not just Starlink. Launching and maintaining that kind of network is difficult if you can only launch once a year and it costs what launches cost 10 years ago.
Needing, and bankrolling, several hundred launches over several years will gradually get people used to the idea of bulk freight to orbit, and some will find other plausible uses for the capability, and shepherd the idea through fundraising channels. It will take time.
I could see the incumbents being very reticent to do so.
It is possible that there is a cap in how much stuff people want to put into space.
(EDIT: I do think it’s possible for SpaceX to exist as an entity that is simply smaller and not wasting its time trying to make its CEO Baron Harkonnen , but hey corporate ownership law amirite?)
I very much get the picture that New Space has an if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach which is soon facing a reckoning. It is very important that the whole of society pivots their thinking to the only thing that will give Earth a long-term future.
I used the wrong word there. I was thinking more in terms of: SpaceX enables higher volumes, etc..
I know it's not a perfect analogy but cheap and predictable global shipping enabled business models which were not possible before.
Maybe cheap and predictable access to space will do the same.
I’m still trying to figure out if Earth is the slave planet or Mars is the slave planet, and how that’s gonna play out.
Either way, lots of stuff to move.
Have you heard about SpinLaunch? SpinLaunch really came out of left field for me as a serious contender.
Really curious how they plan to re-balance a multi-ton spinning mass when half the mass gets ejected at 10,000 RPM.
That sounds nuts but the scale test went OK, so I guess they have a handle on that?
https://www.planet.com/our-constellations/
They started with this strategy before Starlink was started.
As far as how long it will take, it didn't take long for a single company to revolutionize the industry, I expect that those that want to keep up will fill the gap. It's honestly probably going to be mostly new names, some of which we have not heard of yet.
Even a really big telescope doesn't seem to need more than 50 launches, $2.5B. A moonbase needs fuel depot runs in the tens per year, and the occasional crew exchange, all under $1B/y.
At issue is whether and when their planned launch capacity ever finds other customers. Once all 30k birds are up, will there be other uses for the launchers, besides going to Mars? Do they need more than a dozen or two, for the job?
So yeah, if they ever launch the whole 30k, they'll be flying quite often; the first replenishment will likely happen before the constellation is complete if the start slow.
If you lower the dollar cost of going to the dentist by 10x, you're not going to see people going to the dentist 10 times more often.
We can anticipate some businesses would benefit from having low-cost access to microgravity environments - right now you carefully select your experiments, because it's extremely costly, but, if it weren't, you wouldn't need to.
While satellite/probe/crewed-craft building has an extensive industrial chain with multiple bottlenecks that would hold it back if launch costs plumeted, there are others that have few and that would be enabled.
We'd probably need a lot of barriers so that people don't launch cubesats for $100 in volumes that make LEO dangerous.
Nobody cares about satellites themselves. What they care about is using them for something useful. Communication and imaging. At some point, both markets will become saturated.
I don't know what level of demand there is for them, but it's entirely conceivable that it will be long-term limited by something other than launch costs.
I disagree. The excess payload and cheapness of Falcon 9 created a huge market for smallsats and microsats as secondary payloads. If you look at the _number_ (not mass) of operational payloads since Falcon 9 has come online, the numbers have been shooting up dramatically (and that is excluding Starlink). There's been a 5-fold increase in the number of smaller satellites being launched (excluding Starlink) since the last decade.
See (pdf): https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/Bryce_Smallsa...
(1) I could not find a good chart showing the historic Space Sector investment, but there were multiple articles talking about record amount of the investment: https://spacenews.com/space-industry-in-midst-of-transformat...
...mostly because reliability must be so high and launching mass costs so much. If you can launch mass cheaply, and accept lower reliability, space vehicles should be much easier to build.
Not only that, but they'd need to integrate with Starship and, right now, we aren't even sure which way the payload needs to go once the target orbit is achieved (it looks like it's sideways, while every other launcher releases the payload forward).
Um, SpaceX. Private. Volunteers for the jobs are plentiful. They'll have a harder time culling the list than filling it.
Travel time to "home" seems close enough in terms of months long voyages. Haven't decided which journey is the more treacherous option.
The 15th century colonists came to a place that was resource rich in whatever a colony could need: food, water, building material, etc. Martian colonists will not have that luxury.
New world colonists faced an indigenous poplulation that Martian colonists won't have. Probably a good thing, as the examples provided by the new world colonists on how to interact with indeginous people does not bode well (at least for those who continued to follow).
Communication time back to home is actually in the Martian colonist's favor. As is the fact the area will have been surveyed quite exetensively in advance of arrival, so preparations can be better made with that knowledge. Full detailed maps will be available as well. This will help finding more barren wasteland even easier than just wandering around looking for barren wasetland. Effeciency will be key with the constrained resources.
But this is the key point: there were plenty of desirable things in the Americas. There is absolutely nothing of any value whatsoever on Mars that can't be found much, much more easily on Earth.
Also, alien artifacts.
Indigenous people artifacts. Let's not be rude. ;-)
Ungoverned land.
Once the powers that be regarding the colonists realized ownership issues were going to be had with the indigenous population, those relationships didn't go so well though. that's what I meant by those who followed. "Hi, here's a lovely friendship blanket" doesn't speak well for relationships with those indigenous people.
Don’t get me wrong, when Musk first announced this I was very interested, and could just about afford the target price. But then I tried a much more minor relocation — Cambridge to Berlin — and found myself much lonlier than I’d been primed to expect by my experience moving to Cambridge in the first place after I graduated.
It might be fine, I just wouldn’t assume that now.
If SpaceX hit something like that, we enter a whole different paradigm because a trip in relative comfort to orbit becomes comparable to middle class holiday prices.
If you can send an average person to orbit for the price of a trip to Disneyland, your launch demand functionally becomes infinite. This would become the thing to do for so many people.
It's sort of like CPU manufacturing: making a CPU is a peak technology, multi billion dollar undertaking - but because we can sell the things for like $250, everyone on the planet now has one.
Space access may go the same way if SpaceX get anywhere near those lower numbers. Blue Origin did one interesting thing recently, and that was launching William Shatner suborbital - if you can send a 90 year old, you can send anyone.
Building the official hotel would become the next obvious thing, complete with spin gravity. It would be a while new dimension.
Bring on the space hotels though! For the right price, that's absolutely a trip I would pay to make.
There are plenty of people here here who could benefit, possibly even financially, from research there. Paying what is essentially a monopoly on research capability on mars would be one avenue of profitability for the project.
Also think about this: once there's a profitable economy there of some kind, you'll get all sorts of capital interplay that doesn't actually need physical financial instruments to make happen, only networking.
We've had the technology to colonize Antarctica pretty cheaply for quite some time now. I don't see any self sustaining cities there; just small research bases. Why should Mars be different?
Musk talks frequently about a self-sustaining Martian city becoming a "backup for humanity" in the case of some global extinction-level event (Asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc), which is all well and good. But who's going to pay for it? In order for Mars colonization to actually happen, it needs to be not only affordable, but profitable!
It's like saying we should colonize Antarctica because then we'd learn things that would make it easier to colonize the North Pole. Doesn't really answer the question.
So far, it's private money moving that direction. It's not tax dollars. If some uber rich asshole wants to spend his money on this, so be it. It's his money. If it doesn't work out, okay, we learn from it. But not going is just not going to happen. It's part of the human experience to ask "what's next" and then do it. Less adventurous can sit at home. The meek shall inherit the earth, the bold are going to space!
The only way I can see large-scale Mars colonization happening is if there's a strong economic incentive for that. It isn't going to happen just because a few people want it to, or think it's the "next step for humanity".
[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217986505513172992
[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217993568482025472
My guess is, that short list of volunteers will get a lot shorter.
Why cut further when you're already the cheapest?
It isn't that SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity and so fills it with Starlink satellites. SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity because they're launching so many Starlink satellites. They only make large launch vehicles and they can only hit the prices they do if the launch regularly. If they stop manufacturing their own demand the price will rise precipitously.
SpaceX is currently subsidized by investor money. The steady state remains to be seen.
One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued was that there was no need for such a large vehicle. It was cheap per unit mass to orbit but there was not enough demand to justify it.
I'm a bit baffled as to how you dont see how Falcon 9 and Starship are different to the shuttle. Much more re-usable, must faster turnaround. And hence much cheaper cost per kg to orbit. Granted that Starship might turn out to not work (Musk likes to gamble, thats what innovation _is_) but even Falcon 9 is reusable in a much more comprehensive way than the SLS ever was.
Henry Spencer at least helped to popularize the idea (if not invented the phrase himself), that Space Shuttle wasn't reusable, but rather refurbishable system. Both 1st stage boosters and 2nd stage engines had to go through detailed inspection and maintenance after each flight.
to be fair to them the idea is not new and shuttles could not have worked the way Space X rockets do, for that it requires sensors and computing power not available at the time.
Cheap for whom? Governments with unlimited budgets? It was not cheap for commercial entities designing products for sure.
Back then, there were no commercial entities designing and launching satellites. The first two Telstar comsats were basically international collaborative experiments between national-level telcos; Telstar didn't actually get under way with operational comsats until the 1980s. Similarly, Inmarsat, the maritime comsat company, was founded in 1979. The first GPS prototypes weren't launched until the 1970s, and the civilian use of GPS didn't take off until the late 1980s. And in the 1960s, the only people with Earth Resources Satellites were national-level spy agencies.
Short version: civilian space applications barely existed until 1-2 decades after the Saturn V was cancelled. The current efflorescence of communications, positioning, observation/meteorology, and broadcasting satellites were foreseeable and foreseen, but the entire manifest of commercial satellite payloads through 1990 could probably have fitted on top of a single Saturn V (although the need to deliver them to different orbits, over a 30 year period, would have made this a non-starter).
Finally, NASA had a program for Apollo science missions (from 1966 onwards), the Apollo Applications Program:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program
Only two AAP missions eventually flew -- Skylab (plus three crew launches aboard S-IB stacks, and a spare "lifeboat" stack), and the Apollo-Soyuz Mission (IIRC ASM used the "lifeboat" stack for the US flight). The proposed Venus fly-by was cancelled, the Saturn V launcher to carry the Viking Mars lander was cancelled, and so on.
It kills me every time I remember what could have been. We could already be multiplanetary.
I think that by the time they actually built flyable hardware for that mission, they'd learn to properly shield the crew. They could at least hide behind the propellant tanks.
Except that the 3rd stage would be empty by then :-(
BTW, it'd be a cool movie, even if a bit Apollo 13-like.
> Alas, the Shuttle turned out to be a white elephant with a couple of lethal design flaws
Indeed. The Shuttle shouldn't even called "reusable", but merely "fixable" or "rebuildable", if you got lucky.
In any case, I'd have loved more Skylab workshop launches and the AAP permanent lunar presence. The modules were huge compared to ISS ones. It was a tragic loss to have Skylab fall to Earth because they didn't have the money to build something to boost it up a little.
Skylab wasn't great, but if it hadn't re-entered prematurely it could have been fixed up (new solar panels FTW!) and refurbed internally (methane scrubbers!) and used as a learning platform for a new space station, rather than the USA going nearly two decades without one.
What happens when launching a Saturn-V sized payload becomes cheaper than launching an Atlas V sized one?
These 10 or 20 telescopes can be as capable as the JWST. And not only because they could just be manufactured copies of the original. Remember the original budget for it was about 500M. A lot of the ballooning price was because they had extremely tight weight and size constraints (for example, the sunshide had to be insanely light, because almost all of the weight budget had already been allocated)
By using Starship, weight can absolve many sins...
This is one reason I always liked sportscars with small engines - it's much more fun when you have the same acceleration with a smaller car. There's also little subtlety in a 10 litre V-12...
Astra just made it to orbit a few days ago. Firefly almost did, and might very well do so on the next attempt. Relativity is supposed to launch next year. And then there is Blue Origin New Glenn , which also may (eventually...) be ready.
The launch market hasn't really grown much, despite Falcon 9 lowering the cost quite a bit. SpaceX gets a majority of revenue from government launches.
I wonder what will happen to all those new companies.
humans are really good at finding ways to use excess anything. Look at the explosion of software use cases thanks to improved hardware
We'd also need to invent new uses for sattelites, things we don't do now because launching is too expensive. Their suborbital passenger transportation is one such new demand generators, but only if they can solve launching and landing near population centers.
They are planning a solution for that: offshore launch platforms [0] 30 km at sea, directly accessible by high-speed train, à la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_International_Airport
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_offshore_platf...
Because that's Tesla's business. Plus halo effect - you don't want to board a spaceship by flying on a helicopter designed 30 years ago.
Remember that battery weight scales linearly with number of passengers, so building a larger battery operated helicopter just needs more motors and batteries. We don't have large e-copters because it costs a lot of money to certify one for 20 passengers and, until now, there is very little demand for that.
Starship turns everything upside down and, suddenly, makes the cheapest rocket a Saturn-V class heavy booster. With it, it's cheaper to add a huge kick stage to your Neptune probe to make it get there faster, put more solar panels so you don't need to deal with compliance around an RTG, or just use steel for structural elements (because why not?), and so on.
If it were easier - say, if Starships were locally available within all the other states on Earth - then we'd be witnessing a massive move to space. This may yet come, but its not going to happen at the magnitude we'd all like, for as long as the US Government is gate-keeping things.
As far as I can tell and have heard other people much smarter than me say, there's no real physics-level barrier to any of Starship's goals. There's plenty of tough, tough engineering problems to solve, but it doesn't require unobtanium in order to work.
SpaceX has already pulled off landing an orbital-class first stage (not to discount the prior work in the form of DC-X and others, but they weren't orbital), and they've gotten to the point where they can refly those stages many times in relatively quick succession. Seems reasonable to believe that they can figure out Starship, even if it may not be in the exact form or on the exact timescale that they want.
NASA has invested more than SpaceX in the Space Launch System (think $20B plus in spending). This will be a rocket that is disposable, every launch it lands in the ocean, all work lost. Estimated per launch costs and sustaining costs for all the facilities involved run about $2B-$3B - NASA isn't saying actually.
Anways, once things are head to head we will get to see if Musks promise of cheaper access to space vs the rocket with tons more money invested pans out.
Facility List for SLS by the way to give you just a sense of the cost base Musk is competing against.
Booster Fabrication Facility (BFF) - 45-acre site at KSC used to refurbish, manufacture, and assemble the aft skirt assembly and forward assembly for the SLS boosters. Includes the Multi-Purpose Logistic Facility used to receive, inspect and store shipped flight hardware.
Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) - Large (456 ft H max) vertical rocket integration facility. Floor load capacity of 12 million lbs, cranes located throughout building. Handling and storage of hazardous/ nonhazardous commodities.
Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) - The Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) was built in 1986. It is a Level 4, class 100,000 clean room that can be used as a Payload Processing Facility (PPF) and/or a Hazardous Processing Facility (HPF).
Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) – 832 acre production complex located in New Orleans. MAF is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world with 43 environmentally controlled acres (174,000 m2) under one roof. Includes two Vertical Assembly Buildings. Current site of the majority of core stage manufacturing and assembly and planned location for EUS manufacture and assembly.
Systems Integration Lab (SIL) - The Systems Integration Lab (SIL) supports end-to-end integrated avionics and software integration, check-out, verification, and validation. It demonstrates real-time flight control of a launch vehicle, such as SLS, during ascent. This lab at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, not only includes the flight computers and avionics identical to the core stage avionics but also includes emulators for the rocket’s boosters and engines, the Launch Control Center and Orion.
Systems Integrated Test Facility (SITF) - The Software Integration and Test Facility (SITF) at MSFC on Redstone Arsenal integrates and tests software specifically for the SLS Core/Upper Stage avionics system.
Software Development Facility (SDF) - This Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Level 3 certified facility at MSFC performs a complete range of flight software activities from requirements development and analysis, software processes and planning, design and development, to systems integration and development testing. Products developed at the SDF are installed and tested at MSFC’s SITF.
Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) – At MSFC on Redstone Arsenal, the HOSC is capable of distributing secure mission voice, video and data anywhere in the world. Includes Engineering Support
SLS Engineering Support Center (SESC) - Engineering Support Center (SESC). Certification runs for contingencies are performed by engineers responsible for the major elements of the SLS. Located in the HOSC, the SESC leverages remote architecture built for the ISS Payload Operations Center to allow engineers to focus on the engines, boosters, and stages of the SLS during testing and launch.
Advanced Manufacturing and Weld Facility – Located in MSFC’s Building 4755 on Redstone Arsenal, this friction stir welding facility uses advanced robotic tooling to weld barrel or dome segments up to 33 feet in diameter.
MSFC Flowrate and Structural Test Stands –Located at MSFC on Redstone Arsenal, designed to push, pull and apply pressure loads to SLS cryogenic tanks. Cutting-edge technology is also adaptable for future large-scale rockets and systems. Testing and data can be safely monitored from a control room via fiber optic cables.
Stennis Space Center – Multiple propulsion testing facilities for components, engines and stages located near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Facilities include the B-2 test stand used for the SLS core stage green run. Formerly used for Saturn V and Space Shuttle testing, this stand is equipped with a 195-ton (US), main derrick, lifting crane, with a 20-ton jib crane and is capable of static-firing test articles up to 33 ft in diameter.
So for example if it’s not as cheap as expected, it’s still huge that it can deliver volumes larger than the interior of the ISS to orbit in a single launch — that alone means much less of a need to resort to exotic materials and expensive engineering to cut down on weight and volume on projects like the James Webb Space Telescope. It could also have huge implications for which types of orbital stations it’s practical to build.
SpaceX has a good track record of success with their rockets and with this project in particular. They seem to have the skills and backing to make it work, and they aren't discouraged by setbacks. Of course it is not guaranteed to succeed, but it seemed clear to me that the point of this article was to explore what could be done with starship if it does succeed.
Starship seems to, again, require a few of these X% improvements. And the thing about exponential growth, as Covid kindly reminded us, is that eventually it is overwhelming.
So I don't think you can simply extrapolate from "they have a good track record of solving hard problems", because the problems they tackle are getting harder and harder.
I wish them well, but I'm tired of all these blogs writing about Starship as if it's a done thing, to the point of writing about delivery costs. It might happen, it might not.
The typical solution, which is in the context of relighting a liquid fueled rocket that is coasting in microgravity, is to use some other engine to push the fuel in one direction, providing enough initial ullage to light the main engine after which the thrust from the main engine provides the rest.
For refueling it is normally assumed that the target and resupplier are stationary when docked, or at least not accelerating to their next set of orbital parameters; they are station-keeping. The typical solution doesn't work there, so there is research to be done on just how the refueling will work in practice.
This is accurate.
Even though SpaceX does the launches, it is government agencies that deal with launching missions, and government budgets are influenced by public opinion.
E.g. it would serve the latter better if we would explore Venus, Europa, Titan, etc. than trying to live underground on a dead poisonous planet.
What we learn there can be helpful for understanding the history of the solar system as well as planetary dynamics (remember that in terms of well-studied planets, we’re currently at sample size = 1).
We don’t live in the 1950s or the 1890s any more. We are not willing to sacrifice the lives of our explorers like we did when we went to the moon or Antarctica in the 1960s and 1900s respectively. We are not engaging in juvenile races to “get there first” which is both expensive and dangerous.
The space exploration of today is more collaborative and careful then the explorations of the past. So we don’t risk the lives of our explorers nor the unnecessary expenses of getting things done 20 years when we can do it in 50 for far less money and with infinity more safety.
So it’s not about trying to race and and get there first, but rather making sure that the opportunity doesn’t pass us by.
As far as cost goes… these sorts of missions are expensive relative to the amounts of money most of us work with in a regular basis, but compared to the vast sums that get put toward far more questionable and frivolous uses it’s a drop in the bucket. If saving money or rerouting funds to more deserving causes is a goal, there’s several tens of bushels of lower hanging fruit elsewhere that should be looked at first — anything with scientific purpose should be trimmed last.
This is all just to say. A non-voting F-150 owner who talks shit about rich people going to space is actually not doing any damage while filling up his truck, next to that rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope in a singe space visit for his own amusement.
None of the space tourists so far have been particularly known for their conservative politics. Nor do I find space tourism to be some lauded thing in conservative circles.
>rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope
Wow
So to answer your question: “How rich”: Rich enough to own significant stock in polluting corporations.
Planets are big, like absolutely massive. You can easily catch up, specially if you get intel on inevitable failures of first movers.
The rich would spoil Earth and defile it and then move off to the ultimate gated community of Mars, leaving us to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Mars is the spoiled planet, and will be until some point technology is a lot further along. The rich are not going to run away to some wonderland. Earth is the garden, and nothing else is like it in space.
Otherwise you've gotta start stacking disasters to get close, and even then it's pretty difficult. Mars is really bad.
Also, it is not like you couldn't vastly more cheaply and easily build Mars bunker on Earth. As we are centuries away from planet scale geo-engineering.
If we did, it would still work better to just use it here on some isolated land.
Such a ridiculous idea puts the rest of the article in a very questionable light for me.
The earth-sized radio telescope made out of Starlink transceivers is an obvious winner. Total coverage ground radar using the transceiver antenna is another.
I am all for exploring space. I just loathe the fact that we have billionaires with no technical training calling the shots.
(Well, maybe not "exploring". There isn't much to see! I'm very much for using space.)
It's always been true ;)
If you put it to a vote, majority of americans will allocate public funds towards terrestrial concerns over a new space lab. Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. In today's dollars, what was nasa's highest yearly budget: maybe $30B? Let's see what 5% of US GDP devoted to Space R&D and Peaceful Expansion by mid century looks like!
This makes sense if you think about it - flying humans around the solar system just doesn’t make much sense until we have actual orbital industry at some point in the future to bring the costs down to a reasonable level. And I personally have to agree with the camp opposed to Mars colonization, but for different reasons than most. Mars is kind of a crappy place to try and live by most metrics. It seems like colonization efforts would be better allocated to large asteroids or water-rich moons.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-a...
[2] https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exp...
When someone (usually NASA or NASA fanboys) does a Gish gallop and drops of huge list of things supposedly created by NASA, it's worth picking a couple to take a deep dive into. When you look at the details, the amount of tech transfer is often not anywhere close to the amount claimed.
Still, there is good science and technology that comes out of NASA. But it's likely we'd have a lot better results if a large chunk of the NASA budget wasn't spent throwing people up into space for no reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
Bowflex ;)
Honestly though several really nice space exploration projects have been well founded by several governments (including India, China, Europe and North America). Some really silly projects have also been privately funded (e.g. space tourism for the rich). People are rightly questioning how people get so insanely rich that they can afford this. They ask if they are paying their fair share of taxes, if they pay their workers fairly, and which contracts the government have offered them.
If you separate those two classes of space projects I bet you would find way more support for the former (or at least some indifference) while you would find that people vehemently oppose the latter.
It'd be interesting to follow this thread and see if this sentiment can be heard here.
As a comparison, Opportunity rover covered 45.16 km in 15 years. The Apollo 17 crew covered 35.74 kilometers in 3 days.
It is just that we are not found of sending people and letting them die there, so a human mission implies a return mission, and if there is a return mission, of course you want to bring back souvenirs.
In fact, a sample return mission can be seen as a step towards a manned mission. First you try to bring back a pile of rocks, then you consider bringing back humans.
And yes, humans are far more efficient than robots at space exploration today, but robots keep improving, and I think it will take many years before we put people on Mars, so by the time we are ready for a manned Mars mission, we will probably have much better robots. Not as good as humans, but digging lots of rocks and moving faster than a snail will probably be well within their abilities.
Clue?
Making a successful return trip would be an important milestone, we never did anything close to that before. Yes, moon landings, but the moon is 100-1000 times closer and 10 times less massive than mars, with half its surface gravity.
If it ever happens, the "get back samples" mission is likely to focus on that technical aspect more than anything else, it may not even have a way to explore and collect samples. So let Perseverance do the collection because it is what it is designed for and put them in a neat pile so that the other mission can focus on getting them back.
Further missions should be able to do both collection and return, maybe even take people, but starting small may be a good idea, especially if human lives are at stake.
Perhaps an answer is that one of the contingencies being covered by the Perseverance sample-collecting is against future contamination? Maybe the NASA missions have been extraordinarily careful about not contaminating Mars with earth microbes, but they're worried that future commercial crewed missions won't be able to be so careful. Then when the humans get there, they'll have some unspoiled sample containers to experiment on and compare to the post-human samples.
> Mere dozens of such Starship launches would be needed to substantially increase net insolation on Mars and begin raising the temperature, without the emplacement of any surface infrastructure.
Heating sounds like a good step, but aren't the major challenges a lack of atmosphere and magnetosphere? Having one without the others seems a bit useless to me. What am I missing?
The order of magnitude of would require stripping Ceres of it's mantle.
On Falcon, and in the future with conventional Starship, Starlink launches are volume-limited, not mass-limited. Thus, a Starship with more interior space would allow them to send up many more satellites per launch.
When they get their production line up, we might see them launch Starlink in disposable second stages, dispensing with heat shielding and landing engines, and with substantially smaller fuel tanks, leaving room for more Starlink cargo. They could park the carriers in orbit, and gather up the Raptor engines to bring home once enough have piled up there; and maybe turn the empty hulls into a fuel depot.
Launching, say, 150 satellites at a time, that's more than a hundred launches to fill out the constellation. It should not be hard to find a use for some fraction of those hulls given they have already been boosted to orbit.
Not saying it can't be done, just that it's not as simple as just whacking a larger fairing on, there are lots of considerarations to deal with. Perhaps it's worth it for 15m, but then again even a 9m would be a vast improvement from 2.4m
> For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
> The post mentions an expendable version at 15m d but that can't be done on either the current iteration (9m) or v2.0 (12m). The original plan was for 15m but that would require around 100 raptors to get it off the ground!
However, that's not obviously true. This is just a fairing. The fairing can be made wider w/o adding engines or making the booster (or the bottom of starship) wider.
Then you mentioned the stage zero issues, but if an expendable starship with a wider fairing doesn't need to be reused then there's plenty of space right now between starship's nose and the launch tower for a wider fairing, and a crane can be used to stack it instead of the chopsticks if the wider fairing makes using the chopsticks impossible. Even if modifications to stage 0 are needed -or a new one altogether-, if SpaceX ends up building more stage zeros elsewhere (like, say, at Cape Canaveral), they'll have a chance to accommodate larger fairings then.
I don't think people are talking about changing Super Heavy.
> For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
You'd have to build an entire new stage0 system, for starters, even if you've built a new one for starship 2.0 as it wouldn't accomodate the larger fairing size.