SpaceX rocket set for unintentional moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway
theregister.com
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And anyway yes there are programs that are dependent on Starship working on a schedule. If it doesn't work on schedule, those programs will advance without it and the Starship program will eventually fail.
How many of those things that have never been done/attempted before sit downstream of poor strategic decisions?
Even if you want to put less then that on the moon, anything but a tiny lander still needs refueling and reusable launch.
In fact, anything not in space wouldn't be ideal.
But that's a political choice, and Moon base is what NASA and congress are working towards.
I became a starship skeptic because I thought the project management was bullshit. Nothing I've seen changes in my mind about that.
Starship has come as close to landing an upper stage as its possible on water, and from orbital velocity. That's already a huge accomplishment and the landing on land has also been demonstrated.
Problems are constantly being worked on in parallel. Transferring fuel between tanks in the Ship is literally something already tested and that's a big part of the validation of inter-ship fuel transfer. There was even a NASA contract about exactly that. There is parallel work on the launch site, ship the booster and the interior (this is just less visible but its being worked on as we can see from the contract).
Orbital refueling can continually be worked on even if some ships fail landings.
> It could easily take another 10 years for upper stage reusability
Or it could take less ...
And even so, if we ever want a serious moon base, an architecture like that is required. The tiny BlueOrigin lander might be ok for flags and footprints but not to deploy serious infrastructure.
The whole starship project is the wrong way to get to the wrong goal.
Do the math and you will see the same, its obvious once you think about it. Even most the smaller lander need refueling.
And if you actually think its viable to do Apollo style where we put everything on a single stack and land on the moon like that and build a base that way, you need to get your head examined.
Obviously a semblance of a schedule is good to have, but realistically, that's not really how research works. Look at James Webb telescope, it was originally scheduled for 2007, and ended up launching 14 years later. It's still an amazing piece of engineer/science, and it's amazing that it's up there now, even if it was very late to it. It's much better to be late and successful than early and failing.
I am taking issue with this claim. Are there cases where the cost/benefit actually come out favorably for Starship as it is actually turning out? Are they cases anyone should actually care about beyond sci-fi fantasies (i.e. not "colonize Mars")?
Of course that's how they will make lots of money, not by rides to Mars.
Shouldn't even be phrased like this. We can cheer for progress without simping so badly that we can't acknowledge failures and missteps.
Space is hard and over promising and under delivering are real possibilities that a hype-person cannot run from. Just moderate the hype and let the engineers cook - is that so hard??
Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows. But, if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.
SpaceX has many things correct, except for the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.
I am a huge space nerd, therefore I have a lot of respect for SpaceX, and I have been hating on Blue for years. As weird as it is, Blue might actually beat SpaceX to the moon. Just the real chance of that is crazy, and if you look at the logistics, there's a real chance.
In the long term, aside from HLS, Stoke Aerospace has the coolest design. Late mover advantage.
So anyway the math is weird to only get twice that payload but require 10x more propellent.
Starship excels at funneling tax money into Musk's various enterprises. Whether it actually reaches orbit, much less the moon or Mars, merely incidental, the sexy marketing photos for an imaginary island resort.
By the time Starship does actually achieve orbit it will likely get damaged by all of the debris SpaceX has parked around the planet.
They're not scheduled until 2063 :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_...
It's a lot more than you might think, and I couldn't find a comprehensive list of the non-spacecraft objects, some of which are hinted at in the first paragraph.
All of those impact sites have been located but the last one wasn't pinpointed until 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-mystery-solved-apollo-rock...
ref: https://books.google.ie/books?id=6QAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA...
> 2.43 kilometers a second, or 1.51 miles a second, or 5,400 miles an hour, or 8,700 kilometers an hour.
> There is, of course, no air and no sound on the Moon, so a "Mach number" doesn't really make sense. But if there were air, the speed would be about Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound.
I still call it sound when I hear things under water. Gas isn't special.
When someone knocks on your door, you still say you heard the sound, even though the pressure wave was transmitted through the solid door material (before then being transmised to the gas in the room). Likewise, we still file a noise complaint when the neighbor is throwing a raging party, even though we are feeling the bass as much as we are hearing it.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-blue-origin-launch-tw...
Falcon Heavy launched a spacecraft that used a Mars gravity assist in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft) same with the Europa Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper going to Jupiter
Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.
[p.s.: The drive to land on the moon makes sense in the context of "how can we fund colonizing Mars?" Starlink funded the initial development of Starship. Musk believes (rightly or wrongly) that data centers in orbit and on the moon can fund the next set of projects.]
As stupid as the basic idea is the scope he's described is beyond any reasonable endeavor it's nor clear our society could achieve it if it was the singular goal of our species and what for? There is simply no use nor demand for it and it's by no means a durable investment we should have to continue the effort forever to sustain it.