[Video on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRvjc-tTChk&t=176s&ab_channel=MichaelWijas) with cleaned up audio with pauses removed so that it is 40% shorter!
Credit to Michael Wijas
**Links copied from the Rustybeancake stickied post**
Follow up tweet with 1 min concept video of Super Heavy chopstick landing:
The update included near-term priorities for Starship that will unlock its ability to be fully and rapidly reusable, the core enabler for transforming humanity’s ability to send large amounts of payload to orbit and beyond
https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669517860786631?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g
Another follow up tweet:
With more flight tests, significant vehicle upgrades, and missions returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon with NASA’s Artemis Program all coming soon, excitement will continue to be guaranteed with Starship
https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669602740830566?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g
[Longship is long (slide from the update)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKgGBuLXMAIRofe?format=jpg&name=large)
If we trust the graphics, it seems that the next versions are going to have bigger flaps.
ITS was truly psychotic. Elongatedship + mechazilla brings Starship from insane back to psychotic, and i love it. Where Rogozin's smokey ass at? (if anyone remember his comments after ITS around these parts)
Longship weighs maybe 2500 tonnes fueled and has 2700 tonnes of thrust. For reference, the entire Saturn V stack was ~2900 tonnes fueled and had ~3500 tonnes of thrust.
We're talking about a goddamn upper stage/spacecraft with ~90% of the mass and ~80% the thrust of an *entire Saturn V*.
I've made a similar comparison before for my projections of a 9 engine Starship, but that was for Raptor 2s and with a much more conservative stretch estimate. Longship significantly exceeds those expectations.
Psychotic indeed.
Can you compare it like that? I would guess the "tonnes of thrust" varies depending on the altitude. Saturn V start from the ground but Starship starts from space with vacuum engines.
Rolling on the longitudinal axis is dumb. For ships of a reasonable diameter, you have to spin fast enough that you get weird coriolis effects and people will feel sick. Worse, you've just re-oriented gravity in centrifugal direction and need to have all your payloads, equipment, furniture, etc set up for that not mention the ship structure.
But if you tether two ships together via a cable attachment at the nose you can get an arbitrarily long radius, nice comfortable slow spin rates, and most importantly, keep gravity oriented the same way it was when the ship is on the ground. All your structural elements, payloads, and everything can stay oriented exactly the same way.
I see what you mean but there’s the solar panels in the old render and for them they aft of the ship has to oriented towards the sun. Can’t do with tether and two ships. Also it’s really unsexy. Agree with the structural load with gravity acting same was as in earth.
Not difficult at all. Spin them on an axis radial to the sun, the panels can be on the side always directed at the sun. Panels can be big and fold out only once in space, shielding the cryogenic tanks of the ships from the sun. Tether can be as long as you want, the longer it is the more stable the view out the ports for potentially nauseous passengers.
Alternately, place the panels in a huge disk at the center point of the tethers to make the assembly more photogenic, Starships can do rotisserie rolls. Add more pairs of Starships to the disk till the entire assembly earns the moniker of "Starship".
> for artificial gravity, would 12m allow rotation on the longitudinal axis ie roll?
Why roll Starship when you can "roll" around on a cycle track inside it for exercise?
Taking the internal radius of the current Starship with 50cm wall + insulation as 4m, and the center of mass of a cyclist as 1m from the track, then the effective radius is 3m. If wanting Earth gravity at 9.81 m/s the cyclist is now going at [19.5 km/h](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/centrifugal-force) or **12mph**.
For simplicity, on this calculator its easier to set unit mass, but you can do this for your own mass with whichever units you want. If training for Mars, then use 3.73 m/s.
Do you really think that a 12m Starship is really worth the extra delays?
> longship is long
Is ~90% the height of the Washington Monument, the distance between the road and top of a support tower for the Golden Gate Bridge, or half the height of the Eiffel tower for those of you in Europe.
It will be almost as tall as the Cologne Cathedral (157m), which was the tallest structure before the completion of the Washington Monument.
https://www.varta-guide.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/koelner-dom_panorama.jpg
On the Booster side:
* Grid fins placement will change to a more "even" one (90° between adjacent fins). Possibly bigger.
* Hot-stage ring will be a more traditional one ("just sticks").
* No engine bay skirt.
You can imagine each engine as having to lift the column of fuel that is directly above the engine. If the thrust of the engine can go up (for whatever reason), the the height of the column of fuel above that engine can also go up. Raptor's thurst and ISP has been continuously improving, so the fuel column is allowed to get longer without significantly affecting the rest of the design.
A similar thing happened with the Falcon 9, as the Merlin engines kept improving. Look at the height of the original F9 compared to the current one.
That said, it isn't free -- a bunch of other engineering needs to be done to support this. Ground support equipment needs to be able to support the increased height. So there is usually a limit. And there are some other engineering side effects (the rocket needs to be sufficiently stiff to support the weight of the additional fuel, they need to model the aerodynamics again, etc.)
A bit of both.
V1 can only lift 40-50 tonnes to LEO according to Elon so it is not viable for use as a tanker as it would require 24 trips to fill the tanks of HLS!
V2 is effectively the minimal viable product to get HLS done.
V3 is the stretch goal in all kinds of ways including length.
I haven't done the math but they probably don't need to stretch the ship for a tanker although stretching the booster may be helpful. They might even be able to shrink the ship for a tanker variant since propellant is probably going to be higher density than a typical payload.
Average density for subcooled methalox is 872 kg/m^^3 while Starship cargo will be 200 tonnes spread across at least 1000 m^^3 so 200 kg/m^^3.
So yes - *with* maths
They don't want to stretch the booster too far because the booster needs to return to the launch pad, so the more energy the booster gains, the more it needs to cancel out. The calculations are a bit different from the classic expendable rocket calculations.
Agreed. The confounding factor to that is if the mass flow rate of raptors increases. Then you can stretch the booster without the same downrange boost back penalty. Lots of parameters to balance.
People have talked about why the whole stack is longer, but there's also the question of why does the stretch goes almost completely into the ship...
Since the Booster always returns to launch site, it should do as little as possible. Every m/s it provides it will have to cancel so that it goes back.
Starship, on the other hand, has free return because of aerobraking.
That's why the stack shifts as much Δv to the ship as possible. The booster burns to give give the ship enough airtime so that it can get into orbit and no more.
> Since the Booster always returns to launch site,...
No discussions on offshore barge recovery, or just force the customer to pony up the considerable cash for an expendable mission?
Elon usually gives an expendable figure as well.
It is nearly double the figure for payload with full reuse so might be useful for say a heavy space station segment or a fusion engine where you need to launch the entire magnet assembly as a single object.
I can't think of a lot of other applications where the load cannot be split among multiple launches.
bigger is better, literally, by the square cube law. more payload, better fuel efficiency, and better cost efficiency. but the diameter is by far the hardest to change, whereas stretching it is easier.
this is in common with trains, planes and other rockets like Falcon 9. trains and planes are also really hard to change the diameter of, so stretch is the main way. (the 737 has been overstretched, for example, whereas the 777-200 and 777-300 are good examples of the correct amount of stretch. trains have been the same diameter for a long tme, so the only way to make trains bigger is to make em longer, as in north american and australian freight trains.)
in some ways, Starship is "merely" a successor to falcon 9 where they increase the diameter (in addition to all the other improvements). it's kinda similar to, say, a 767 vs 777. bigger diameter, and improve everything else too while you're at it.
After stretching Starship some more, I would expect we see a further diameter upgrade in the long run, perhaps 2 decades from now we'll get a 12m or 15m diameter rocket.
But in the short run, diameter is fixed at 9m, and the best way to make your rocket bigger -- and better -- is to stretch it.
> trains have been the same diameter for a long time,...
Those pesky pre-existing train-tunnels, someone really need to have a chat with them, selfishly impeding transportation progress efficiency...
(Obvious *sarc*...)
Actually 15-20 years ago they increased the height of tunnels on highly used rail lines. This was to accommodate the increased maximum height of railcars, so they had to make the tunnels taller.
I'm sure it was a very expensive thing to do.
It's also different to strech steam era tunnels for diesel train compared to electric train which need extra space for the electric wire. Look up the new Indian cargo trains which have double stacked containers and they are electric too.
It should noted that if you hold the diameter constant there is no square/cube scaling going on.
Stretching a ship does improves the dry mass fraction because you already have all the heavy stuff like engines, flaps and bulkheads factored in so you are effectively just stretching the tank walls which are relatively low mass compared with the rest.
it's still line/square scaling i guess, the dvolume goes as stretch^2 while the dtank goes as stretch^1, so overall the mass fraction still improves with stretch^1, so id call that within the bounds of "Generalized square/cube scaling laws" (be it 3-2=1 or 2-1=1). it's right in spirit, if not in the most literal+strict sense
> Why do they need the extra length?
This happened to Falcon 9 too as engine specifications improved with the Merlin-1D. So it looks more like taking advantage of the opportunity presented by Raptor 2 and successors.
Both Falcon 9 and Starship are stuck with the initially specified diameter. It initially seems odd that SpaceX would get caught out a second time. However it may not be a mistake as such:
* the F9 diameter was constrained by road bridge height
* maybe Starship diameter is constrained by the costs of the factory and the launch tower or even the connecting road.
Maybe the limitation is just the bell diameter and packing efficiency of the SL Raptors on the booster?
If you increase the diameter you need more engine area to make up for it, and if you're already confident in the bell size/expansion ratio the only way to add more engine area would be to add more engines. Perhaps they decided adding an entire extra ring of engines would require raising the diameter too much, and trying to stagger them in such a way as to interleave the new outer ring with the previously-outer ring wouldn't allow them to efficiently pack?
An extra ring of 1.3m diameter engines is very close to an extra 3m diameter so 12m total.
It is also another 26 engines so 59 total which is certainly getting up there.
From the video: If flight 4 gets booster to do the landing on a "virtual tower" (at sea), flight 5 may try to catch the booster with the mechazilla.
Clearly an optimistic scenario, but it might happen!
Also mentioned that ship will take longer, will want at least two "virtual" catches at designated spot at sea before trying to bring one back to the launch site due to having to overfly land on return and not wanting to rain bits of the ship on anything...
Will they at least attempt to relight the ships engines after it makes it through reentry for flight 4? If no soft landing, seems like relight would be useful.
I think for all these tests, the will try every stage according to the plan.
If IFT ship had made it to Hawaii, and dt had made it through the atmosphere, the plan was to attempt to relight engines for soft landing.
They want at least one full belly-flop into the ocean to calibrate how bad that would be. Also, they've already demonstrated that relight and flip can be done, during hopper tests. So the first time they pass re-entry, they won't relight.
That can relight and still belly flop. They’ve demonstrated burn and flip but haven’t demonstrated relighting the engines after passing through reentry.
The Mars part of this video is bananas so I am just going to pause on processing all of that, but the 1-2 year vision looks fantastic, and while optimistic I think it's not unrealistic. We'll be seeing more towers, more launch attempts, probably a real booster landing attempt this year (possibly with an early success) and then go into refining and mapping out ship landings.
What went entirely unmentioned, unfortunately, was the plan for early operational use of Starship. Presumably this will be Starlink at first, but I'd love to see a clearer mapped out plan of when they begin work on prop transfer and other payloads. Maybe still too far beyond the envelope to start reporting, as they're going to be all-in trying to get the ship to land. If that happens next year I will consider it an amazing success. The challenges of performing a reentry and overflying land/population centers with that thing are considerable (though not unprecedented... see shuttle).
All that depends on getting it to work first. And we already know from the current payload bay door that the early payloads will be Starlinks.
Then the next step would be to get a depot on orbit and get refueling flights to work. The demo mission to land HLS variant unmanned to the moon will take at least 7-8 tanker flights. Lots of opportunity to practice. And since the Starship tanker variant will probably be bit more complex and you'd want to re-use it, this will wait until recovery is working. Starlinks they could toss up even with expendable Starship as long as booster is recovered.
Seems to me that SpaceX needs to make a deal with Space Force for a Starship Launch and landing site at Vandenberg, sooner rather than later, for this reason among others. Perhaps that is in the plans that are not being publicly disclosed yet.
I hope they build a second tower at Boca Chica. It would be a shame if they destroyed the only launch tower on IFT-5or IFT-6.
There would be some benefits to building a catch-only tower. It would be cheaper than building a complete launch tower: No OLM (Orbital Launch Mount) needed. On the other hand, very soon they will have so many improvements to make that the original OLM will be obsolete for launches, much like the Transporter-Erector at Vandenberg became obsolete for Falcon Heavy launches, even before the first FH flight.
I am watching the video as I write. Although the upper stage is much smaller, catching it is much riskier, due to the rough ride during reentry.
I'm glad Musk has said there will soon be 2 launch towers at Boca Chica, and 2 at the Cape. Besides the reasons he gave, that would mean that 3 refilling flights could be teed up and ready to go, before HSL or Mars Starship launches.
> Although the upper stage is much smaller, catching it is much riskier, due to the rough ride during reentry
And due to its need to fly over land at low altitude, to reach the landing site, coming from the west.
Wouldn't it have reduced pretty much all of its horizontal velocity by FL350 or so?
That does not change the risk of a high-speed high-altitude breakup scattering possibly large pieces of debris over a huge inhabited area...
Safety calculations rely on the fact that most people are indoors most of the time. A house will defend you against a kg or two of metal but not against a 10 tonne chunk of engine bay.
In any case the worst case event would be a break up during entry because of the size of the debris cloud.
> Safety calculations rely on the fact that most people are indoors most of the time.
Serious question.
Do they? When there was calculation of risk of satellite debris, it seemed they assume all people out in the open 24/7.
Adds a ton of cost. Would be cheaper long term to try to build a new site on the west coast of FL for landings only. There’s a good wide and smooth interstate to truck it across the peninsula near Naples.
Good point. Risk to lives and property are an excellent reason to build an offshore catch tower, for the experimental phase of Starship operations. An offshore platform in the Gulf could provide 10,000 km^2 of relatively safe, empty sea around the landing area.
If future cargo Starships suffer from a tile-shedding incident, they might want to have an "emergency landing site," at a very remote place like Kwajalein Island. If this happens to a manned Starship, they might want to send up a repair expedition and replace the tiles in orbit. They mioght rescue the crew by putting them on the repair ship, but they would not want to take any chances on losing a manned Starship, since the life support and other crew features will probably cost 3 or 4 times as much as the rest of the Starship.
That's my guess.
Offshore towers don't solve the problem of overflying land. It's not the immediate landing area that's a concern it's the hundred or thousands of miles of land it flies over. See how long the Columbia debris field was.
You raise a valid point, but it is not practical to land Starships near the West coast, and then barge them through the Panama Canal, to Boca Chica or Cape Canaveral.
If a Starship were to break up during reentry, broadly speaking, there would be materials with 2 densities. 1) the tiles, with about the density of styrofoam, and 2) the hull of Starship, with the density of stainless steel.
If Starship were to break up in the upper atmosphere on approach to landing, the tiles would be scattered all across Mexico or the USA, while the hull would make it close to the landing zone. If the landing zone was surrounded by 100 km of sea water in all directions, the chance of any stainless steel hitting anything other than water or a boat would be zero, and the chance of hitting a boat would be under 1:10,000.
The shuttle, on the other hand, was mostly made of aluminum, which melted in places when it got hot and did not stay together, as Starship is expected to do. Shuttle wings, pillows, and the toilet tank were found in Texas, while heavier parts like the tires and engines made it ito the Gulf of Mexico.
Ground prep work has begun (using drainage wicks to remove the water from the sodden ground - these will need to sit for a few months to do their thing) and the segments for the new tower have been assembled (most of them were prepared over a year ago) but until the ground is in a good, dry, compressed state they can't even begin to start the foundations. As for the next OLM, the area where that may be situated currently needs to be approved for construction purposes (and then wicking first needs to also be done on that area).
It would be amazing if the attempted "landings" at sea could be done where the water is shallow enough that the booster and ships could eventually become dive sites. This probably won't happen due to ITAR, but it would be an amazing future tourist attraction and something that a place like the Bahamas should absolutely look into - they have loads of shallow water that would be perfect for it.
Those lunar rovers in one of the [follow up tweets](https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669602740830566) look interesting. Do we know if that's something they're working on, or was it just made up to make the render look cooler?
Love how they left the brake lights on them. Need to make sure you don’t get rear ended in that heavy moon traffic. Waiting on AAA would be a nightmare…
Not brake lights, marker lights for nighttime or shadow (remember there is no atmosphere to scatter light into shadowed areas) are the primary need.
You would not want to follow another vehicle on the moon unless it were on a paved and possibly swept surface, due to the dust.
The minimal fenders is more laughable to me, both for the above reason and for the vehicle occupants.
Remember that after damaging a fender on the Apollo 17 rover, they had to repair it with maps and duct tape!
Other companies are working on Lunar rovers for NASA. See for example [Ars](https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/nasa-asks-the-commercial-space-industry-for-a-rugged-long-lived-lunar-rover/). SpaceX didn't submit a bid so presumably they don't plan to have their own.
Well, if they did, it would probably be a pressurized rover in cooperation with Tesla (similar to what Toyota and JAXA are working on). Those bids were for the unpressurized rover (LTV).
That bid was for a fully autonomous rover that could last for years even through 2 weeks of very low temperatures during the Lunar night. It seemed almost ridiculously overspecified for the actual requirement of crew transport - Swiss Army knife anyone?
SpaceX are more likely to provide a crew only vehicle that transports the crew only during Lunar day and parks up in the relatively warm HLS cargo bay or a shelter during the Lunar night.
For the foreseeable future, the Moon will likely see at most one visit by astronauts per year (since SLS/Orion won't launch more often), for a stay of at most 2 weeks (a Lunar day). So having a vehicle that can be driven remotely from Earth, with a robot arm that is capable of collecting samples and bringing them back to a base, makes sense. It lets them get stuff done during the 50 weeks a year when there's no-one there. Probably the base will have automated labs so samples can be processed remotely too. Powered by solar panels which the rover could deploy via remote control.
I imagine anything SpaceX do would be with an eye towards Mars. For that they wouldn't need to cope with the same temperature extremes. However, remote control will still be important, and autonomy even more so (because the light speed delay is greater).
Follow up tweet with 1 min concept video of Super Heavy chopstick landing:
> The update included near-term priorities for Starship that will unlock its ability to be fully and rapidly reusable, the core enabler for transforming humanity’s ability to send large amounts of payload to orbit and beyond
https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669517860786631?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g
Another follow up tweet:
> With more flight tests, significant vehicle upgrades, and missions returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon with NASA’s Artemis Program all coming soon, excitement will continue to be guaranteed with Starship
https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669602740830566?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g
Also brings things closer in range to affordability. At $3M A 30-person starship flight would cost $100,000 per seat. Still *kinda* pricey, but if people buy luxury cars at that price, I think they could also afford a spaceflight. If we hit $2M flight, then *now* we're talking closer to everyman prices, at $67K. And presumably that price can come down further as they streamline the process.
Mmhh. But Starship is really huge. I think it also would be possible that, for example, a company can buy and equip a more 'popular' Starship V3 (+60 people) for trips to low orbit. It would present its owns challenges (organization and how to maintain order among so many people inside a Starship), but if that trip were worth 3M dollars, then the prices per seat could be around ~$50,000. Crazy.
They wouldn't "buy" it so much, as pay to have it built to their specs, and then SpaceX launches it for them on a contract basis. This is how companies that want to get into orbital manufacturing are going to do it. 200 tons to orbit, and however many back means they can send people and materials relatively inexpensively, even if it is still mid 8 figures per launch.
Get your custom inflatable station up, outfit it with another launch or two, then start making drugs / growing organs / run your space brothel / etc.
> I mean, what else are you gonna do while you sit around and wait for those stem cells to do their thing?
Going by what is happening on the ISS today, routine maintenance take up the majority of the waking hours...
> company can buy and equip a more 'popular' Starship V3 (+60 people) for trips to low orbit.
60? You're forgetting something *important*. Before the FAA will allow a paying passenger flight, there *must* be a redundant pressurization system to keep the passengers alive if they lose pressurization.
Airliners do this with masks that drop if the pressure gets too low and the aircraft does a fast decent to 10,000 feet so people can breathe without oxygen.
So, you have 2 choices, a redundant (extra) pressure hull, or the passengers are individually fitted and pressure-tested with a pressure suit like NASA's orange launch-reentry survival suit.
There has to be a backup, opening the hatch at the space station to find a ship of corpses will scare off the passengers from buying future space flights...
I'm pretty sure a good proportion of those who experience zero-G for the first time throw up. Yay for being in a Starship with 60 other people, some of whom are throwing up. Not sure I'd pay $50K for that privilege.
Is that common in parabolic flights? Or is only for extended 0G experience?
I also think that go to space would require pre-training and medical chekouts, for get a 'spaceflight license' or permission.
That could allow to the people to detect what kind of situations they need to face off in space trips. I mean, going down a medium slide (the critical points of the training) can make you understand that perhaps the giant slide is not your thing (although in general people who seek such extreme experiences are usually familiar with strong emotions).
Of course, something like the training for get the "space license" surely add more cost that only the 50k for the Journey.
And even with that, I think I could dodge some vomit balls in zero-G only to see our beatiful planet for a day or so ;)
>I also think that go to space would require pre-training and medical chekouts, for get a 'spaceflight license' or permission.
NASA found that there was no way to predict space sickness. It was one of the reasons why they backed off such a strenuous physical/training thresholds.
Honestly I don't know how the heck I forget that lol.
But anyway, I doubt that the 2/3 part ([according to Yaniec](https://web.archive.org/web/20060310204522/http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/yaniec_991020.html)) that get bad into a parabolic flight training keep interested in go to LEO, knowing that these momentanous experience gonna be their daily experience. You get kinda little "natural selection bias" in that.
Antiemetic treatment would also be a thing.
> Antiemetic treatment would also be a thing.
It is a thing, and a pre-flight dose is recommended 20 min. before the parabolic flights begins.
(It does no good if you are already sick, that's just the way they work. From personal experience as kid who puked on long car trips, there's the nasty side-effect of making you very drowsy, as well. Not fun...)
> Is that common in parabolic flights?
It does happen, I don't know the odds on puking, but vomit sacks are in the pockets of *every* passenger jumpsuits...
$3M would be cost, not price. At your $100,000 per seat SpaceX wouldn't be making any profit.
Also, Musk is probably thinking of tankers, which are the simplest to build, and have no cargo integration costs since they only carry propellant. Cargo flights would cost more, and crewed launches more still.
> Musk is probably thinking of tankers, which are the simplest to build, and have no cargo integration costs since they only carry propellant.
Tankers in orbit will require heavy propellant re-liquidifican machinery to deal with the inevitable cryogenic boil-off.
Oh, and the weight of the solar panels to deploy to power that heavy machinery...
Nope. SpaceX plans don't include even painting them white.
They plan on just launching fast enough and to rely on the Square-Cube law, since the vehicle is so big.
This doesn't exclude having equipment on board to those things, but SpaceX never shown any signs that they think they need it.
Lox and Methane liquefaction plants and solar panels are available off the shelf anyway. Just need a big enough rocket to launch them.
Depots will need that for long term storage, but tankers will be storing their propellant for much shorter times. Are you sure the mass of the added solar panels and cooling is less than the propellant mass lost by boil-off?
Remember Musk floated the idea a while ago of a "coach" Starship flight Earth-to-Earth with 1,000 people. And yes, you could cramp that many people in a Starship, semi-seated and without luggage, so most likely soldiers.
If you want to fly with more comfort and checked bags like current Economy airplane class, it could carry 300 people, so $10k per ticket.
I don't know how likely it'd be to get 300 persons paying $10k each for a scheduled flight, let's say, once a week both ways, to hop half the world in one hour (like Florida - Singapore and Singapore - Florida).
> I don't know how likely it'd be to get 300 persons paying $10k each for a scheduled flight, let's say, once a week both ways, to hop half the world in one hour
It wouldn't cost that much, because presumably that flight would be done without superheavy. Once you cut out those expenses it's on par with Concorde tickets, adjusted for inflation.
> Once you cut out those expenses it's on par with Concorde tickets, adjusted for inflation.
A flight on the now-retired Concorde didn't require a pressure suit or a double pressure hull to make the flight. The regulators will *require* that before the first seat get sold...
Opening the hatch at landing only to find corpses will crush ticket sales.
(Obvious snark...)
> Opening the hatch at landing only to find corpses will crush ticket sales.
Elon Musk said it. If the ticket says, "34 minutes to Shanghai, but you may die", few people will fly.
> And yes, you could cramp that many people in a Starship, semi-seated and without luggage, so most likely soldiers.
I hate to break it to you, but you seem to not have a grasp on how much kit the average servicemember lugs around with them going to/from deployment. Or how much the average infantry rifleman carries on their back.
> I don't know how likely it'd be to get 300 persons paying $10k each for a scheduled flight,...
Time-critical freight like fresh seafood is a likely market...
> for Mars you need more space per person because of the long journey
It's no where near as much room as most folks would like.
An analogy I recall was the personal space on US Navy submarines, a rack 7 feet long and *maybe* 2 feet wide and tall, and a 6 inch pull out drawer below the thin mattress.
If there's an ex nuclear attack or boomer crew member, they can give the specifics. Quarters are very tight, and sometimes crew members must 'hot rack', as in, sleep in a rack someone just crawled out of. Sub crew members seriously *hated* having to do that with a passion.
You will *never* an individual cabin unless you are mega-rich on a Starship Mars flight...
> You will never an individual cabin unless you are mega-rich on a Starship Mars flight...
I disagree. An individual cabin of 2m³ will be very efficient. For 100 people that will be only 20% of the available volume. People will stay there for some part of their waking hours. Reading, watching movies, learning. That frees up the remaining communal space for those outside their cabin.
On a sub people mostly are sleeping or are on station. Passengers to Mars won't have a station to be at.
> Still kinda pricey, but if people buy luxury cars at that price, I think they could also afford a spaceflight.
Not a good analogy, you don't buy a luxury car and drive it only once and have it crushed.
Keep it maintained, you can get 100,000+ miles of service over many years of ownership.
While *major* cool, the spaceflight is a short mini-vacation at best...
It doesn't really mean anything until they actually prove out reusability for both stages though. Those numbers are just speculation right now, similar to the 20 year timeframe he mentioned for establishing a civilization on Mars.
If the man weren't a lunatic he'd never have sunk his fortune into a new car company and a space launch company -- both businesses that had been tried a dozen of times before resulting in embarrassing failure and bankruptcy.
We're just lucky he's both crazy and skilled at developing successful, innovative companies.
(And, yes, I understand that Tesla is vastly more than a car company)
> If the man weren't a lunatic he'd never have sunk his fortune into a new car company and a space launch company
He actually said this himself. Something like "Do you think any sane person would have done what I have done?"
Not to me. Like many comments online either state he is the greatest genius of all time or a complete moron conman. He's a complex human being like the rest of us, with both good and bad traits. There's plenty I don't like about him but that doesn't mean absolutely everything he touches is either bad or evil. The fact that there are both extremes is actually pretty common (see any other notable person in history).
It's not about badness or evil, but he's very facts/engineering focused in some areas and totally disconnected from facts in others. That's the odd part.
Not really. Being highly educated and knowledgeable in one domain does not necessarily translate for other domains. If you're smarter, you will handle more domains but you can't be master of all.
People were always going to Stephen Hawking for opinions about alien life. What does being a brilliant mathematician and theoretical physicist have to do with exobiology?
No you can't we don't have enough information.
Without a real understanding of the process of abiogenesis we can't say if life is like a mineral that forms wherever possible or if life is like the literal Roman Empire that occurred on Earth but will never occur anywhere else in the history of the universe because it required all the exact events of Earth's history to happen -- or any possible state in between those extremes.
We don't THINK life is like the Roman Empire, we THINK life forms whenever conditions allow it, but that's really little more than a guess based on nothing but the timing of life's emergence on Earth.
Until we get some actual data or at least an independent example of the development of life we don't really know anything.
> No you can't we don't have enough information
From what we know, it is a quite safe bet that life is abundant throughout the universe. But it seems likely that the step from single celled organisms to to multicellular life growing into large plants and animals is rare, possibly very, very rare.
From there to intelligence and technical civilization probably even much more rare.
> From there to intelligence and technical civilization probably even much more rare.
No doubt!
Imagine a highly evolved form of life knowing how lucky they were to have evolved at all, and decided to 'seed' the universe with the chemical combination that worked for them. Encase them in rock redesigned to shatter during the shock of atmospheric entry and scattering those 'presents'...
It's in no way a safe bet. It's a certainty that chain molecules are essentially everywhere. But we still don't have any solid idea of how that got to a robust replicating system. We, at this point, have absolutely no basis other than preference and inclination to say life is common.
> Well, you can kinda make the possibility of alien life occurring into a math problem.
Astronomers have detected the chemical 'building blocks' (called precursors) for things like amino acids floating in interstellar space...
Elon is 100 percent an ass. But so was Steve Jobs and arguably Bill Gates, at least in his younger days. It's not that you have to be an ass to be innovative, but being one also doesn't stop you either.
So aiming for almost 3 ships made per day on average? It sounds doable if they automate manufacturing as much as possible. Tesla creates over 5000 cars per day on average. If there's anyone who could engineer this production line it's Elon.
The AI overlords condensed it into this, FWIW:
**Near Term Launch Plans for Starship:**
- SpaceX aims to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer next year.
- Plans to bring Starship back to a controlled point in the ocean this year.
- Building more Mechazilla arms for booster recovery and reusability.
- Targeting the first Cape launch tower to be operational by the middle of next year.
**Raptor Engine Plans:**
- Evolution of Raptor engines from Raptor 2 to Raptor 3 for higher performance and reliability.
- Raptor 3 design features integral cooling channels and simplified components.
- Aim to increase thrust to over 10,000 tons for Starship.
**Starship Improvements:**
- Starship 2 expected to carry over 100 tons to orbit.
- Starship 3 projected to lift over 200 tons to orbit.
- Plans for Starship to cost less than Falcon 1 per flight.
- Future Starship designs to be taller and more powerful, aiming for 500 feet tall and 200 tons to orbit.
**Long Term Plans for SpaceX:**
- Vision of creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars within 20 years.
- Goal to have a million people and several million tons of cargo for a self-sustaining city on Mars.
- Plans for offshore launch
I'm watching it on YouTube as I write this. It's a stolen rebroadcast from a channel called Scientia Plus.
Note on the content. Raptor 3 has ~50% more thrust than Raptor 1.
Upgraded Starship will be about 8000 tons of liftoff mass, 10,000 tons of thrust at liftoff. ~500 feet tall, maybe stretched 30m. And Starship 3 should cost less per flight than Falcon 1. Down to around $2 million to $3 million per flight, due to full reusability.
I was surprised that IFT-3 could only carry 50 tonnes to orbit. I thought the original Starship was supposed to carry over 100 tonnes. Now it looks like that will be Starship 2.
Yeah, it’s interesting because they seem to often be adding additional weight to the vehicles (additional stiffeners, the hot staging ring, additional heat shielding in the engine bays, etc). There’s a lot riding on the Raptor team being able to continually upgrade performance.
Amazing accomplishments and exciting short term plans from SpaceX and Musk. Can't understand how people don't realize how important and difficult these are, many of these things were science-fiction even a few decades ago.
Instead, many people just focus on "yeah, but Musk said *this* and *that*, oh, so terrible", depressing really.
Interesting how Starship is still *not* pointy enough to satisfy Elon. I guess they will make it pointier still to match the aerodynamics of the stretch?
Umm... everything? There's never been systemic active geology or hydrology on the Moon so there's never been a concentration of useful elements to access beyond what might possibly be gathered from impact debris.
It's a big worthless hunk of basalt. In the words of Ford Prefect, it's a desolate hole.
Atmosphere, water and sunlight.
On Mars the atmosphere does pretty much all the slowing down for landing and the 24.5h day cycle ensures that you can easily live off solar power and a few batteries.
Also the atmosphere provides CO2 which can be turned into oxygen and parts of propellant.
Water is pretty abounded across the Martian surface.
Compared to that the moon's water resources are extremely limited in volume and location. The 14 day night/14 day light cycle makes it extremely difficult to create cheap power sources. No atmosphere means far more difficult manufacturing of about everything and landing requires enormous amounts of propellant.
And in addition to that Mars seems to have very similar rock and therfore ore deposits to earth. On the moon you have aluminium, titanium and iron, but little of all the other important elements.
The big one, nitrogen. Also carbon/CO2, some may be in the cold traps, we don't know, but not much. There is water, but probably not enough, if wasted on propellant production.
Everything is in the surface regolith, except water, but only traces, very hard to extract.
The LCROSS plume suggests the lunar cold traps are around 0.5% carbon by weight, and Chang'e-5 soil samples found a mineral that's 5% nitrogen (in ammonium ions). Neither of these is going to be nearly as easy to extract as they will be on Mars (just condense some air!), though.
Thank you for participating in r/SpaceX! Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with our [community rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/rules) before commenting. Here's a reminder of some of our most important rules:
* Keep it civil, and directly relevant to SpaceX and the thread. Comments consisting solely of jokes, memes, pop culture references, etc. will be removed.
* Don't downvote content you disagree with, unless it clearly doesn't contribute to constructive discussion.
* Check out [these threads](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/threads) for discussion of common topics.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/spacex) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[FAA](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kykp3np "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[GSE](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyv9tdd "Last usage")|Ground Support Equipment|
|[HLS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyoyhjx "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ISRU](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kye499n "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)|
|[ITAR](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyp0blc "Last usage")|(US) International Traffic in Arms Regulations|
|[ITS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyeoggy "Last usage")|Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT)|
| |[Integrated Truss Structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Truss_Structure)|
|[Isp](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyhf4kk "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)|
| |Internet Service Provider|
|[JAXA](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kygxvf9 "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyklrzh "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|MCT|Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS)|
|[N1](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyjo4p7 "Last usage")|Raketa Nositel-1, Soviet super-heavy-lift ("Russian Saturn V")|
|[OLM](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kydmemg "Last usage")|Orbital Launch Mount|
|[RTLS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyokkgi "Last usage")|Return to Launch Site|
|[SLS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyr7f0j "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyidlel "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kzuh3vw "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cryogenic](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kytk328 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|[hopper](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kygdq06 "Last usage")|Test article for ground and low-altitude work (eg. Grasshopper)|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[methalox](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyp2ng1 "Last usage")|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj)
^(18 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bt7w64)^( has 83 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8336 for this sub, first seen 6th Apr 2024, 21:33])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceX) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
IMO he’s talking about a conceptual idea, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s NASA or SpaceX, but he likes to use the name from the tv show. In reality, SpaceX have no plans to make their own moon base so it’s either Artemis or nothing.
Love these types of talks/updates, wish these talks were what he discusses online more rather than all the wacky noise he makes that alienates people (no pun intended).
Starlink monthly subscriptions, US government contracts, and private company payload launches.
And in the distant future, Mars tourism and deep space commercial enterprises.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1c1xz6g/exclusive_internal_prestarlink_spacex_financials/
SpaceX is now very well funded with their own activities. They don't need any more financing rounds.
To build a thousand spaceships? At a low cost of $10m dollars each, they would need $10b to build these, multiply that by 2 to factor other associated costs with this and with getting to Mars. May take 10 years of profits to pay for this.
I am thinking of a substantial base and early settlement. That can very well be financed by SpaceX.
The full settlement drive with 1000 Starships per window? Maybe if Starlink is very successful. There is a lot of money in that business and Starlink will probably highly profitable with a large profit margin. But doubtful, it can be financed by SpaceX alone.
All this longship stuff is WAY down the line right?
This would take years to get the pad ready and 12+ months to develop right?
I’m not cool with pushing Artemis 3 into the 2030’s.
[Video on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRvjc-tTChk&t=176s&ab_channel=MichaelWijas) with cleaned up audio with pauses removed so that it is 40% shorter! Credit to Michael Wijas **Links copied from the Rustybeancake stickied post** Follow up tweet with 1 min concept video of Super Heavy chopstick landing: The update included near-term priorities for Starship that will unlock its ability to be fully and rapidly reusable, the core enabler for transforming humanity’s ability to send large amounts of payload to orbit and beyond https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669517860786631?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g Another follow up tweet: With more flight tests, significant vehicle upgrades, and missions returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon with NASA’s Artemis Program all coming soon, excitement will continue to be guaranteed with Starship https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669602740830566?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g
[Longship is long (slide from the update)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKgGBuLXMAIRofe?format=jpg&name=large) If we trust the graphics, it seems that the next versions are going to have bigger flaps.
Damn, Longship is getting back into ITS territory; roughly 75% of the launch mass and thrust by my reckoning.
ITS was truly psychotic. Elongatedship + mechazilla brings Starship from insane back to psychotic, and i love it. Where Rogozin's smokey ass at? (if anyone remember his comments after ITS around these parts)
Longship weighs maybe 2500 tonnes fueled and has 2700 tonnes of thrust. For reference, the entire Saturn V stack was ~2900 tonnes fueled and had ~3500 tonnes of thrust. We're talking about a goddamn upper stage/spacecraft with ~90% of the mass and ~80% the thrust of an *entire Saturn V*. I've made a similar comparison before for my projections of a 9 engine Starship, but that was for Raptor 2s and with a much more conservative stretch estimate. Longship significantly exceeds those expectations. Psychotic indeed.
Can you compare it like that? I would guess the "tonnes of thrust" varies depending on the altitude. Saturn V start from the ground but Starship starts from space with vacuum engines.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
They need to go to a 12m diameter to fulfill the prophecy
Would 12m allow rotation on the longitudinal axis ie roll? Edit: for artificial gravity
Rolling on the longitudinal axis is dumb. For ships of a reasonable diameter, you have to spin fast enough that you get weird coriolis effects and people will feel sick. Worse, you've just re-oriented gravity in centrifugal direction and need to have all your payloads, equipment, furniture, etc set up for that not mention the ship structure. But if you tether two ships together via a cable attachment at the nose you can get an arbitrarily long radius, nice comfortable slow spin rates, and most importantly, keep gravity oriented the same way it was when the ship is on the ground. All your structural elements, payloads, and everything can stay oriented exactly the same way.
I see what you mean but there’s the solar panels in the old render and for them they aft of the ship has to oriented towards the sun. Can’t do with tether and two ships. Also it’s really unsexy. Agree with the structural load with gravity acting same was as in earth.
The great thing about renders is it's really easy to move things around.
Yeah I get that but end over end spin seems really difficult with solar panels regardless where they are mounted
Not difficult at all. Spin them on an axis radial to the sun, the panels can be on the side always directed at the sun. Panels can be big and fold out only once in space, shielding the cryogenic tanks of the ships from the sun. Tether can be as long as you want, the longer it is the more stable the view out the ports for potentially nauseous passengers. Alternately, place the panels in a huge disk at the center point of the tethers to make the assembly more photogenic, Starships can do rotisserie rolls. Add more pairs of Starships to the disk till the entire assembly earns the moniker of "Starship".
Yeah, this.
Short answer is no. Longer answer is you can do the math yourself at this link: https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/
> for artificial gravity, would 12m allow rotation on the longitudinal axis ie roll? Why roll Starship when you can "roll" around on a cycle track inside it for exercise? Taking the internal radius of the current Starship with 50cm wall + insulation as 4m, and the center of mass of a cyclist as 1m from the track, then the effective radius is 3m. If wanting Earth gravity at 9.81 m/s the cyclist is now going at [19.5 km/h](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/centrifugal-force) or **12mph**. For simplicity, on this calculator its easier to set unit mass, but you can do this for your own mass with whichever units you want. If training for Mars, then use 3.73 m/s. Do you really think that a 12m Starship is really worth the extra delays?
That's not going to happen soon, they would need to redesign a big part of Starbase.
I reckon the flaps for version 2 are fairly locked in. I think the design for version 3 haven't been done yet. Just my speculation.
Yeah probably, as usual whatever they're saying about the future is subject to change
Probably at the specification phase. So even if the design isn't finalized, the size and thrust is probably part of the specs.
> longship is long Is ~90% the height of the Washington Monument, the distance between the road and top of a support tower for the Golden Gate Bridge, or half the height of the Eiffel tower for those of you in Europe.
It will be almost as tall as the Cologne Cathedral (157m), which was the tallest structure before the completion of the Washington Monument. https://www.varta-guide.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/koelner-dom_panorama.jpg
Looks like the hot staging ring is going to evolve into the Russian style spokes.
On the Booster side: * Grid fins placement will change to a more "even" one (90° between adjacent fins). Possibly bigger. * Hot-stage ring will be a more traditional one ("just sticks"). * No engine bay skirt.
N1 vibes!
. . . but vibes are what made the N1 blow up!
They should have performed a vibe check before the flight
We just have to make sure Starship has good vibes instead of bad vibes.
Starship was already full of N1 energy - especially at ITF-1 - and this just pushes it further down the line.
Why do they need the extra length? Seems weird to be almost as big as the booster. Better for moon/mars?
You can imagine each engine as having to lift the column of fuel that is directly above the engine. If the thrust of the engine can go up (for whatever reason), the the height of the column of fuel above that engine can also go up. Raptor's thurst and ISP has been continuously improving, so the fuel column is allowed to get longer without significantly affecting the rest of the design. A similar thing happened with the Falcon 9, as the Merlin engines kept improving. Look at the height of the original F9 compared to the current one. That said, it isn't free -- a bunch of other engineering needs to be done to support this. Ground support equipment needs to be able to support the increased height. So there is usually a limit. And there are some other engineering side effects (the rocket needs to be sufficiently stiff to support the weight of the additional fuel, they need to model the aerodynamics again, etc.)
Thanks for the real explanation. So this is tied to the development of Raptor and more of a "because we can” than a "because we need to".
A bit of both. V1 can only lift 40-50 tonnes to LEO according to Elon so it is not viable for use as a tanker as it would require 24 trips to fill the tanks of HLS! V2 is effectively the minimal viable product to get HLS done. V3 is the stretch goal in all kinds of ways including length.
I haven't done the math but they probably don't need to stretch the ship for a tanker although stretching the booster may be helpful. They might even be able to shrink the ship for a tanker variant since propellant is probably going to be higher density than a typical payload.
Average density for subcooled methalox is 872 kg/m^^3 while Starship cargo will be 200 tonnes spread across at least 1000 m^^3 so 200 kg/m^^3. So yes - *with* maths
They don't want to stretch the booster too far because the booster needs to return to the launch pad, so the more energy the booster gains, the more it needs to cancel out. The calculations are a bit different from the classic expendable rocket calculations.
Agreed. The confounding factor to that is if the mass flow rate of raptors increases. Then you can stretch the booster without the same downrange boost back penalty. Lots of parameters to balance.
More fuel, more cargo
> More fuel, more cargo *To a point*. There's no free lunch in orbital-class rocket engineering, *everything* is a trade-off with something else...
People have talked about why the whole stack is longer, but there's also the question of why does the stretch goes almost completely into the ship... Since the Booster always returns to launch site, it should do as little as possible. Every m/s it provides it will have to cancel so that it goes back. Starship, on the other hand, has free return because of aerobraking. That's why the stack shifts as much Δv to the ship as possible. The booster burns to give give the ship enough airtime so that it can get into orbit and no more.
> Since the Booster always returns to launch site,... No discussions on offshore barge recovery, or just force the customer to pony up the considerable cash for an expendable mission?
Never. It only does RTLS. And is optimized for that mission profile.
Elon usually gives an expendable figure as well. It is nearly double the figure for payload with full reuse so might be useful for say a heavy space station segment or a fusion engine where you need to launch the entire magnet assembly as a single object. I can't think of a lot of other applications where the load cannot be split among multiple launches.
bigger is better, literally, by the square cube law. more payload, better fuel efficiency, and better cost efficiency. but the diameter is by far the hardest to change, whereas stretching it is easier. this is in common with trains, planes and other rockets like Falcon 9. trains and planes are also really hard to change the diameter of, so stretch is the main way. (the 737 has been overstretched, for example, whereas the 777-200 and 777-300 are good examples of the correct amount of stretch. trains have been the same diameter for a long tme, so the only way to make trains bigger is to make em longer, as in north american and australian freight trains.) in some ways, Starship is "merely" a successor to falcon 9 where they increase the diameter (in addition to all the other improvements). it's kinda similar to, say, a 767 vs 777. bigger diameter, and improve everything else too while you're at it. After stretching Starship some more, I would expect we see a further diameter upgrade in the long run, perhaps 2 decades from now we'll get a 12m or 15m diameter rocket. But in the short run, diameter is fixed at 9m, and the best way to make your rocket bigger -- and better -- is to stretch it.
> trains have been the same diameter for a long time,... Those pesky pre-existing train-tunnels, someone really need to have a chat with them, selfishly impeding transportation progress efficiency... (Obvious *sarc*...)
Actually 15-20 years ago they increased the height of tunnels on highly used rail lines. This was to accommodate the increased maximum height of railcars, so they had to make the tunnels taller. I'm sure it was a very expensive thing to do.
It's also different to strech steam era tunnels for diesel train compared to electric train which need extra space for the electric wire. Look up the new Indian cargo trains which have double stacked containers and they are electric too.
It should noted that if you hold the diameter constant there is no square/cube scaling going on. Stretching a ship does improves the dry mass fraction because you already have all the heavy stuff like engines, flaps and bulkheads factored in so you are effectively just stretching the tank walls which are relatively low mass compared with the rest.
it's still line/square scaling i guess, the dvolume goes as stretch^2 while the dtank goes as stretch^1, so overall the mass fraction still improves with stretch^1, so id call that within the bounds of "Generalized square/cube scaling laws" (be it 3-2=1 or 2-1=1). it's right in spirit, if not in the most literal+strict sense
More payload capacity/space for larger payloads and crewed missions.
> Why do they need the extra length? This happened to Falcon 9 too as engine specifications improved with the Merlin-1D. So it looks more like taking advantage of the opportunity presented by Raptor 2 and successors. Both Falcon 9 and Starship are stuck with the initially specified diameter. It initially seems odd that SpaceX would get caught out a second time. However it may not be a mistake as such: * the F9 diameter was constrained by road bridge height * maybe Starship diameter is constrained by the costs of the factory and the launch tower or even the connecting road.
Maybe the limitation is just the bell diameter and packing efficiency of the SL Raptors on the booster? If you increase the diameter you need more engine area to make up for it, and if you're already confident in the bell size/expansion ratio the only way to add more engine area would be to add more engines. Perhaps they decided adding an entire extra ring of engines would require raising the diameter too much, and trying to stagger them in such a way as to interleave the new outer ring with the previously-outer ring wouldn't allow them to efficiently pack?
An extra ring of 1.3m diameter engines is very close to an extra 3m diameter so 12m total. It is also another 26 engines so 59 total which is certainly getting up there.
From the video: If flight 4 gets booster to do the landing on a "virtual tower" (at sea), flight 5 may try to catch the booster with the mechazilla. Clearly an optimistic scenario, but it might happen! Also mentioned that ship will take longer, will want at least two "virtual" catches at designated spot at sea before trying to bring one back to the launch site due to having to overfly land on return and not wanting to rain bits of the ship on anything...
Will they at least attempt to relight the ships engines after it makes it through reentry for flight 4? If no soft landing, seems like relight would be useful.
I think for all these tests, the will try every stage according to the plan. If IFT ship had made it to Hawaii, and dt had made it through the atmosphere, the plan was to attempt to relight engines for soft landing.
They want at least one full belly-flop into the ocean to calibrate how bad that would be. Also, they've already demonstrated that relight and flip can be done, during hopper tests. So the first time they pass re-entry, they won't relight.
That can relight and still belly flop. They’ve demonstrated burn and flip but haven’t demonstrated relighting the engines after passing through reentry.
It is the goal of ITF-4 according to Elon Musk. Get Starship intact through the hot stage of reentry.
Why would they need to know how bad it would be?
For environmental assessments, for the effect on marine life.
haha thats an ironic username
The Mars part of this video is bananas so I am just going to pause on processing all of that, but the 1-2 year vision looks fantastic, and while optimistic I think it's not unrealistic. We'll be seeing more towers, more launch attempts, probably a real booster landing attempt this year (possibly with an early success) and then go into refining and mapping out ship landings. What went entirely unmentioned, unfortunately, was the plan for early operational use of Starship. Presumably this will be Starlink at first, but I'd love to see a clearer mapped out plan of when they begin work on prop transfer and other payloads. Maybe still too far beyond the envelope to start reporting, as they're going to be all-in trying to get the ship to land. If that happens next year I will consider it an amazing success. The challenges of performing a reentry and overflying land/population centers with that thing are considerable (though not unprecedented... see shuttle).
All that depends on getting it to work first. And we already know from the current payload bay door that the early payloads will be Starlinks. Then the next step would be to get a depot on orbit and get refueling flights to work. The demo mission to land HLS variant unmanned to the moon will take at least 7-8 tanker flights. Lots of opportunity to practice. And since the Starship tanker variant will probably be bit more complex and you'd want to re-use it, this will wait until recovery is working. Starlinks they could toss up even with expendable Starship as long as booster is recovered.
The initial Shuttle flights landed on the West Coast so did not involve overflight of heavily populated areas.
Seems to me that SpaceX needs to make a deal with Space Force for a Starship Launch and landing site at Vandenberg, sooner rather than later, for this reason among others. Perhaps that is in the plans that are not being publicly disclosed yet.
I hope they build a second tower at Boca Chica. It would be a shame if they destroyed the only launch tower on IFT-5or IFT-6. There would be some benefits to building a catch-only tower. It would be cheaper than building a complete launch tower: No OLM (Orbital Launch Mount) needed. On the other hand, very soon they will have so many improvements to make that the original OLM will be obsolete for launches, much like the Transporter-Erector at Vandenberg became obsolete for Falcon Heavy launches, even before the first FH flight. I am watching the video as I write. Although the upper stage is much smaller, catching it is much riskier, due to the rough ride during reentry. I'm glad Musk has said there will soon be 2 launch towers at Boca Chica, and 2 at the Cape. Besides the reasons he gave, that would mean that 3 refilling flights could be teed up and ready to go, before HSL or Mars Starship launches.
> Although the upper stage is much smaller, catching it is much riskier, due to the rough ride during reentry And due to its need to fly over land at low altitude, to reach the landing site, coming from the west.
Wouldn't it have reduced pretty much all of its horizontal velocity by FL350 or so? That does not change the risk of a high-speed high-altitude breakup scattering possibly large pieces of debris over a huge inhabited area...
Safety calculations rely on the fact that most people are indoors most of the time. A house will defend you against a kg or two of metal but not against a 10 tonne chunk of engine bay. In any case the worst case event would be a break up during entry because of the size of the debris cloud.
> Safety calculations rely on the fact that most people are indoors most of the time. Serious question. Do they? When there was calculation of risk of satellite debris, it seemed they assume all people out in the open 24/7.
True, by “low altitude” I meant “well below orbital altitude.” Poorly phrased
Can it land in California?
The trick would be getting it back to Texas or Florida. Edit: now that I think about it they could just put it on a barge at Vandenberg.
Adds a ton of cost. Would be cheaper long term to try to build a new site on the west coast of FL for landings only. There’s a good wide and smooth interstate to truck it across the peninsula near Naples.
Good point. Risk to lives and property are an excellent reason to build an offshore catch tower, for the experimental phase of Starship operations. An offshore platform in the Gulf could provide 10,000 km^2 of relatively safe, empty sea around the landing area. If future cargo Starships suffer from a tile-shedding incident, they might want to have an "emergency landing site," at a very remote place like Kwajalein Island. If this happens to a manned Starship, they might want to send up a repair expedition and replace the tiles in orbit. They mioght rescue the crew by putting them on the repair ship, but they would not want to take any chances on losing a manned Starship, since the life support and other crew features will probably cost 3 or 4 times as much as the rest of the Starship. That's my guess.
We live in a time now where we could send up a new taxi home or repair crew in short order.
Offshore towers don't solve the problem of overflying land. It's not the immediate landing area that's a concern it's the hundred or thousands of miles of land it flies over. See how long the Columbia debris field was.
You raise a valid point, but it is not practical to land Starships near the West coast, and then barge them through the Panama Canal, to Boca Chica or Cape Canaveral. If a Starship were to break up during reentry, broadly speaking, there would be materials with 2 densities. 1) the tiles, with about the density of styrofoam, and 2) the hull of Starship, with the density of stainless steel. If Starship were to break up in the upper atmosphere on approach to landing, the tiles would be scattered all across Mexico or the USA, while the hull would make it close to the landing zone. If the landing zone was surrounded by 100 km of sea water in all directions, the chance of any stainless steel hitting anything other than water or a boat would be zero, and the chance of hitting a boat would be under 1:10,000. The shuttle, on the other hand, was mostly made of aluminum, which melted in places when it got hot and did not stay together, as Starship is expected to do. Shuttle wings, pillows, and the toilet tank were found in Texas, while heavier parts like the tires and engines made it ito the Gulf of Mexico.
If I'm not mistaken, construction on a second tower has begun
Ground prep work has begun (using drainage wicks to remove the water from the sodden ground - these will need to sit for a few months to do their thing) and the segments for the new tower have been assembled (most of them were prepared over a year ago) but until the ground is in a good, dry, compressed state they can't even begin to start the foundations. As for the next OLM, the area where that may be situated currently needs to be approved for construction purposes (and then wicking first needs to also be done on that area).
Cool thank you
I believe the purpose is to have the next launch rapidly ready. But for the test program it would be wise to build just a catch tower yes.
Still with the catch-only nonsense? SpaceX employees have repeatedly said there won't be and that it wouldn't work anyway.
He also said 80-90% chance of catching booster this year.
While his timing statistics are terrible, i feel his “success” probabilities are pretty reasonable
It would be amazing if the attempted "landings" at sea could be done where the water is shallow enough that the booster and ships could eventually become dive sites. This probably won't happen due to ITAR, but it would be an amazing future tourist attraction and something that a place like the Bahamas should absolutely look into - they have loads of shallow water that would be perfect for it.
Those lunar rovers in one of the [follow up tweets](https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669602740830566) look interesting. Do we know if that's something they're working on, or was it just made up to make the render look cooler?
Love how they left the brake lights on them. Need to make sure you don’t get rear ended in that heavy moon traffic. Waiting on AAA would be a nightmare…
> Waiting on AAA would be a nightmare… So no different than now?
Not brake lights, marker lights for nighttime or shadow (remember there is no atmosphere to scatter light into shadowed areas) are the primary need. You would not want to follow another vehicle on the moon unless it were on a paved and possibly swept surface, due to the dust. The minimal fenders is more laughable to me, both for the above reason and for the vehicle occupants. Remember that after damaging a fender on the Apollo 17 rover, they had to repair it with maps and duct tape!
Other companies are working on Lunar rovers for NASA. See for example [Ars](https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/nasa-asks-the-commercial-space-industry-for-a-rugged-long-lived-lunar-rover/). SpaceX didn't submit a bid so presumably they don't plan to have their own.
Well, if they did, it would probably be a pressurized rover in cooperation with Tesla (similar to what Toyota and JAXA are working on). Those bids were for the unpressurized rover (LTV).
That bid was for a fully autonomous rover that could last for years even through 2 weeks of very low temperatures during the Lunar night. It seemed almost ridiculously overspecified for the actual requirement of crew transport - Swiss Army knife anyone? SpaceX are more likely to provide a crew only vehicle that transports the crew only during Lunar day and parks up in the relatively warm HLS cargo bay or a shelter during the Lunar night.
For the foreseeable future, the Moon will likely see at most one visit by astronauts per year (since SLS/Orion won't launch more often), for a stay of at most 2 weeks (a Lunar day). So having a vehicle that can be driven remotely from Earth, with a robot arm that is capable of collecting samples and bringing them back to a base, makes sense. It lets them get stuff done during the 50 weeks a year when there's no-one there. Probably the base will have automated labs so samples can be processed remotely too. Powered by solar panels which the rover could deploy via remote control. I imagine anything SpaceX do would be with an eye towards Mars. For that they wouldn't need to cope with the same temperature extremes. However, remote control will still be important, and autonomy even more so (because the light speed delay is greater).
Hope it doesn’t get stuck in a crater and need a Space-Ford-150 to pull it out 😂
Follow up tweet with 1 min concept video of Super Heavy chopstick landing: > The update included near-term priorities for Starship that will unlock its ability to be fully and rapidly reusable, the core enabler for transforming humanity’s ability to send large amounts of payload to orbit and beyond https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669517860786631?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g Another follow up tweet: > With more flight tests, significant vehicle upgrades, and missions returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon with NASA’s Artemis Program all coming soon, excitement will continue to be guaranteed with Starship https://x.com/spacex/status/1776669602740830566?s=46&t=u9hd-jMa-pv47GCVD-xH-g
The animation doesnt show the hot stage ring?
Potentially this is accounting for it being jettisoned after stage sep. That was specifically noted as a possibility in the FAA filings.
I'm not sure V2's hot stage truss can be jettisoned at all, so that might not be relevant anymore
True
\> Starship 3 (fully reusable) will cost less than Falcon 1 (expendable) per flight. Cost per flight to Earth's orbit is 2-3 million dollars Insane
Even if out by a factor of 10 it would be a huge deal.
Hell, even if off by a factor of 100 that still beats Falcon 9 reusable payload per dollar by about 2x.
Also brings things closer in range to affordability. At $3M A 30-person starship flight would cost $100,000 per seat. Still *kinda* pricey, but if people buy luxury cars at that price, I think they could also afford a spaceflight. If we hit $2M flight, then *now* we're talking closer to everyman prices, at $67K. And presumably that price can come down further as they streamline the process.
Mmhh. But Starship is really huge. I think it also would be possible that, for example, a company can buy and equip a more 'popular' Starship V3 (+60 people) for trips to low orbit. It would present its owns challenges (organization and how to maintain order among so many people inside a Starship), but if that trip were worth 3M dollars, then the prices per seat could be around ~$50,000. Crazy.
They wouldn't "buy" it so much, as pay to have it built to their specs, and then SpaceX launches it for them on a contract basis. This is how companies that want to get into orbital manufacturing are going to do it. 200 tons to orbit, and however many back means they can send people and materials relatively inexpensively, even if it is still mid 8 figures per launch. Get your custom inflatable station up, outfit it with another launch or two, then start making drugs / growing organs / run your space brothel / etc.
>run your space brothel With blackjack... and hookers!
I mean, what else are you gonna do while you sit around and wait for those stem cells to do their thing?
> I mean, what else are you gonna do while you sit around and wait for those stem cells to do their thing? Going by what is happening on the ISS today, routine maintenance take up the majority of the waking hours...
> company can buy and equip a more 'popular' Starship V3 (+60 people) for trips to low orbit. 60? You're forgetting something *important*. Before the FAA will allow a paying passenger flight, there *must* be a redundant pressurization system to keep the passengers alive if they lose pressurization. Airliners do this with masks that drop if the pressure gets too low and the aircraft does a fast decent to 10,000 feet so people can breathe without oxygen. So, you have 2 choices, a redundant (extra) pressure hull, or the passengers are individually fitted and pressure-tested with a pressure suit like NASA's orange launch-reentry survival suit. There has to be a backup, opening the hatch at the space station to find a ship of corpses will scare off the passengers from buying future space flights...
I'm pretty sure a good proportion of those who experience zero-G for the first time throw up. Yay for being in a Starship with 60 other people, some of whom are throwing up. Not sure I'd pay $50K for that privilege.
Is that common in parabolic flights? Or is only for extended 0G experience? I also think that go to space would require pre-training and medical chekouts, for get a 'spaceflight license' or permission. That could allow to the people to detect what kind of situations they need to face off in space trips. I mean, going down a medium slide (the critical points of the training) can make you understand that perhaps the giant slide is not your thing (although in general people who seek such extreme experiences are usually familiar with strong emotions). Of course, something like the training for get the "space license" surely add more cost that only the 50k for the Journey. And even with that, I think I could dodge some vomit balls in zero-G only to see our beatiful planet for a day or so ;)
>I also think that go to space would require pre-training and medical chekouts, for get a 'spaceflight license' or permission. NASA found that there was no way to predict space sickness. It was one of the reasons why they backed off such a strenuous physical/training thresholds.
The zero G parabolic flights are known as the "vomit comet" for a reason.
Honestly I don't know how the heck I forget that lol. But anyway, I doubt that the 2/3 part ([according to Yaniec](https://web.archive.org/web/20060310204522/http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/yaniec_991020.html)) that get bad into a parabolic flight training keep interested in go to LEO, knowing that these momentanous experience gonna be their daily experience. You get kinda little "natural selection bias" in that. Antiemetic treatment would also be a thing.
> Antiemetic treatment would also be a thing. It is a thing, and a pre-flight dose is recommended 20 min. before the parabolic flights begins. (It does no good if you are already sick, that's just the way they work. From personal experience as kid who puked on long car trips, there's the nasty side-effect of making you very drowsy, as well. Not fun...)
> Is that common in parabolic flights? It does happen, I don't know the odds on puking, but vomit sacks are in the pockets of *every* passenger jumpsuits...
Parabolic flights are much worse. They have frequent changes from 0g to quite high g forces.
$3M would be cost, not price. At your $100,000 per seat SpaceX wouldn't be making any profit. Also, Musk is probably thinking of tankers, which are the simplest to build, and have no cargo integration costs since they only carry propellant. Cargo flights would cost more, and crewed launches more still.
> Musk is probably thinking of tankers, which are the simplest to build, and have no cargo integration costs since they only carry propellant. Tankers in orbit will require heavy propellant re-liquidifican machinery to deal with the inevitable cryogenic boil-off. Oh, and the weight of the solar panels to deploy to power that heavy machinery...
Nope. SpaceX plans don't include even painting them white. They plan on just launching fast enough and to rely on the Square-Cube law, since the vehicle is so big. This doesn't exclude having equipment on board to those things, but SpaceX never shown any signs that they think they need it. Lox and Methane liquefaction plants and solar panels are available off the shelf anyway. Just need a big enough rocket to launch them.
Depots will need that for long term storage, but tankers will be storing their propellant for much shorter times. Are you sure the mass of the added solar panels and cooling is less than the propellant mass lost by boil-off?
Remember Musk floated the idea a while ago of a "coach" Starship flight Earth-to-Earth with 1,000 people. And yes, you could cramp that many people in a Starship, semi-seated and without luggage, so most likely soldiers. If you want to fly with more comfort and checked bags like current Economy airplane class, it could carry 300 people, so $10k per ticket. I don't know how likely it'd be to get 300 persons paying $10k each for a scheduled flight, let's say, once a week both ways, to hop half the world in one hour (like Florida - Singapore and Singapore - Florida).
> I don't know how likely it'd be to get 300 persons paying $10k each for a scheduled flight, let's say, once a week both ways, to hop half the world in one hour It wouldn't cost that much, because presumably that flight would be done without superheavy. Once you cut out those expenses it's on par with Concorde tickets, adjusted for inflation.
> Once you cut out those expenses it's on par with Concorde tickets, adjusted for inflation. A flight on the now-retired Concorde didn't require a pressure suit or a double pressure hull to make the flight. The regulators will *require* that before the first seat get sold... Opening the hatch at landing only to find corpses will crush ticket sales. (Obvious snark...)
> Opening the hatch at landing only to find corpses will crush ticket sales. Elon Musk said it. If the ticket says, "34 minutes to Shanghai, but you may die", few people will fly.
> And yes, you could cramp that many people in a Starship, semi-seated and without luggage, so most likely soldiers. I hate to break it to you, but you seem to not have a grasp on how much kit the average servicemember lugs around with them going to/from deployment. Or how much the average infantry rifleman carries on their back.
> I don't know how likely it'd be to get 300 persons paying $10k each for a scheduled flight,... Time-critical freight like fresh seafood is a likely market...
Top Grade Sushi Tuna from the Atlantic to Japan
Starship can hold 100 Persons with enough space (Esrth Orbit or Moon, for Mars you need more space per person because of the long journey).
You might want to check these out: https://www.flickr.com/photos/194580829@N02/albums/72157720226339059/with/51752386721
> for Mars you need more space per person because of the long journey It's no where near as much room as most folks would like. An analogy I recall was the personal space on US Navy submarines, a rack 7 feet long and *maybe* 2 feet wide and tall, and a 6 inch pull out drawer below the thin mattress. If there's an ex nuclear attack or boomer crew member, they can give the specifics. Quarters are very tight, and sometimes crew members must 'hot rack', as in, sleep in a rack someone just crawled out of. Sub crew members seriously *hated* having to do that with a passion. You will *never* an individual cabin unless you are mega-rich on a Starship Mars flight...
> You will never an individual cabin unless you are mega-rich on a Starship Mars flight... I disagree. An individual cabin of 2m³ will be very efficient. For 100 people that will be only 20% of the available volume. People will stay there for some part of their waking hours. Reading, watching movies, learning. That frees up the remaining communal space for those outside their cabin. On a sub people mostly are sleeping or are on station. Passengers to Mars won't have a station to be at.
> Still kinda pricey, but if people buy luxury cars at that price, I think they could also afford a spaceflight. Not a good analogy, you don't buy a luxury car and drive it only once and have it crushed. Keep it maintained, you can get 100,000+ miles of service over many years of ownership. While *major* cool, the spaceflight is a short mini-vacation at best...
If there is a destination in LEO, there is no reason there could not be 200-300 people on board for a 1 day transfer.
It doesn't really mean anything until they actually prove out reusability for both stages though. Those numbers are just speculation right now, similar to the 20 year timeframe he mentioned for establishing a civilization on Mars.
I can live with a billion year civilization.
Elon might be controversial for some, however I'm glad I'm living in the same era; his companies are so insanely innovative and interesting.
It’s crazy how thoughtful and immature he can be at the same time.
If the man weren't a lunatic he'd never have sunk his fortune into a new car company and a space launch company -- both businesses that had been tried a dozen of times before resulting in embarrassing failure and bankruptcy. We're just lucky he's both crazy and skilled at developing successful, innovative companies. (And, yes, I understand that Tesla is vastly more than a car company)
> If the man weren't a lunatic he'd never have sunk his fortune into a new car company and a space launch company He actually said this himself. Something like "Do you think any sane person would have done what I have done?"
Not to me. Like many comments online either state he is the greatest genius of all time or a complete moron conman. He's a complex human being like the rest of us, with both good and bad traits. There's plenty I don't like about him but that doesn't mean absolutely everything he touches is either bad or evil. The fact that there are both extremes is actually pretty common (see any other notable person in history).
It's not about badness or evil, but he's very facts/engineering focused in some areas and totally disconnected from facts in others. That's the odd part.
He thinks he has Asperger's. It's pretty typical within that demographic.
Not really. Being highly educated and knowledgeable in one domain does not necessarily translate for other domains. If you're smarter, you will handle more domains but you can't be master of all.
People were always going to Stephen Hawking for opinions about alien life. What does being a brilliant mathematician and theoretical physicist have to do with exobiology?
Well, you can kinda make the possibility of alien life occurring into a math problem.
No you can't we don't have enough information. Without a real understanding of the process of abiogenesis we can't say if life is like a mineral that forms wherever possible or if life is like the literal Roman Empire that occurred on Earth but will never occur anywhere else in the history of the universe because it required all the exact events of Earth's history to happen -- or any possible state in between those extremes. We don't THINK life is like the Roman Empire, we THINK life forms whenever conditions allow it, but that's really little more than a guess based on nothing but the timing of life's emergence on Earth. Until we get some actual data or at least an independent example of the development of life we don't really know anything.
> No you can't we don't have enough information From what we know, it is a quite safe bet that life is abundant throughout the universe. But it seems likely that the step from single celled organisms to to multicellular life growing into large plants and animals is rare, possibly very, very rare. From there to intelligence and technical civilization probably even much more rare.
> From there to intelligence and technical civilization probably even much more rare. No doubt! Imagine a highly evolved form of life knowing how lucky they were to have evolved at all, and decided to 'seed' the universe with the chemical combination that worked for them. Encase them in rock redesigned to shatter during the shock of atmospheric entry and scattering those 'presents'...
It's in no way a safe bet. It's a certainty that chain molecules are essentially everywhere. But we still don't have any solid idea of how that got to a robust replicating system. We, at this point, have absolutely no basis other than preference and inclination to say life is common.
> Well, you can kinda make the possibility of alien life occurring into a math problem. Astronomers have detected the chemical 'building blocks' (called precursors) for things like amino acids floating in interstellar space...
Elon is 100 percent an ass. But so was Steve Jobs and arguably Bill Gates, at least in his younger days. It's not that you have to be an ass to be innovative, but being one also doesn't stop you either.
So was Tesla, Edison, etc. it should not tarnish the inventions
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
So aiming for almost 3 ships made per day on average? It sounds doable if they automate manufacturing as much as possible. Tesla creates over 5000 cars per day on average. If there's anyone who could engineer this production line it's Elon.
Will this be on YouTube?
Unofficially, yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3B0XIImf_w
Thank you!
The AI overlords condensed it into this, FWIW: **Near Term Launch Plans for Starship:** - SpaceX aims to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer next year. - Plans to bring Starship back to a controlled point in the ocean this year. - Building more Mechazilla arms for booster recovery and reusability. - Targeting the first Cape launch tower to be operational by the middle of next year. **Raptor Engine Plans:** - Evolution of Raptor engines from Raptor 2 to Raptor 3 for higher performance and reliability. - Raptor 3 design features integral cooling channels and simplified components. - Aim to increase thrust to over 10,000 tons for Starship. **Starship Improvements:** - Starship 2 expected to carry over 100 tons to orbit. - Starship 3 projected to lift over 200 tons to orbit. - Plans for Starship to cost less than Falcon 1 per flight. - Future Starship designs to be taller and more powerful, aiming for 500 feet tall and 200 tons to orbit. **Long Term Plans for SpaceX:** - Vision of creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars within 20 years. - Goal to have a million people and several million tons of cargo for a self-sustaining city on Mars. - Plans for offshore launch
I'm watching it on YouTube as I write this. It's a stolen rebroadcast from a channel called Scientia Plus. Note on the content. Raptor 3 has ~50% more thrust than Raptor 1. Upgraded Starship will be about 8000 tons of liftoff mass, 10,000 tons of thrust at liftoff. ~500 feet tall, maybe stretched 30m. And Starship 3 should cost less per flight than Falcon 1. Down to around $2 million to $3 million per flight, due to full reusability.
Just short clips and a link to X.com...
Guess I’ll wait for somone to rip it
I was surprised that IFT-3 could only carry 50 tonnes to orbit. I thought the original Starship was supposed to carry over 100 tonnes. Now it looks like that will be Starship 2.
Yeah, it’s interesting because they seem to often be adding additional weight to the vehicles (additional stiffeners, the hot staging ring, additional heat shielding in the engine bays, etc). There’s a lot riding on the Raptor team being able to continually upgrade performance.
Amazing accomplishments and exciting short term plans from SpaceX and Musk. Can't understand how people don't realize how important and difficult these are, many of these things were science-fiction even a few decades ago. Instead, many people just focus on "yeah, but Musk said *this* and *that*, oh, so terrible", depressing really.
Interesting how Starship is still *not* pointy enough to satisfy Elon. I guess they will make it pointier still to match the aerodynamics of the stretch?
Or the artists just took the model and stretched it, fins, tanks, nosecone and all
He said there's not enough resources for a self-sufficient civilization on the Moon. But what exactly is lacking?
Umm... everything? There's never been systemic active geology or hydrology on the Moon so there's never been a concentration of useful elements to access beyond what might possibly be gathered from impact debris. It's a big worthless hunk of basalt. In the words of Ford Prefect, it's a desolate hole.
Atmosphere, water and sunlight. On Mars the atmosphere does pretty much all the slowing down for landing and the 24.5h day cycle ensures that you can easily live off solar power and a few batteries. Also the atmosphere provides CO2 which can be turned into oxygen and parts of propellant. Water is pretty abounded across the Martian surface. Compared to that the moon's water resources are extremely limited in volume and location. The 14 day night/14 day light cycle makes it extremely difficult to create cheap power sources. No atmosphere means far more difficult manufacturing of about everything and landing requires enormous amounts of propellant. And in addition to that Mars seems to have very similar rock and therfore ore deposits to earth. On the moon you have aluminium, titanium and iron, but little of all the other important elements.
The big one, nitrogen. Also carbon/CO2, some may be in the cold traps, we don't know, but not much. There is water, but probably not enough, if wasted on propellant production. Everything is in the surface regolith, except water, but only traces, very hard to extract.
The LCROSS plume suggests the lunar cold traps are around 0.5% carbon by weight, and Chang'e-5 soil samples found a mineral that's 5% nitrogen (in ammonium ions). Neither of these is going to be nearly as easy to extract as they will be on Mars (just condense some air!), though.
Just as easy as extracting the gold from seawater.
Just the basic essentials: - water - oxygen - iron - nitrogen - gold - aluminum - copper - atmosphere - radiation shielding - sunlight - etc..
Thank you for participating in r/SpaceX! Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with our [community rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/rules) before commenting. Here's a reminder of some of our most important rules: * Keep it civil, and directly relevant to SpaceX and the thread. Comments consisting solely of jokes, memes, pop culture references, etc. will be removed. * Don't downvote content you disagree with, unless it clearly doesn't contribute to constructive discussion. * Check out [these threads](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/threads) for discussion of common topics. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/spacex) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[FAA](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kykp3np "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[GSE](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyv9tdd "Last usage")|Ground Support Equipment| |[HLS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyoyhjx "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ISRU](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kye499n "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)| |[ITAR](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyp0blc "Last usage")|(US) International Traffic in Arms Regulations| |[ITS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyeoggy "Last usage")|Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT)| | |[Integrated Truss Structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Truss_Structure)| |[Isp](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyhf4kk "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)| | |Internet Service Provider| |[JAXA](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kygxvf9 "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency| |[LEO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyklrzh "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |MCT|Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS)| |[N1](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyjo4p7 "Last usage")|Raketa Nositel-1, Soviet super-heavy-lift ("Russian Saturn V")| |[OLM](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kydmemg "Last usage")|Orbital Launch Mount| |[RTLS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyokkgi "Last usage")|Return to Launch Site| |[SLS](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyr7f0j "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyidlel "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kzuh3vw "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[cryogenic](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kytk328 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |[hopper](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kygdq06 "Last usage")|Test article for ground and low-altitude work (eg. Grasshopper)| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[methalox](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bxhqjh/stub/kyp2ng1 "Last usage")|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(18 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bt7w64)^( has 83 acronyms.) ^([Thread #8336 for this sub, first seen 6th Apr 2024, 21:33]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceX) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
When Elon refers to the moonbase, is he talking about the outpost envisioned by NASA, or does he want a private SpaceX one?
Probably a mix of both - if SpaceX starts doing it, NASA's immediately gonna want a piece of the action for Artemis.
IMO he’s talking about a conceptual idea, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s NASA or SpaceX, but he likes to use the name from the tv show. In reality, SpaceX have no plans to make their own moon base so it’s either Artemis or nothing.
Love these types of talks/updates, wish these talks were what he discusses online more rather than all the wacky noise he makes that alienates people (no pun intended).
How is all of this funded, won't spacex run out of money? Interested to see if anyone has rough costs on this.
Starlink monthly subscriptions, US government contracts, and private company payload launches. And in the distant future, Mars tourism and deep space commercial enterprises.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1c1xz6g/exclusive_internal_prestarlink_spacex_financials/ SpaceX is now very well funded with their own activities. They don't need any more financing rounds.
To build a thousand spaceships? At a low cost of $10m dollars each, they would need $10b to build these, multiply that by 2 to factor other associated costs with this and with getting to Mars. May take 10 years of profits to pay for this.
I am thinking of a substantial base and early settlement. That can very well be financed by SpaceX. The full settlement drive with 1000 Starships per window? Maybe if Starlink is very successful. There is a lot of money in that business and Starlink will probably highly profitable with a large profit margin. But doubtful, it can be financed by SpaceX alone.
What do you estimate the cost of sending humanity to Mars? The profit of spacex can be fairly well estimated.
~$10 billion a year, but that's not enough to do it in 20 years, would take a lot longer.
All this longship stuff is WAY down the line right? This would take years to get the pad ready and 12+ months to develop right? I’m not cool with pushing Artemis 3 into the 2030’s.
Anyone got more info on possible amass landing sites? He only showed the surface without any exact landing options..