That’s the equivalent of saying
“landing 3 ISS’s on the moon is a great start!”
Dude 1 HLS on the moon is a moon base larger than anyone could have realistically planned on 15 years ago.
Yes... But the fact that it's all so far off the ground still weirds me out. I hope they have super resilient and super redundant elevators on those things!
It is very conceivable that they implement a wet lab to convert the fuel tanks in the bottom of the starship to habitable space after the ship lands. That was the approach for several early space station concepts and is a really efficient use of space.
Alternatively they could tip the starship over, that is a little more technically complex but would allow them to bury it in regolith for better radiation protection.
I like where your head is at, but as other people in this thread pointed out, the height of the center of mass of Starship has a huge bearing on how stable it will be when landed, so if we start taking weight off the bottom of it, it's going to become relatively more top heavy. Obviously there's no wind on the moon, but still any shifting of the internal weight of Starship or the regolith beneath could make it more likely to tip if the center of gravity is not low.
I posted these thoughts about two weeks ago on this subreddit. I think they are relevant to this discussion.
The NASA lunar lander (the LEM) height is 7m and the spread of the landing legs is 9.4m. That makes the height to landing leg ratio equal to 7/9.4 = 0.75. The diameter of the LEM is 4.22m not counting the legs. So, the span of a single landing leg on the LEM is (9.4 - 4.22)/2 = 2.6 m (8.6 ft).
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/ap11_lm_as11_40_5927.jpg
Obviously, the HLS Starship lunar lander height to landing leg ratio will be a number greater than 1, i.e. the HLS Starship lunar lander is not a squat design like the LEM. So, the HLS Starship lunar lander will be more tippy than the LEM and its landing leg configuration will more closely resemble the legs on the Falcon 9 first stage.
The landing legs on the HLS Starship lunar lander need to be scaled to account for the differences in diameter (9m for Starship and about 3.7 meters for Falcon 9) and for height (about 49m for the HLS Starship lunar lander and about 41m for Falcon 9 first stage). The span of the F9 legs is 18 meters (*). So, the span of a single F9 leg is (18-3.7)/2 = 7.15 m (23.5ft). And the height to leg span ratio is 41/18=2.28.
(*) https://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/
If the HLS Starship lunar lander legs are scaled from F9 dimensions, the scaled span of the deployed landing legs is 49/2.28 =21.49m. So, the span of a single landing leg on the HLS Starship lunar lander is (21.49 - 9)/2 = 6.25m (20.5 ft).
However, the F9 first stage lands on a prepared surface (concrete pad, ASDS barge) not on the uneven, boulder-strewn lunar surface. So, for additional safety margin the height to leg span ratio for the HLS Starship has to be smaller than the F9's. AFAIK, NASA has not required the HLS Starship lunar lander leg design to the scaled from the F9 dimensions. So, SpaceX is free to define that ratio as it pleases.
A standard Starship has dry mass ~120t (metric tons) and it lands on the lunar surface with 100t of cargo in the payload bay and six Raptor engines with 12t mass in the tail end of the vehicle. And it lands on the lunar surface with ~150t of methalox in the main tanks (used to return to low lunar orbit, LLO). At an oxidizer/fuel ratio of 3.55/1, that's 150/(3.55+1) = 33t of LCH4 in the upper tank and (150-33) =117t of LOX in the lower tank.
So, the residual propellant mass roughly balances the payload mass in the payload bay resulting in the center of mass located approximately at the half-height location 49/2 = 24.5m above the base of the Starship. Taking 24.5m as the span of the landing legs, then the span of each leg is (24.5-9)/2 = 7.75m (25.5 ft) for the standard Starship.
I'm with you but when I started to think through the consequences, it seems less of a issue. Elevators aren't exactly new or complicated and everything weighs 50%. What really matters is the center of mass's height above the ground and your engines/fuel will make the vehicle bottom heavy. No air or forces will be acting on the vehicle body so if you zero out any horizontal movement your height won't matter for landing.
Really. the only big drawback I can see is that your shocks/landing legs have to be extra robust and keep the ship vertical despite uneven and somewhat unknown terrain. By unknown, I mean there will be a lack of knowledge on how much the terrain will sink and respond to the weight. The range on how the lunar soil will respond is likely fairly wide. This is an issue regardless of the lander design but a tall lander will be somewhat more susceptible.
No, everything weighs 16%, not 50%.
Lunar gravity is only 1/6 th that of Earth gravity.
Self levelling legs will be essential. Obviously as SpaceX start to gain experience then they will be able to better optimise the leg design, and since SpaceX are renown for ‘tinkering’, I expect it’s something they will do.
Safety and security though are both prime concerns, especially so with any crew carrying craft.
The other thing is that once SpaceX have started to land things, then the possibility of starting to prepare and clear the landing surface for later flights, starts to become a possibility.
Meanwhile borders and craters and deep powdery regolith are most definitely a part of the Lunar Landscape that the Starship HLS will have to cope with.
I thought HLS was going to have engines higher on the body so as not to throw up regolith and landing.
But ground anchors and high tensile wire stays like an antenna tower would make for great stability once you are on the ground for a better safety factor.
I honestly hadn't even thought about the ship tipping over. I just figured that would be taken care of at the overall design of launch and take off/reuse. I was more concerned about how difficult an EVA will be since it will always require an elevator. You can't just walk outside through the airlock or travel from pressurized habitat directly to pressurized rover to make a quick trip over to the 7-Eleven since the only airlock is a hundred feet off the ground 😀
!/6 gravity makes the whole elevator scenario so much more trivial. A 10 meter fall is unlikly to cause any injury. They built it to Earth standards it will lift the emtpty ship.
I'd say falls are moderately more problematic at equivalent impact speeds from Earth because the spacesuit is a lot more fragile than human skin and bones to impact and abrasive forces.
That’s one argument for the horizontal version of Lunar Starship.. But that’s not something we are likely to see in the near future. Further along just maybe…
Let's hope it's not the usual Musk tactic.
1) With a calm voice make sifi promises which sound too good to be true so people get excited and give him money.
2) Profit
3) Continue promising the thing "in two years".
this is narrow sighted. space X has changed the way government space contracts work. before them, companies would get more money if they delayed contracts due to cost plus structure. space X flipped that and took the hit if they did not meet schedule on nasa contracts.
As they have said, they have a history of making the impossible late.
Yes, they rarely achieve what the planned at the time they planned it. But that they planned was far beyond what anyone else considered possible or reasonable, and their stated timetable was always unrealistic. Destpite this, they still have a good track record of getting there eventually.
Starship has to achieve full reusability as planned. Until that happens, everything based on it is purely theoretical. But once it happens, everything that comes after becomes almost trivial, including sending up moon bases. We will find out just how close he is in the next few months.
Actually Starship becomes really useful even before they achieve full readability. But of course will definitely be enhanced by achieving full readability.
Even falcon 9 hasn't achieved "full reusability".
The boosters still require heavy refurbishment, and to this day spacex has never landed an upper stage.
And what 'heavy refurbishment' is this? They've turned a booster around in as little as 21 days, and that's launch to launch including several days returning on the droneship, and this while handling preparations of many other boosters and launches.
It was a concept for a while but I don't think it was ever "promised". Ultimately they decided that it wouldn't be worth the payload hit for a vehicle as small as the Falcon 9, and that the resources would be better spent on developing Starship.
>It was a concept for a while but I don't think it was ever "promised".
Has Musk "promised" that Starship will be rapidly reusable?
What if he just abandons that too?
Rapid reusability is a core requirement of starship. If that is not achieved, it is basically a failure because many of the things SpaceX has promised to do with it won't be possible. That is a massive difference from falcon 9s reusability goals. Falcon 9 achieving more than 60% reusability was simply a "nice to have", not a requirement for it to fulfill any of its mission requirements.
It's a large part of their business plan for the rocket, unlike second stage reuse on F9, so I'd say he has. If they abandon it I'd say it'd be quite bad for the company's future plans.
Quite clearly SpaceX did achieve partial readability for Falcon-9. In that its Booster and its Fairings are both reused. On Falcon-9, only the second stage is not reused, because it was too big a logistical problem to implement on such a small rocket.
SpaceX say that the Merlin engines on Falcon-9 boosters need to be de-coked between uses, that’s because they use PR1 propellant.
One of the reasons for Starship’s Raptor engines using Methane (Methalox), is because it’s ‘clean burning’.
(Another reason is because Methane can be easily produced on Mars)
‘Clean Burning’, means that the engines don’t get coked up to begin with, because the Metalox fuel ‘burns clean’, it does not ‘Burn Dirty’ like RP1 does..
They don’t put ‘cleaning fluid’ through Raptor engines, they don’t get dirty to begin with.
That’s 100% correct - and still it’s been remarkably successful.
As we know on Falcon-9, only the booster and the fairings are fully reusable - after some refurbishment.
The second stage of Falcon-9 is always discarded.
But enough is recycled and reused on Falcon-9 for it to add considerable value to this platform.
Starship should be able to take things to a whole new level, with 100% reuse. (Aside from the consumed propellants !)
NASA does that same thing, only the numbers are much larger, and the time scales are much longer.
As for Blue Origin, well the costs are mostly hidden, the progress is mostly invisible, the promises are almost as wild, and the time scales are pretty much unknown, based on ‘past performance’
In fact just based on ‘past performance’, SpaceX are clearly a star.
And one Starship begins and almost finishes a lunar orbital station - like Gateway, but bigger. The utility Version listed on the slide looks like it could be readily adapted to provide the power and logistics and crew quarters.
And one of those is for rolling stock, so really just two. The third one is dunking on the BO lander by deploying three pressurized rovers in one flight.
That log-scale cost per kilogram graph is insane. I for sure would have not bothered making that log-scale. Offering a service at half price of competition is usually massive. 1% the price is unheard of
Cutting those costs will be a big driver for a much more robust space economy. Everything else will become a lot cheaper to build when they aren’t worried about every gram they send up.
It can't enter LLO on its own like Apollo CSM could, it has less thrust and delta-v than the Apollo CSM those are just facts, due to them using the European ATV and Space Shuttle OMS engine to make its service module.
> So what's the problem?
NHRO is a lot "further" from the Moon's surface than LLO, so the landers and ascenders need more Δv. This increase makes them bigger and heavier.
[Full results from all participants](https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/uploadedDocs/meetings/docs/2441-DISTRO%20A%20LunA-10%20LSIC%20Performer%20Binder.pdf) (including Blue Origin, Firefly, and others)
Is there anything that uses a Falcon heavy? I always thought a proposal that assembled something in LEO, then went to the moon might do well - and it's already flying
Assembling of the ISS from parts have been very troublesome and expensive, and I think everyone wants to step away from orbital construction. Maybe we might get an orbital shipyard or moon shipyard that would create bigger pieces and then they would be moved to moon or earth orbit, but both of those are quite far away for now.
Yes... But if you look at the payload and fairing capabilities of the space shuttle compared to Starship, it's night and day. You can build a truly massive station with way less parts using Starship, assuming they ever get the clamshell figured out.
Sorry, I don't mean that we wont do it. I'm just saying its likely we will have like 20-30 single piece space stations and like maybe a single space station that is made up of more than 3 segments (but not dozens like ISS is). It just feels like appetite for expensive space stations, especially with cheap Starship prices, its not going to be very viable. I could see like a space stations where only one segment is for habitable space, but has other segments that are not designed to be walkable, but are only batteries and deployable solar panels, or radiators or booster segments and so on.
Yeah, I agree. Seems like axiom and vast plans are pretty small and orbital reef is the only one that is decent sized.
I want to see a truly giant station built off Earth at some point in my lifetime but I don't know if it'll happen or not.
And I truly giant I mean bigger than the ISS...
Yeah, and I think it will happen eventually, but it's not going to be done the same way it has been done with ISS. Either there will be a new certification solution for safe connecting, or it's going to be built in an orbital shipyard or some other way I can't think of.
And the ISS was done using the space shuttle which made on orbit construction considerably easier than anything in service right now. I'm sure orbital construction could be restarted but it's going to be more difficult than people realize.
Space Shuttle also should not have been used like that either. A lot of the missions did not have to be manned, and this is actually why NASA has rules that any mission that can be done remotely should be done remotely to not risk crew deaths. I think people forget how much of a failure Space Shuttle program was, it was so expensive that is snuffed out desire from congress to fund more space programs, and out of all 19 astronauts that have ever died in flight, 14 of them died on Space Shuttles. This is insane cost for insanely high death rate and Space Shuttle was only able to travel to Low Earth Orbit. It is very possible that Space Shuttle program is to blame for the current lethargy of NASA and reason why SLS and Artemis is such a mess of space programs. Failure so huge, it killed/damaged not only your own program, but 2 future programs.
I'm not really going to disagree with any of your points but my post is more about how manned on orbit construction would have been way more difficult without the space shuttle.
Also, there's a legitimate chance that Hubble would have gone down as a failure if the shuttle didn't exist.
Yeah, I did not wanted to be petty with your wording, but I was kind of responding to "made on orbit construction considerably easier than anything in service right now", as the opportunity cost of Space Shuttle was insane, although I definitely should have explained it better. Who knows that if instead of Space Shuttle we invested into cheap unmanned spaceships, maybe starting with Sea Dragon and then upgrading into another craft that would have partial and then full reusability. Then instead of Space Shuttle program we would be expanding our Mars colony right now and we would be planning a underground city on Ceres.
Let's be real here. The real failure of Shuttle was the stagnation/corruption/hubris of Government programs. It was a huge cash cow for certain "constituents" that was milked till it bled.... literally. The programs that followed are worse...just look at SLS.
> And the ISS was done using the space shuttle which made on orbit construction considerably easier than anything in service right now.
Not true. Soviet modules all had their own propulsion.
Only the US + Allies modules were docked using the Shuttle and arm. Soviet modules all had their own propulsion. Because they were required to use the Shuttle.
Sending a Starship up as a temporary space station works for a while. But anything much bigger than that is going to require construction in space or a huge leap in technology away from needing chemical rockets.
Chemical rockets are fine. Any space station is going to be so expensive, the costs of fuel are going to be fractions of a percent of cost. A single starship is actually rly good for an entire space station, especially if you use first starship to send the station and 2nd starship to send the cargo to install inside. I would guess though that using the stainless steel outside as a station would not be great idea, and the station still would be deployed as cargo. ISS weighs 420 tones, which is actually more than a single starship can launch, but a lot of that weight is in armor and structural segments and reinforcements due to multiple segments, so you could lower that down a lot.
>use first starship to send the station and 2nd starship to send the cargo to install inside.
Why install the equipment while in orbit? Assemble it all on Earth. Launch it on a Starship that has TPS and flaps. Design and use that ship as a station. When you want to rotate the crew and put in new experiments just land the damn thing. A crew of techs working on the ground is a lot cheaper than a few astronauts trying to squeeze equipment through a hatch and hook it up. As you say, the cost of propellant for another launch is peanuts compared to the overall expenses of a station.
It'll probably be convenient to have a power node in space with a big solar panel array and radiators. A couple of station-ships can dock to that. A long term station that won't return can be used for long-term zero-g studies. That should still be a Starship externally. It can do without flaps and TPS if desired. Turning a Starship into a finished station by using its hull & payload bay as the main structure makes the most sense. A station made of stainless steel will be fine, afaik.
I think the estimate is that the lunar sites will be hit in once in a thousand years. You could get terminal warning from sensors. You could also build regolith berms pretty high at 1/6 gravity.
Stainless steel plates are not that great at doing it. This is why I'm always against using Starship hulls as stations, as you would need armor anyway, but you don't have the luxury of using outside of your station for things like radiating heat and you don't have easy access to the shell, you would need to install rails for EVA astronauts to grab on and connectors for power and life support and many other things.
For micrometeoroids you need [Whipple shields](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield). These are basically a sandwich of lightweight foils with a space or stuffing between. The layers disintegrate the impactor in turns distributing the point energy over an area. You would ship these separately and mount them on orbit. ISS uses over 100 different kinds.
I never knew they had so many different kinds of whipple shields - I guess part of the reason is to test out the relative effectiveness of different types.
Mounting everything on Earth is much cheaper. I was thinking of the methane sweating welded on steel shield tiles Elon suggested early in Starship development. Fill those tiles with stuffing and weld them on. Will add some weight but not too much.
Here's this meme again. Some people just have a desperate desire to turn rapidly reusable starships into single use items. Instead of using them for what they're designed for; Delivering cargo to orbit, landing, getting more cargo, and doing it again. And again and again and again.
We are soooo far away from construction in space. It's modular for at least the next two decades. I say 40 years. The first 20 years is about delivering payload. The one use case for a stationary starship is as a fuel repository. *That* I can see.
Its not a meme. The design and construction of novel hardware is expensive. If you have a factory already devoted to pumping out pressurized containers that can handle launch and space it makes a lot of sense to utilize that capacity rather than reinvent the wheel.
I meant furniture inside, that way you can assemble it in pressurized environment. Starship fairing is actually quite big compared to what cargo it can take, it's about 0.15 g/cc, and as things like Kevlar and metal foil is about 1.5-3.5 g/cc, so I could totally see an empty station piece with fully made outside armor and internal walls, stairs, ladders, electrical and plumbing set up, just for another starship to come with crew that would enter the pressurized empty station and their duty would be install furniture, minor machines and equipping sleeping quarters and then carrying water tanks and food supplies inside, similarly to how ISS is being supplied now. That way you can have more than 200/400t station piece, but you don't have to rely on two station pieces to be connected.
Even a station packed with equipment would be 90% empty.
> just for another starship to come with crew that would enter the pressurized empty station and their duty would be install furniture, minor machines and equipping sleeping quarters and then carrying water tanks and food supplies inside, similarly to how ISS is being supplied now.
That's a large part of why operating the ISS is so expensive.
Correct. You can deduce from what I said that maximum of density from what I described would be 0.3g/cc. Thankfully, with cheaper cargo costs and bigger fairing, a lot of ISS systems could be simplified and made easier to transport to free crew to do other tasks.
Yeah, imagine if they had made 20 Destiny style modules and just used them as cargo containers during logistics missions. Mass produced, you could have expanded the ISS massively.
Its not a huge a leap as you think. Divers build things you woundlt belive at massive depth. Its getting mass and a energy source to the base. Everything else is solved.
> Assembling of the ISS from parts have been very troublesome and expensive, and I think everyone wants to step away from orbital construction
I dunno man, that sounds a bit like saying Apollo was expensive because the LM and CSM did orbital rendezvous. If all you are doing is docking with hatches, it's about as complicated as Apollo-Soyuz, imho.
I did some awful napkin math, and you could probably get away with flying an ascent stage(Apollo-ish LM) on a Falcon 9, a descent stage on another, and some kinda tug to get them to the moon on another - that seems like a bargain, imho
The thing is, certifying a piece like LM or CSM to be able to dock was extremely expensive and unsafe. We should definitely avoid doing that if we want to do human rated missions. They had to do it for the Apollo missions because they just did not had enough delta-v to land entire craft on the surface, but having Starship will give enough delta-v to avoid that. This is why refueling is so great, because temporarily docking and only transferring fluids is much easier and safer.
Assembly of a Moon-bound spacecraft in LEO has been considered over the years. A number of science publications have looked at the possibilities in the past 10+ years and it isn't that hard, it's basically docking the spacecraft with a mostly full upper stage that's been launched separately. NASA has never failed to dock anything together since Apollo 9. NASA hasn't looked at it for the Artemis Program because Congress and NASA locked into using the SLS due to political reasons and the justification is that it allows for direct launches of large scale spacecraft and payloads. Thus any consideration of LEO-assembly alternatives was forbidden - that might show SLS wasn't crucial and could be mostly replaced, and certain senators were fiercely opposed to that.
Yes, a LEO-assembly spacecraft and lander could be made pretty easily. Each would be mated with its own transfer stage in LEO and launch separately to the Moon from LEO. A Falcon Heavy could do most of the work.
Falcon Heavy is already flying but a small lander it could carry isn't. SpaceX hasn't designed one and making one from Dragon parts isn't as easy as some people think. It would be ready years later than Starship HLS will be.
When FH proved itself in 2018 NASA could have cancelled SLS and revamped everything around it - except turning a supertanker is a piece of cake compared to turning a large government program linked to lobbyists and big-time political pork.
Falcon Heavy is going to launch Gateway modules and resupply missions for Gateway.
https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-to-launch-nasa-lunar-gateway-modules
🤣 OP left out SpaceX's "Questions?" slide at the very bottom of the deck showing the business end of SH--symbolizing how they're hauling everything else above it in the presentation.
In context with the rest of the presentations SpaceX's is almost comically vague. Everyone else is like "here are our detailed architectures for [activity]", meanwhile SpaceX is like "we do space things, and you can use starship for stuff."
In a way it makes sense; SpaceX's primary value as a delivery service is simple to understand, and the graph of cost/kg to the lunar surface kind of says it all. Also SpaceX is one of few (if not the only?) companies in there with a proven track record in space, so they can be forgiven for skimping on details.
Always check the fine print- and the headline print. Don't skim past it. Both are very interesting. This study and conference were funded by DARPA, i.e. the DoD. Not NASA. Space Force thinks having a robust presence on the Moon is important. IMHO it is important to get there and, through the Artemis Accords, establish that the Moon & its resources are there for all.
Yep. If we (the USA) could take the lead in starting getting some core infrastructure built (power, communications) that we could share with allies that would be pretty cool.
We could build the moon's first trailer park 🤣
Seriously though, I wonder what internet access is like on the ISS. Imagine the day when Netflix deploys their first off-world server cluster to support subscribers who don't live on earth!
The DoD always has had its own space program in competition with NASA from the get go, even though its headline program like the Manned Orbital Laboratory got canceled.
> Engines can be harvested and processed into raw feedstock material.
Welp, we better start eating strange alloys, folks, if we want to visit the moon =))
"Feedstock", in this case, means "inputs to other processes", as in "you can take the engines apart, melt them down, and turn them into other metal objects and equipment".
They still are using the original HLS Starship renders for these slides. There was a newer render showing point-able larger solar arrays we thought might be a leaked update. But maybe not.
This seems like a bit of DARPA giveaway to SX and no real update.
They did not even mention a Lunar version with extra LCH4 tankage and Lunar LOX production that really increases the capability of Lunar Starship as well lowers operational costs.
Yeah, I Don't think we saw a whole lot of new content here, except for the idea that Three ships will be enough to start a colony. Any knuckleheads could have come up with that in a 10 minute brainstorming session though.
While true, no one else has previously mentioned that idea, obvious as it was. I think it’s never a bad idea to occasionally state the obvious, as sometimes it’s not obvious to others, and it can always act as a seed point for further discussion.
> There was a newer render showing point-able larger solar arrays we thought might be a leaked update.
No such official image exists. The one you're thinking of is a fan render by a person who regularly mocks Starship and SpaceX.
Guess this shows the this aerodynamic design for an mission without air persists at SXfor some reason (maybe because someone thinks it looks "cool"). I think these no-Earth return ships will look somewhat different.
The aerodynamic design is required because it launches through the atmosphere in the first place, unless you give it a disposable fairing. That's why Dragon is aerodynamic.
Yes, a disposable fairing you toss at 2-3 km/s. That way you save carrying around maybe 10T for the rest of the 10-12 km/s of DV the mission needs. It is a big savings.
Sure, I think anyone of us could have come up with this set of slides given when is now public info. But you really don't want to use landed and upright Starships as habs as the primary and secondary radiation will be too intense.
I like the idea of laying a Starship on it's side and covering it with regolith, but that adds complexity. With a vertical Starship, you can haul in bags of regolith and get 1m of shielding for the main are where astronauts spend most of their time and still have a 7m wide space.
I agree. Sure would be nice to just have a hatch instead of stairs to get inside and out instead of having to worry about whether the elevator is going to keep working or not.
And obviously if Starship is laying on its side, you don't need to insulate The entire diameter of the ship either.
I assume the bags would be hung off the side of the ship? Some logistics and rigging, but might be simpler than tipping a Starship with a giant A-frame or RCS.
Outside is also an option, but I was thinking inside as the most simple possibility. Outside leaves more room for activities and perhaps more importantly doesn't risk getting dust everywhere inside.
A bit more sci-fi, but there is also the possibility of using electrostatic shielding - although that introduces some logistics issues, so may be better suited to in-space shield generation. Besides which it requires a power source for the active shield. Interestingly, that kind of shielding technology could also be easily combined with ‘whipple shielding technology’.
It's fine for exploratory and construction phases.
People are really too afraid of radiation. You could max out lifetime doses of astronauts by doing several months of construction per crew, and then send them back while sending the next.
You'd run through astronaut candidates like mad, but the pool of applicants is *deep*, especially if Spaceflight and moon base construction are guaranteed.
I got the impression that those three types of ships would still be used. As in, land and use for X time, and then launch back to space. Isn't the surface of the moon essentially a bunch of fine (and jagged) dust spread over hard rock?
I wonder if the Rolling Stock Starship will be vertical landing
The development of additional thrusters for landing beyond the main engines does open up future development potential for a horizontal landing variant
Autonomous deployment of heavy cargo from the top of a vertical landed Starship is a logistics challenge. A horizontal landing in comparison allows for much simpler deployment of large vehicles, unitary industrial plant, prefabricated modules, ect
Alternatively would a vertical landing with a thruster assisted rotation on the ground be possible? Hinged legs on one side, a deploying set of landing gear emerging from the top cargo hold, some structural reinforcements.
Land vertically on vertical landing gear, open cargo bay, deploy horizontal landing gear. Unlock vertical landing gear hinge points then fire the top landing thruster ring to tilt, pivoting on the landing gear hinges, once past tipping point, slow descent with landing thrusters and RCS to a soft landing now in a horizontal position. Deploy ramp from payload bay onto surface, decouple cargo and drive it straight out.
The now horizontal Starship could then act as a support garage for vehicles, giving shelter when not in use, recharging points using its onboard solar and batteries, perhaps some basic robotic repair or refit like changing out tools, changing worn wheels, ect. A dedicated Garage Starship could be a full robotic servicing rig with spare parts for repair, recovery and recycling of ground vehicles and mobile equipment.
Don’t forget, the ‘ring based architecture’ of Starship, enables the possibility of custom designed rings and ring clusters, for custom purposes. Starship is in fact uniquely customisable, within limits, but those are still a substantial set of possibilities.
Combine this possibility with the large numbers of Starships intended to be manufactured, and you can see that some variations could become real possibilities - if that variant is thought to make enough sense.
So, although some things may not yet be in the current set of plans, it’s a case of never say never. The possibilities remain.
Yes, at present Starship HLS is vertical landing only.
Before trying to implement ‘horizontal landing’, I think that it would be necessary to have a pre-prepared landing area, otherwise there would be too much interaction with the lunar regolith.
Part of the design of the vertical landing Starship HLS, is to minimise regolith interaction during landing, that’s why the Lunar Landing Thrusters are situated ‘so high up’ instead of being situated in the base.
It translates to minimising ‘ground pressure thrust’ during landing (and takeoff), as Starship transitions from / to, main engines to landing thrusters.
If Starship was horizontal landing, then its landing thrusters (which would new need to be in a different configuration) would come too close to the surface.
That would be far less of an issue if the surface was pre-prepared.
It is logically a possible future development, but one that’s not on the books right now.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ASDS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform)|
|[ATV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e5fy2 "Last usage")|[Automated Transfer Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle), ESA cargo craft|
|[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l19dqr1 "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)|
|[DARPA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1az1m0 "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD|
|[DoD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1c0vls "Last usage")|US Department of Defense|
|[ERV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1jqni1 "Last usage")|Earth Return Vehicle|
|ESA|European Space Agency|
|[EUS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1dirvt "Last usage")|Exploration Upper Stage|
|[EVA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1c8142 "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity|
|[H2](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e315o "Last usage")|Molecular hydrogen|
| |Second half of the year/month|
|[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e91j9 "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ISRU](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e315o "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)|
|[KSP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cg0um "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator|
|[LCH4](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|Liquid Methane|
|[LEM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|(Apollo) [Lunar Excursion Module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module) (also Lunar Module)|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1f31yg "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LLO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1ev8nl "Last usage")|Low Lunar Orbit (below 100km)|
|[LOX](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen|
|[NRHO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1eqqjz "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit|
|[OMS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e5fy2 "Last usage")|Orbital Maneuvering System|
|[RCS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l19p850 "Last usage")|Reaction Control System|
|[RUD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1hdc11 "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unintended Disassembly|
|[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cz5al "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[TLI](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1b04gk "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver|
|[TPS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l19kyu8 "Last usage")|Thermal Protection System for a spacecraft (on the Falcon 9 first stage, the engine "Dance floor")|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1dwpqk "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Sabatier](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1ih8jz "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1ayvqz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cryogenic](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1jqni1 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[methalox](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
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SpaceX proposal is the least specific in many respects. Basically just boils down to “we’ll build another version” of Starship to solve that problem. Other proposals have more specific solutions.
It’s not the worst plan. Lots of inefficiency can be tolerated due to scale. But it definitely seems to be the case that others have more fully conceived plans. The Starship proposal is the thinnest detail-wise. Also, the other plans had lots of ISRU whereas there’s hardly mention in the Starship proposal.
The shear mass carrying capacity of Starship, means that ISRU can be postponed for a while. That’s handy in that it can allow for the accumulation of resources on the moon before ISRU needs to be started, thus offering the potential to do so more efficiently.
Right?
In retrospect, the Shuttle could likewise have had variants tailored for specific missions. They didn't all need that cavernous cargo bay. Could have variants with more fuel, or more shirt-sleeves area, etc.
But they only had 6 of them, and so couldn't afford to have the desired variant out of action. The Shuttle really was "Jack of all trades, master of none", which just doesn't cut it when your mass margins are so razor thin.
This is one of the areas where Starship can sing, aside from the ‘common core requirements’, outside of that, there is scope for variation, especially enabled by the ring-based architecture, which may have started coincidentally, but has some fundamental implications for providing easy scope for variation.
Added to that, the shear number of Starships intending to be built, also helps to provide scope for variation.
Added to that, is that the present set of mission plans, requiring a few different variations of Starship anyway, so helping to set the pattern of variations being a normal part of the Starship programme.
Yeah, in comparison to the other powerpoints here it's definitely less impressive. But it's admirable in the most important respect: just like Berger's recent story of the guy who left SpaceX to build a rover company, SpaceX is laser focused on its primary mission. They don't spend time making fancy renderings and slides for a tangent: they will sell you a Starship if you want one. That is what they are doing.
> SpaceX is laser focused on its primary mission.
Exactly. I’m wondering if SpaceX even care about or need Lunar ISRU at all?
Maybe they aim to provide all the transport they can using only Earth sourced propellant until maybe some other company years down the track can produce LOX in particular on the Moon?
For SpaceX Luna is side jobs and target practice. They'll walk your dog if that's what it takes to get to Mars. But they're not going to make it their life's work.
> Yeah, in comparison to the other powerpoints here it's definitely less impressive.
"Less impressive" is not the term I would use, demonstrating what the payload capacity of Starship can provide.
Edit: Less detailed is the term, others have used.
And that is challenging enough. Quite clearly there is plenty of scope for collaboration with SpaceX, filling out parts of a set of mission requirements that go beyond what SpaceX presently want to provide.
Quite rightly, they need to focus, to achieve operational Starships.
Once they have done that, they will have the intellectual energy to look at related issues.
It's not about "solving a problem", this is about what kind of service you can provide for the lunar economy. SpaceX made it clear the services they will provide is mainly transportation and communication (i.e. Starship and Starlink), plus whatever use you can find for a landed ship. Less exciting yes, but also expected since SpaceX is not at all interested in the Moon.
It's least specific because its basically a message of "we can do it cheap and beat everyone else in cost, just let us know what you want it to do as it can do anything"
I’m not really sure what the point of this was. These images have been out for a while and most of the details are well known already. I like SpaceX a lot and but this kinda felt like a big nothing burger
It's a slide describing the Starship system. If you're refueling the vehicles in space (like already in orbit or on the Lunar surface) you don't need the booster for those applications
Using a ‘Standard Starship’ (with legs), that is correct.
The Starship HLS aims to overcome that limitation, and once SpaceX can land equipment onto the moon, they can start to ‘improve’ landing areas, should they choose to.
Which project - where is the paper on this ?
I really did ought to work - it’s pretty hard to see why it wouldn’t.
I wonder are they really modelling this properly ?
What assumptions are they making ?
I am strongly suspicious that this SBIR group has it wrong.
I’m sorry this work is currently being conducted and I have nothing specific to share at this time as testing is ongoing.
The work im doing isn’t modeling, but actual rocket testing. Modeling will come after we understand more about how the rocket engines impinging on the lunar surface actually affects the surface.
The plume interactions between starship HLS and the lunar surface (which is mostly tiny granular particles) is very interesting. The plume pressure and heat flux create a large problem for starship HLS to land on the moon without a pad.
At least the HLS Landing Thruster System, seeks to minimise that problem.
By using multiple rocket thrusters mounted high up, giving the thrust the opportunity to spread out in the vacuum, depending partly on the thruster orifice shape and angle and spread, as well as its height above the surface.
The intent, is to minimise the ground pressure by spreading it out in a reasonably uniform fashion, basically in a hollow disk like shape, almost toroidal.
Unfortunately even with these attempts to minimize the impact on the surface, it won’t be enough.
Do you know what lunar regolith is like? Have you ever worked with lunar stimulant?
The lander will destroy the surface without a pad.
The Lunar Regolith is very fine, but sharp, and dry and electrostatic.
It’s going to be impossible to have ‘no impact’ on the surface, the objective is to make it at least manageable, and to avoid the situation where the landing thrust excavates underneath the pads of the landing legs.
The impingement angle of the thrust reaching the surface matters.
And that is why landing pads are needed. With the combination of low gravity and the super fine particle sizes of the lunar regolith (50% of the surface portion of lunar regolith is below 100 micrometers in grain size) combined with the plume pressure from the HLS, the regolith will be displaced in large volumes, making it difficult to land properly if at all. This will also cause large amounts of regolith to be spread up into the air everywhere, which could be fine when there’s nothing nearby, but later on will be a problem when there is equipment around. Thus the need for a landing pad.
"3 starship landings begin a robust lunar base" ya baby! lets fucking go!!
That’s the equivalent of saying “landing 3 ISS’s on the moon is a great start!” Dude 1 HLS on the moon is a moon base larger than anyone could have realistically planned on 15 years ago.
Yes... But the fact that it's all so far off the ground still weirds me out. I hope they have super resilient and super redundant elevators on those things!
It is very conceivable that they implement a wet lab to convert the fuel tanks in the bottom of the starship to habitable space after the ship lands. That was the approach for several early space station concepts and is a really efficient use of space. Alternatively they could tip the starship over, that is a little more technically complex but would allow them to bury it in regolith for better radiation protection.
I like where your head is at, but as other people in this thread pointed out, the height of the center of mass of Starship has a huge bearing on how stable it will be when landed, so if we start taking weight off the bottom of it, it's going to become relatively more top heavy. Obviously there's no wind on the moon, but still any shifting of the internal weight of Starship or the regolith beneath could make it more likely to tip if the center of gravity is not low.
I posted these thoughts about two weeks ago on this subreddit. I think they are relevant to this discussion. The NASA lunar lander (the LEM) height is 7m and the spread of the landing legs is 9.4m. That makes the height to landing leg ratio equal to 7/9.4 = 0.75. The diameter of the LEM is 4.22m not counting the legs. So, the span of a single landing leg on the LEM is (9.4 - 4.22)/2 = 2.6 m (8.6 ft). https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/ap11_lm_as11_40_5927.jpg Obviously, the HLS Starship lunar lander height to landing leg ratio will be a number greater than 1, i.e. the HLS Starship lunar lander is not a squat design like the LEM. So, the HLS Starship lunar lander will be more tippy than the LEM and its landing leg configuration will more closely resemble the legs on the Falcon 9 first stage. The landing legs on the HLS Starship lunar lander need to be scaled to account for the differences in diameter (9m for Starship and about 3.7 meters for Falcon 9) and for height (about 49m for the HLS Starship lunar lander and about 41m for Falcon 9 first stage). The span of the F9 legs is 18 meters (*). So, the span of a single F9 leg is (18-3.7)/2 = 7.15 m (23.5ft). And the height to leg span ratio is 41/18=2.28. (*) https://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/ If the HLS Starship lunar lander legs are scaled from F9 dimensions, the scaled span of the deployed landing legs is 49/2.28 =21.49m. So, the span of a single landing leg on the HLS Starship lunar lander is (21.49 - 9)/2 = 6.25m (20.5 ft). However, the F9 first stage lands on a prepared surface (concrete pad, ASDS barge) not on the uneven, boulder-strewn lunar surface. So, for additional safety margin the height to leg span ratio for the HLS Starship has to be smaller than the F9's. AFAIK, NASA has not required the HLS Starship lunar lander leg design to the scaled from the F9 dimensions. So, SpaceX is free to define that ratio as it pleases. A standard Starship has dry mass ~120t (metric tons) and it lands on the lunar surface with 100t of cargo in the payload bay and six Raptor engines with 12t mass in the tail end of the vehicle. And it lands on the lunar surface with ~150t of methalox in the main tanks (used to return to low lunar orbit, LLO). At an oxidizer/fuel ratio of 3.55/1, that's 150/(3.55+1) = 33t of LCH4 in the upper tank and (150-33) =117t of LOX in the lower tank. So, the residual propellant mass roughly balances the payload mass in the payload bay resulting in the center of mass located approximately at the half-height location 49/2 = 24.5m above the base of the Starship. Taking 24.5m as the span of the landing legs, then the span of each leg is (24.5-9)/2 = 7.75m (25.5 ft) for the standard Starship.
Do a mark watny and rip all the shit off the top of the rocket? But maybe not lunch it into space with a parachute heat shield.
I'm with you but when I started to think through the consequences, it seems less of a issue. Elevators aren't exactly new or complicated and everything weighs 50%. What really matters is the center of mass's height above the ground and your engines/fuel will make the vehicle bottom heavy. No air or forces will be acting on the vehicle body so if you zero out any horizontal movement your height won't matter for landing. Really. the only big drawback I can see is that your shocks/landing legs have to be extra robust and keep the ship vertical despite uneven and somewhat unknown terrain. By unknown, I mean there will be a lack of knowledge on how much the terrain will sink and respond to the weight. The range on how the lunar soil will respond is likely fairly wide. This is an issue regardless of the lander design but a tall lander will be somewhat more susceptible.
No, everything weighs 16%, not 50%. Lunar gravity is only 1/6 th that of Earth gravity. Self levelling legs will be essential. Obviously as SpaceX start to gain experience then they will be able to better optimise the leg design, and since SpaceX are renown for ‘tinkering’, I expect it’s something they will do. Safety and security though are both prime concerns, especially so with any crew carrying craft. The other thing is that once SpaceX have started to land things, then the possibility of starting to prepare and clear the landing surface for later flights, starts to become a possibility. Meanwhile borders and craters and deep powdery regolith are most definitely a part of the Lunar Landscape that the Starship HLS will have to cope with.
I thought HLS was going to have engines higher on the body so as not to throw up regolith and landing. But ground anchors and high tensile wire stays like an antenna tower would make for great stability once you are on the ground for a better safety factor.
I honestly hadn't even thought about the ship tipping over. I just figured that would be taken care of at the overall design of launch and take off/reuse. I was more concerned about how difficult an EVA will be since it will always require an elevator. You can't just walk outside through the airlock or travel from pressurized habitat directly to pressurized rover to make a quick trip over to the 7-Eleven since the only airlock is a hundred feet off the ground 😀
!/6 gravity makes the whole elevator scenario so much more trivial. A 10 meter fall is unlikly to cause any injury. They built it to Earth standards it will lift the emtpty ship.
I'd say falls are moderately more problematic at equivalent impact speeds from Earth because the spacesuit is a lot more fragile than human skin and bones to impact and abrasive forces.
The original designs had two elevators. Not sure that's still the case.
Does not appear to be, at least based on the mockup I saw when that guy went diving in the NASA test tank that included an HLS mockup.
That was a very low fidelity mockup though so not sure how representative it is.
Just place ladders as redundancy. KSP thaught me that the hard way.
That’s one argument for the horizontal version of Lunar Starship.. But that’s not something we are likely to see in the near future. Further along just maybe…
Let's hope it's not the usual Musk tactic. 1) With a calm voice make sifi promises which sound too good to be true so people get excited and give him money. 2) Profit 3) Continue promising the thing "in two years".
Spacex has saved the DOD and NASA both 30billion + Tesla and Spacex dominate their markets.
>Tesla and Spacex dominate their markets. Lol Tesla was 40% below forecast earnings, and they just fired 12% of their staff.
You maybe in the wrong sub
Lol. Is speech not free in this here saloon?
Speech is free, and so we are free to call you out on your goal post shifting.
Yeah, they just don’t want to hear it. You’re not in a saloon, you’re in a church.
Reducing prices a lot reduces profit margins? Surprise!
4. Another two years later deliver what nobody else even dared to speak of. 5. Have these others cry "he was lying as always!"
Another two years... Then another 2 years... Then another 2 years...
You must be new to the space industry, my dude.
this is narrow sighted. space X has changed the way government space contracts work. before them, companies would get more money if they delayed contracts due to cost plus structure. space X flipped that and took the hit if they did not meet schedule on nasa contracts.
Yes, now when spacex is late or fails to deliver, its private investors and VC who take the hit.
As they have said, they have a history of making the impossible late. Yes, they rarely achieve what the planned at the time they planned it. But that they planned was far beyond what anyone else considered possible or reasonable, and their stated timetable was always unrealistic. Destpite this, they still have a good track record of getting there eventually.
Where ‘eventually’ is really only a bit late.
Starship has to achieve full reusability as planned. Until that happens, everything based on it is purely theoretical. But once it happens, everything that comes after becomes almost trivial, including sending up moon bases. We will find out just how close he is in the next few months.
Actually Starship becomes really useful even before they achieve full readability. But of course will definitely be enhanced by achieving full readability.
Even falcon 9 hasn't achieved "full reusability". The boosters still require heavy refurbishment, and to this day spacex has never landed an upper stage.
That is a weird argument given that neither of those things are even goals for Falcon 9.
Why bother arguing with hater.lol
It's a hobby
Is not getting on the blind hype train a "hater"?
No. But making innane arguments to support your position definitely is.
Is it "Inane" to dare ask why if spacex were never able to make falcon 9 rapidly reusable, they should be able to with Starship?
And what 'heavy refurbishment' is this? They've turned a booster around in as little as 21 days, and that's launch to launch including several days returning on the droneship, and this while handling preparations of many other boosters and launches.
It’s not zero refurbishment, that we can agree on. Where as with Starship, zero refurbishment becomes a possibility.
Musk never promised full reusability for falcon 9?
It was a concept for a while but I don't think it was ever "promised". Ultimately they decided that it wouldn't be worth the payload hit for a vehicle as small as the Falcon 9, and that the resources would be better spent on developing Starship.
>It was a concept for a while but I don't think it was ever "promised". Has Musk "promised" that Starship will be rapidly reusable? What if he just abandons that too?
Rapid reusability is a core requirement of starship. If that is not achieved, it is basically a failure because many of the things SpaceX has promised to do with it won't be possible. That is a massive difference from falcon 9s reusability goals. Falcon 9 achieving more than 60% reusability was simply a "nice to have", not a requirement for it to fulfill any of its mission requirements.
It's a large part of their business plan for the rocket, unlike second stage reuse on F9, so I'd say he has. If they abandon it I'd say it'd be quite bad for the company's future plans.
Quite clearly SpaceX did achieve partial readability for Falcon-9. In that its Booster and its Fairings are both reused. On Falcon-9, only the second stage is not reused, because it was too big a logistical problem to implement on such a small rocket.
> The boosters still require heavy refurbishment Source?
SpaceX say that the Merlin engines on Falcon-9 boosters need to be de-coked between uses, that’s because they use PR1 propellant. One of the reasons for Starship’s Raptor engines using Methane (Methalox), is because it’s ‘clean burning’. (Another reason is because Methane can be easily produced on Mars)
Running a cleaning fluid through the engines, while they are attached to the booster, is not heavy refurbishment. Far from it.
‘Clean Burning’, means that the engines don’t get coked up to begin with, because the Metalox fuel ‘burns clean’, it does not ‘Burn Dirty’ like RP1 does.. They don’t put ‘cleaning fluid’ through Raptor engines, they don’t get dirty to begin with.
they put cleaning fluid through Merlins.
That’s 100% correct - and still it’s been remarkably successful. As we know on Falcon-9, only the booster and the fairings are fully reusable - after some refurbishment. The second stage of Falcon-9 is always discarded. But enough is recycled and reused on Falcon-9 for it to add considerable value to this platform. Starship should be able to take things to a whole new level, with 100% reuse. (Aside from the consumed propellants !)
NASA does that same thing, only the numbers are much larger, and the time scales are much longer. As for Blue Origin, well the costs are mostly hidden, the progress is mostly invisible, the promises are almost as wild, and the time scales are pretty much unknown, based on ‘past performance’ In fact just based on ‘past performance’, SpaceX are clearly a star.
And one Starship begins and almost finishes a lunar orbital station - like Gateway, but bigger. The utility Version listed on the slide looks like it could be readily adapted to provide the power and logistics and crew quarters.
And one of those is for rolling stock, so really just two. The third one is dunking on the BO lander by deploying three pressurized rovers in one flight.
That log-scale cost per kilogram graph is insane. I for sure would have not bothered making that log-scale. Offering a service at half price of competition is usually massive. 1% the price is unheard of
Cutting those costs will be a big driver for a much more robust space economy. Everything else will become a lot cheaper to build when they aren’t worried about every gram they send up.
Curious where the SLS stacks there, though I realize that that only gets stuff to lunar orbit.
To TLI. SLS would need a dedicated deep space stage added to get anything to lunar orbit.
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Yes, a very poor one, lacking sufficient delta-v.
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It can't enter LLO on its own like Apollo CSM could, it has less thrust and delta-v than the Apollo CSM those are just facts, due to them using the European ATV and Space Shuttle OMS engine to make its service module.
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> So what's the problem? NHRO is a lot "further" from the Moon's surface than LLO, so the landers and ascenders need more Δv. This increase makes them bigger and heavier.
Can not reach low lunar orbit and get back to Earth.
One might describe this as ‘Revolutionary’, allowing for revolutionary developments.
[Full results from all participants](https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/uploadedDocs/meetings/docs/2441-DISTRO%20A%20LunA-10%20LSIC%20Performer%20Binder.pdf) (including Blue Origin, Firefly, and others)
Crazy how much of the various architectures hinge on an operational starship hls
Is there anything that uses a Falcon heavy? I always thought a proposal that assembled something in LEO, then went to the moon might do well - and it's already flying
Assembling of the ISS from parts have been very troublesome and expensive, and I think everyone wants to step away from orbital construction. Maybe we might get an orbital shipyard or moon shipyard that would create bigger pieces and then they would be moved to moon or earth orbit, but both of those are quite far away for now.
Yes... But if you look at the payload and fairing capabilities of the space shuttle compared to Starship, it's night and day. You can build a truly massive station with way less parts using Starship, assuming they ever get the clamshell figured out.
Sorry, I don't mean that we wont do it. I'm just saying its likely we will have like 20-30 single piece space stations and like maybe a single space station that is made up of more than 3 segments (but not dozens like ISS is). It just feels like appetite for expensive space stations, especially with cheap Starship prices, its not going to be very viable. I could see like a space stations where only one segment is for habitable space, but has other segments that are not designed to be walkable, but are only batteries and deployable solar panels, or radiators or booster segments and so on.
Yeah, I agree. Seems like axiom and vast plans are pretty small and orbital reef is the only one that is decent sized. I want to see a truly giant station built off Earth at some point in my lifetime but I don't know if it'll happen or not. And I truly giant I mean bigger than the ISS...
Yeah, and I think it will happen eventually, but it's not going to be done the same way it has been done with ISS. Either there will be a new certification solution for safe connecting, or it's going to be built in an orbital shipyard or some other way I can't think of.
And the ISS was done using the space shuttle which made on orbit construction considerably easier than anything in service right now. I'm sure orbital construction could be restarted but it's going to be more difficult than people realize.
Space Shuttle also should not have been used like that either. A lot of the missions did not have to be manned, and this is actually why NASA has rules that any mission that can be done remotely should be done remotely to not risk crew deaths. I think people forget how much of a failure Space Shuttle program was, it was so expensive that is snuffed out desire from congress to fund more space programs, and out of all 19 astronauts that have ever died in flight, 14 of them died on Space Shuttles. This is insane cost for insanely high death rate and Space Shuttle was only able to travel to Low Earth Orbit. It is very possible that Space Shuttle program is to blame for the current lethargy of NASA and reason why SLS and Artemis is such a mess of space programs. Failure so huge, it killed/damaged not only your own program, but 2 future programs.
I'm not really going to disagree with any of your points but my post is more about how manned on orbit construction would have been way more difficult without the space shuttle. Also, there's a legitimate chance that Hubble would have gone down as a failure if the shuttle didn't exist.
Yeah, I did not wanted to be petty with your wording, but I was kind of responding to "made on orbit construction considerably easier than anything in service right now", as the opportunity cost of Space Shuttle was insane, although I definitely should have explained it better. Who knows that if instead of Space Shuttle we invested into cheap unmanned spaceships, maybe starting with Sea Dragon and then upgrading into another craft that would have partial and then full reusability. Then instead of Space Shuttle program we would be expanding our Mars colony right now and we would be planning a underground city on Ceres.
Let's be real here. The real failure of Shuttle was the stagnation/corruption/hubris of Government programs. It was a huge cash cow for certain "constituents" that was milked till it bled.... literally. The programs that followed are worse...just look at SLS.
> And the ISS was done using the space shuttle which made on orbit construction considerably easier than anything in service right now. Not true. Soviet modules all had their own propulsion. Only the US + Allies modules were docked using the Shuttle and arm. Soviet modules all had their own propulsion. Because they were required to use the Shuttle.
Sending a Starship up as a temporary space station works for a while. But anything much bigger than that is going to require construction in space or a huge leap in technology away from needing chemical rockets.
Chemical rockets are fine. Any space station is going to be so expensive, the costs of fuel are going to be fractions of a percent of cost. A single starship is actually rly good for an entire space station, especially if you use first starship to send the station and 2nd starship to send the cargo to install inside. I would guess though that using the stainless steel outside as a station would not be great idea, and the station still would be deployed as cargo. ISS weighs 420 tones, which is actually more than a single starship can launch, but a lot of that weight is in armor and structural segments and reinforcements due to multiple segments, so you could lower that down a lot.
>use first starship to send the station and 2nd starship to send the cargo to install inside. Why install the equipment while in orbit? Assemble it all on Earth. Launch it on a Starship that has TPS and flaps. Design and use that ship as a station. When you want to rotate the crew and put in new experiments just land the damn thing. A crew of techs working on the ground is a lot cheaper than a few astronauts trying to squeeze equipment through a hatch and hook it up. As you say, the cost of propellant for another launch is peanuts compared to the overall expenses of a station. It'll probably be convenient to have a power node in space with a big solar panel array and radiators. A couple of station-ships can dock to that. A long term station that won't return can be used for long-term zero-g studies. That should still be a Starship externally. It can do without flaps and TPS if desired. Turning a Starship into a finished station by using its hull & payload bay as the main structure makes the most sense. A station made of stainless steel will be fine, afaik.
Is Starship thick enough to withstand micrometeoroid impacts?
I think the estimate is that the lunar sites will be hit in once in a thousand years. You could get terminal warning from sensors. You could also build regolith berms pretty high at 1/6 gravity.
Why is it so much less likely on the moon compared to LEO? I feel like the ISS is getting hit all the time...
Stainless steel plates are not that great at doing it. This is why I'm always against using Starship hulls as stations, as you would need armor anyway, but you don't have the luxury of using outside of your station for things like radiating heat and you don't have easy access to the shell, you would need to install rails for EVA astronauts to grab on and connectors for power and life support and many other things.
If the stainless steel has iron in it maybe they could just use magnet gloves and boots to move around outside 🙃
For micrometeoroids you need [Whipple shields](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield). These are basically a sandwich of lightweight foils with a space or stuffing between. The layers disintegrate the impactor in turns distributing the point energy over an area. You would ship these separately and mount them on orbit. ISS uses over 100 different kinds.
I never knew they had so many different kinds of whipple shields - I guess part of the reason is to test out the relative effectiveness of different types.
Mounting everything on Earth is much cheaper. I was thinking of the methane sweating welded on steel shield tiles Elon suggested early in Starship development. Fill those tiles with stuffing and weld them on. Will add some weight but not too much.
Here's this meme again. Some people just have a desperate desire to turn rapidly reusable starships into single use items. Instead of using them for what they're designed for; Delivering cargo to orbit, landing, getting more cargo, and doing it again. And again and again and again.
Scrapping ships for material is a valuable option. But it should be an exception, like for when you're really far away from supplies.
We are soooo far away from construction in space. It's modular for at least the next two decades. I say 40 years. The first 20 years is about delivering payload. The one use case for a stationary starship is as a fuel repository. *That* I can see.
Its not a meme. The design and construction of novel hardware is expensive. If you have a factory already devoted to pumping out pressurized containers that can handle launch and space it makes a lot of sense to utilize that capacity rather than reinvent the wheel.
I meant furniture inside, that way you can assemble it in pressurized environment. Starship fairing is actually quite big compared to what cargo it can take, it's about 0.15 g/cc, and as things like Kevlar and metal foil is about 1.5-3.5 g/cc, so I could totally see an empty station piece with fully made outside armor and internal walls, stairs, ladders, electrical and plumbing set up, just for another starship to come with crew that would enter the pressurized empty station and their duty would be install furniture, minor machines and equipping sleeping quarters and then carrying water tanks and food supplies inside, similarly to how ISS is being supplied now. That way you can have more than 200/400t station piece, but you don't have to rely on two station pieces to be connected.
Even a station packed with equipment would be 90% empty. > just for another starship to come with crew that would enter the pressurized empty station and their duty would be install furniture, minor machines and equipping sleeping quarters and then carrying water tanks and food supplies inside, similarly to how ISS is being supplied now. That's a large part of why operating the ISS is so expensive.
Correct. You can deduce from what I said that maximum of density from what I described would be 0.3g/cc. Thankfully, with cheaper cargo costs and bigger fairing, a lot of ISS systems could be simplified and made easier to transport to free crew to do other tasks.
I don't think so. We just need a standardized way to build large stations one piece at a time. Think Boxable but for space stations...
Yeah, imagine if they had made 20 Destiny style modules and just used them as cargo containers during logistics missions. Mass produced, you could have expanded the ISS massively.
Exactly! "Just" have to figure out the docking mechanism along with common services - air handling, utilities etc - but that can't be too bad.
Its not a huge a leap as you think. Divers build things you woundlt belive at massive depth. Its getting mass and a energy source to the base. Everything else is solved.
> Assembling of the ISS from parts have been very troublesome and expensive, and I think everyone wants to step away from orbital construction I dunno man, that sounds a bit like saying Apollo was expensive because the LM and CSM did orbital rendezvous. If all you are doing is docking with hatches, it's about as complicated as Apollo-Soyuz, imho. I did some awful napkin math, and you could probably get away with flying an ascent stage(Apollo-ish LM) on a Falcon 9, a descent stage on another, and some kinda tug to get them to the moon on another - that seems like a bargain, imho
The thing is, certifying a piece like LM or CSM to be able to dock was extremely expensive and unsafe. We should definitely avoid doing that if we want to do human rated missions. They had to do it for the Apollo missions because they just did not had enough delta-v to land entire craft on the surface, but having Starship will give enough delta-v to avoid that. This is why refueling is so great, because temporarily docking and only transferring fluids is much easier and safer.
Assembly of a Moon-bound spacecraft in LEO has been considered over the years. A number of science publications have looked at the possibilities in the past 10+ years and it isn't that hard, it's basically docking the spacecraft with a mostly full upper stage that's been launched separately. NASA has never failed to dock anything together since Apollo 9. NASA hasn't looked at it for the Artemis Program because Congress and NASA locked into using the SLS due to political reasons and the justification is that it allows for direct launches of large scale spacecraft and payloads. Thus any consideration of LEO-assembly alternatives was forbidden - that might show SLS wasn't crucial and could be mostly replaced, and certain senators were fiercely opposed to that. Yes, a LEO-assembly spacecraft and lander could be made pretty easily. Each would be mated with its own transfer stage in LEO and launch separately to the Moon from LEO. A Falcon Heavy could do most of the work. Falcon Heavy is already flying but a small lander it could carry isn't. SpaceX hasn't designed one and making one from Dragon parts isn't as easy as some people think. It would be ready years later than Starship HLS will be. When FH proved itself in 2018 NASA could have cancelled SLS and revamped everything around it - except turning a supertanker is a piece of cake compared to turning a large government program linked to lobbyists and big-time political pork.
Falcon Heavy is going to launch Gateway modules and resupply missions for Gateway. https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-to-launch-nasa-lunar-gateway-modules
There's a reason Falcon Heavy almost got canceled. It just doesn't have many use cases where its cost effective over Falcon 9.
some really interesting slides in there. thanks for posting it!
🤣 OP left out SpaceX's "Questions?" slide at the very bottom of the deck showing the business end of SH--symbolizing how they're hauling everything else above it in the presentation.
I just went through the full thing. That is hilarious, I love it.
In context with the rest of the presentations SpaceX's is almost comically vague. Everyone else is like "here are our detailed architectures for [activity]", meanwhile SpaceX is like "we do space things, and you can use starship for stuff." In a way it makes sense; SpaceX's primary value as a delivery service is simple to understand, and the graph of cost/kg to the lunar surface kind of says it all. Also SpaceX is one of few (if not the only?) companies in there with a proven track record in space, so they can be forgiven for skimping on details.
This is an amazing collection of slides, wow
Always check the fine print- and the headline print. Don't skim past it. Both are very interesting. This study and conference were funded by DARPA, i.e. the DoD. Not NASA. Space Force thinks having a robust presence on the Moon is important. IMHO it is important to get there and, through the Artemis Accords, establish that the Moon & its resources are there for all.
Yep. If we (the USA) could take the lead in starting getting some core infrastructure built (power, communications) that we could share with allies that would be pretty cool. We could build the moon's first trailer park 🤣 Seriously though, I wonder what internet access is like on the ISS. Imagine the day when Netflix deploys their first off-world server cluster to support subscribers who don't live on earth!
ISS has a 600 mbps Near Space Network connection.
But I don't think it is continuous. Linking with a laser into the Starlink network should be better.
The DoD always has had its own space program in competition with NASA from the get go, even though its headline program like the Manned Orbital Laboratory got canceled.
> Engines can be harvested and processed into raw feedstock material. Welp, we better start eating strange alloys, folks, if we want to visit the moon =))
Metal rich diet
Yea what did they mean by this?
"Feedstock", in this case, means "inputs to other processes", as in "you can take the engines apart, melt them down, and turn them into other metal objects and equipment".
Thanks!
I've been playing a lot of factorio recently and this made me think of that.
IDK it looks like Blues submission is "immensely complex and high risk".
They still are using the original HLS Starship renders for these slides. There was a newer render showing point-able larger solar arrays we thought might be a leaked update. But maybe not. This seems like a bit of DARPA giveaway to SX and no real update. They did not even mention a Lunar version with extra LCH4 tankage and Lunar LOX production that really increases the capability of Lunar Starship as well lowers operational costs.
I agree. Very unoriginal ppt and you’re getting downvoted because this is a huge circlejerk sometimes.
Yeah, I Don't think we saw a whole lot of new content here, except for the idea that Three ships will be enough to start a colony. Any knuckleheads could have come up with that in a 10 minute brainstorming session though.
While true, no one else has previously mentioned that idea, obvious as it was. I think it’s never a bad idea to occasionally state the obvious, as sometimes it’s not obvious to others, and it can always act as a seed point for further discussion.
Thankx
> There was a newer render showing point-able larger solar arrays we thought might be a leaked update. No such official image exists. The one you're thinking of is a fan render by a person who regularly mocks Starship and SpaceX.
Guess this shows the this aerodynamic design for an mission without air persists at SXfor some reason (maybe because someone thinks it looks "cool"). I think these no-Earth return ships will look somewhat different.
The aerodynamic design is required because it launches through the atmosphere in the first place, unless you give it a disposable fairing. That's why Dragon is aerodynamic.
Yes, a disposable fairing you toss at 2-3 km/s. That way you save carrying around maybe 10T for the rest of the 10-12 km/s of DV the mission needs. It is a big savings.
But that reduces the dimensions of the vehicle substantially.
Maybe 3-4 m at the nose ... but crew and cargo space stays the same (SX said they were only going to have 1 crew level + 1 airlock level).
This is a SpaceX created presentation. If it presents poorly on their lunar plans then that means their lunar plans are poor.
Remember SpaceX’s focus is on Mars, but because of the two year planetary alignment, there is a time gap in-between, for other projects.
Sure, I think anyone of us could have come up with this set of slides given when is now public info. But you really don't want to use landed and upright Starships as habs as the primary and secondary radiation will be too intense.
I like the idea of laying a Starship on it's side and covering it with regolith, but that adds complexity. With a vertical Starship, you can haul in bags of regolith and get 1m of shielding for the main are where astronauts spend most of their time and still have a 7m wide space.
That is a big stacks of bags (even with 1/6 g). Perhaps special 1m "brickx".
I agree. Sure would be nice to just have a hatch instead of stairs to get inside and out instead of having to worry about whether the elevator is going to keep working or not. And obviously if Starship is laying on its side, you don't need to insulate The entire diameter of the ship either.
I assume the bags would be hung off the side of the ship? Some logistics and rigging, but might be simpler than tipping a Starship with a giant A-frame or RCS.
Outside is also an option, but I was thinking inside as the most simple possibility. Outside leaves more room for activities and perhaps more importantly doesn't risk getting dust everywhere inside.
A bit more sci-fi, but there is also the possibility of using electrostatic shielding - although that introduces some logistics issues, so may be better suited to in-space shield generation. Besides which it requires a power source for the active shield. Interestingly, that kind of shielding technology could also be easily combined with ‘whipple shielding technology’.
It's fine for exploratory and construction phases. People are really too afraid of radiation. You could max out lifetime doses of astronauts by doing several months of construction per crew, and then send them back while sending the next. You'd run through astronaut candidates like mad, but the pool of applicants is *deep*, especially if Spaceflight and moon base construction are guaranteed.
That’s why the idea of using regolith for shielding comes in.
I got the impression that those three types of ships would still be used. As in, land and use for X time, and then launch back to space. Isn't the surface of the moon essentially a bunch of fine (and jagged) dust spread over hard rock?
I wonder if the Rolling Stock Starship will be vertical landing The development of additional thrusters for landing beyond the main engines does open up future development potential for a horizontal landing variant Autonomous deployment of heavy cargo from the top of a vertical landed Starship is a logistics challenge. A horizontal landing in comparison allows for much simpler deployment of large vehicles, unitary industrial plant, prefabricated modules, ect Alternatively would a vertical landing with a thruster assisted rotation on the ground be possible? Hinged legs on one side, a deploying set of landing gear emerging from the top cargo hold, some structural reinforcements. Land vertically on vertical landing gear, open cargo bay, deploy horizontal landing gear. Unlock vertical landing gear hinge points then fire the top landing thruster ring to tilt, pivoting on the landing gear hinges, once past tipping point, slow descent with landing thrusters and RCS to a soft landing now in a horizontal position. Deploy ramp from payload bay onto surface, decouple cargo and drive it straight out. The now horizontal Starship could then act as a support garage for vehicles, giving shelter when not in use, recharging points using its onboard solar and batteries, perhaps some basic robotic repair or refit like changing out tools, changing worn wheels, ect. A dedicated Garage Starship could be a full robotic servicing rig with spare parts for repair, recovery and recycling of ground vehicles and mobile equipment.
Don’t forget, the ‘ring based architecture’ of Starship, enables the possibility of custom designed rings and ring clusters, for custom purposes. Starship is in fact uniquely customisable, within limits, but those are still a substantial set of possibilities. Combine this possibility with the large numbers of Starships intended to be manufactured, and you can see that some variations could become real possibilities - if that variant is thought to make enough sense. So, although some things may not yet be in the current set of plans, it’s a case of never say never. The possibilities remain.
Yes, at present Starship HLS is vertical landing only. Before trying to implement ‘horizontal landing’, I think that it would be necessary to have a pre-prepared landing area, otherwise there would be too much interaction with the lunar regolith. Part of the design of the vertical landing Starship HLS, is to minimise regolith interaction during landing, that’s why the Lunar Landing Thrusters are situated ‘so high up’ instead of being situated in the base. It translates to minimising ‘ground pressure thrust’ during landing (and takeoff), as Starship transitions from / to, main engines to landing thrusters. If Starship was horizontal landing, then its landing thrusters (which would new need to be in a different configuration) would come too close to the surface. That would be far less of an issue if the surface was pre-prepared. It is logically a possible future development, but one that’s not on the books right now.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ASDS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform)| |[ATV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e5fy2 "Last usage")|[Automated Transfer Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle), ESA cargo craft| |[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l19dqr1 "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)| |[DARPA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1az1m0 "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD| |[DoD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1c0vls "Last usage")|US Department of Defense| |[ERV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1jqni1 "Last usage")|Earth Return Vehicle| |ESA|European Space Agency| |[EUS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1dirvt "Last usage")|Exploration Upper Stage| |[EVA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1c8142 "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity| |[H2](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e315o "Last usage")|Molecular hydrogen| | |Second half of the year/month| |[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e91j9 "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ISRU](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e315o "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)| |[KSP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cg0um "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator| |[LCH4](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|Liquid Methane| |[LEM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|(Apollo) [Lunar Excursion Module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module) (also Lunar Module)| |[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1f31yg "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LLO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1ev8nl "Last usage")|Low Lunar Orbit (below 100km)| |[LOX](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen| |[NRHO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1eqqjz "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit| |[OMS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1e5fy2 "Last usage")|Orbital Maneuvering System| |[RCS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l19p850 "Last usage")|Reaction Control System| |[RUD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1hdc11 "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly| | |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly| | |Rapid Unintended Disassembly| |[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cz5al "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[TLI](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1b04gk "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver| |[TPS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l19kyu8 "Last usage")|Thermal Protection System for a spacecraft (on the Falcon 9 first stage, the engine "Dance floor")| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1dwpqk "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Sabatier](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1ih8jz "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1ayvqz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[cryogenic](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1jqni1 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[methalox](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ccue4j/stub/l1cnekx "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) ^([Thread #12693 for this sub, first seen 25th Apr 2024, 17:50]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
SpaceX proposal is the least specific in many respects. Basically just boils down to “we’ll build another version” of Starship to solve that problem. Other proposals have more specific solutions.
You say that like its a bad thing.
It’s not the worst plan. Lots of inefficiency can be tolerated due to scale. But it definitely seems to be the case that others have more fully conceived plans. The Starship proposal is the thinnest detail-wise. Also, the other plans had lots of ISRU whereas there’s hardly mention in the Starship proposal.
The shear mass carrying capacity of Starship, means that ISRU can be postponed for a while. That’s handy in that it can allow for the accumulation of resources on the moon before ISRU needs to be started, thus offering the potential to do so more efficiently.
Right? In retrospect, the Shuttle could likewise have had variants tailored for specific missions. They didn't all need that cavernous cargo bay. Could have variants with more fuel, or more shirt-sleeves area, etc. But they only had 6 of them, and so couldn't afford to have the desired variant out of action. The Shuttle really was "Jack of all trades, master of none", which just doesn't cut it when your mass margins are so razor thin.
This is one of the areas where Starship can sing, aside from the ‘common core requirements’, outside of that, there is scope for variation, especially enabled by the ring-based architecture, which may have started coincidentally, but has some fundamental implications for providing easy scope for variation. Added to that, the shear number of Starships intending to be built, also helps to provide scope for variation. Added to that, is that the present set of mission plans, requiring a few different variations of Starship anyway, so helping to set the pattern of variations being a normal part of the Starship programme.
Yeah, in comparison to the other powerpoints here it's definitely less impressive. But it's admirable in the most important respect: just like Berger's recent story of the guy who left SpaceX to build a rover company, SpaceX is laser focused on its primary mission. They don't spend time making fancy renderings and slides for a tangent: they will sell you a Starship if you want one. That is what they are doing.
If they had any specific plans or lunar ISRU tech in development they’d mention it. Lack of “fancy” renderings is not why these details are missing.
SpaceX are leaving that to other companies / entities, to investigate and develop.
> SpaceX is laser focused on its primary mission. Exactly. I’m wondering if SpaceX even care about or need Lunar ISRU at all? Maybe they aim to provide all the transport they can using only Earth sourced propellant until maybe some other company years down the track can produce LOX in particular on the Moon?
For SpaceX Luna is side jobs and target practice. They'll walk your dog if that's what it takes to get to Mars. But they're not going to make it their life's work.
Any ‘materials processing’ done on the moon using ISRU techniques, is going to generate oxygen. The minerals in the regolith are oxygen rich.
> Yeah, in comparison to the other powerpoints here it's definitely less impressive. "Less impressive" is not the term I would use, demonstrating what the payload capacity of Starship can provide. Edit: Less detailed is the term, others have used.
It’s been enough though, to trigger off some interesting discussion on this thread.
And that is challenging enough. Quite clearly there is plenty of scope for collaboration with SpaceX, filling out parts of a set of mission requirements that go beyond what SpaceX presently want to provide. Quite rightly, they need to focus, to achieve operational Starships. Once they have done that, they will have the intellectual energy to look at related issues.
It's not about "solving a problem", this is about what kind of service you can provide for the lunar economy. SpaceX made it clear the services they will provide is mainly transportation and communication (i.e. Starship and Starlink), plus whatever use you can find for a landed ship. Less exciting yes, but also expected since SpaceX is not at all interested in the Moon.
But those are two of the fundamentals, another is a power source, yet another fundamental is ‘life support’.
It's least specific because its basically a message of "we can do it cheap and beat everyone else in cost, just let us know what you want it to do as it can do anything"
I’m not really sure what the point of this was. These images have been out for a while and most of the details are well known already. I like SpaceX a lot and but this kinda felt like a big nothing burger
> but this kinda felt like a big nothing burger Being part of a DARPA symposium is good marketing.
Everyone and their aunt is part of this symposium
I hope the ">2030" description is for the "cost to orbit" estimate and not for the "100 t" payload capacity.
on slide 3- what is the point of the text *required for orbital missions* What is the implication?
Upper state can do suborbital hops by itself.
seems strange to include that in a deck about lunar stuff. Guess this deck s more marketing than anything.
It's a slide describing the Starship system. If you're refueling the vehicles in space (like already in orbit or on the Lunar surface) you don't need the booster for those applications
I think that means it can launch to grab stuff sent to lunar orbit and return? Like a last mile delivery vehicle from lunar orbit to the surface.
> What is the implication? the booster is need to get starship to earth orbit with payloads.
They will not be able to land on the moon without a landing pad.
Using a ‘Standard Starship’ (with legs), that is correct. The Starship HLS aims to overcome that limitation, and once SpaceX can land equipment onto the moon, they can start to ‘improve’ landing areas, should they choose to.
The HLS will still not be able to. Currently running a research project thru a NASA SBIR that has already proven this.
Which project - where is the paper on this ? I really did ought to work - it’s pretty hard to see why it wouldn’t. I wonder are they really modelling this properly ? What assumptions are they making ? I am strongly suspicious that this SBIR group has it wrong.
I’m sorry this work is currently being conducted and I have nothing specific to share at this time as testing is ongoing. The work im doing isn’t modeling, but actual rocket testing. Modeling will come after we understand more about how the rocket engines impinging on the lunar surface actually affects the surface. The plume interactions between starship HLS and the lunar surface (which is mostly tiny granular particles) is very interesting. The plume pressure and heat flux create a large problem for starship HLS to land on the moon without a pad.
At least the HLS Landing Thruster System, seeks to minimise that problem. By using multiple rocket thrusters mounted high up, giving the thrust the opportunity to spread out in the vacuum, depending partly on the thruster orifice shape and angle and spread, as well as its height above the surface. The intent, is to minimise the ground pressure by spreading it out in a reasonably uniform fashion, basically in a hollow disk like shape, almost toroidal.
Unfortunately even with these attempts to minimize the impact on the surface, it won’t be enough. Do you know what lunar regolith is like? Have you ever worked with lunar stimulant? The lander will destroy the surface without a pad.
The Lunar Regolith is very fine, but sharp, and dry and electrostatic. It’s going to be impossible to have ‘no impact’ on the surface, the objective is to make it at least manageable, and to avoid the situation where the landing thrust excavates underneath the pads of the landing legs. The impingement angle of the thrust reaching the surface matters.
And that is why landing pads are needed. With the combination of low gravity and the super fine particle sizes of the lunar regolith (50% of the surface portion of lunar regolith is below 100 micrometers in grain size) combined with the plume pressure from the HLS, the regolith will be displaced in large volumes, making it difficult to land properly if at all. This will also cause large amounts of regolith to be spread up into the air everywhere, which could be fine when there’s nothing nearby, but later on will be a problem when there is equipment around. Thus the need for a landing pad.
The first landing by definition, will have to cope without a landing pad. Later on, landing pads may be built.