man I am so glad I ofund this channel. Calm, on point talking. It's pure content and it's great. Hope you having a great time and don't feel overwhelmed. Take your time. This is just really neat stuff.
@@EagerSpace hahaha, no worries. I just noticed that a lot of videos that don't get much attention cause of their thumbnail are of higher quality information wise than other and I was happy that this observation was once again confirmed. Do well I would have preferred a purple question mark thou ;p
@@kurknielsenIt’s orbital refueling, which is necessary for starship to be a big success, will allow us to put very heavy payloads into far off orbits. This allows for a massive range of exploration.
James Burke used to host a series called "the day the universe changed" and it was all about how the effect of changes are not readily apparent at the time. I'm not even trying to predict what Starship will do when it shows up.
SpaceX hasn't updated Falcon Heavy's max payload to LEO for years. Block 5 has been tweaked over the years and some analysts say FH is quite a bit more now, based on the Viasat launch direct to GEO.
Pretty much confirmed by Elon. The spacex all-hands video today Elon mentioned how the mass-to-orbit slide was incorrect and that besides falcon 1 each supported more payload.
The moment you put shuttle up and removed it for payload capacity, I wondered how many people would complain about leaving "Buran" there because they don't know that Energia was meant to carry multiple payloads, not just a shuttle. There are fewer comments than I expected.. but I think I thought this channel was bigger than it is. I'm curious if any will appear in the future. :3
10:50 As a KSP player, it takes 3,500 m/s of DV to orbit the starting Earth like planet (give or take 200 based on ship design and piloting ability). It only takes 3,000 MAX to do a direct transfer to any destination in the stock system, WITHOUT GRAVITY ASSISTS. When you add your capture burn numbers (with some gravity assists to help if you want) you get around the same number to get into orbit. This can scale with the size of the system you’re in in any scenario, so these guys really were right.
Watch this video... th-cam.com/video/-vVagY3O2Rc/w-d-xo.html Then you can look up the approximate delta-v to get from LEO to other destinations - see "delta v map of the solar system" but note that these are just approximations. Then I have a model for starship in excel that can calculate delta v using the rocket equation and I play around with propellant amounts to find out how much it will take to get enough delta v to go from LEO to GEO or LEO to TLI. I didn't actually calculate TLI in this case. Note that this depends on starship mass numbers that aren't very accurate so it's only a ballpark estimate, but it's pretty close.
@@kennethferland5579 That's because what he calculated in the video is only the fuel needed to go to TLI, the Artemis HLS will need to carry the fuel to get into lunar orbit, land on the moon, take off from the moon and return to lunar orbit, that requires completely filling the starship instead of just a partial refill
More research on the biological effects of intermediate gravity need to be done. We currently have long-duration access to 1G and 0G, but nothing between. The Moon will get you 1/6g, and I'm sure artemis will research this (likely with starship's help), but nothing else. Starship could be used to build a rotating space station (like 2001) with this goal.
Don't even need a rotating station or moon base for this. It's an absolute travesty that no small centrifuge for rats/mice/whatever has been sent to the ISS when you look at some of the stupid stuff they send up like baking in space...
Why not have a beefy kick stage craft that just stays in orbit? Starship launches to leo with a 50t payload and 100t of fuel, docks with the kick stage to transfer payload and fuel, the kick stage takes it geo, then finally returns to leo for the next run. Also, would it be economical to use electric propulsion to move payloads to leo?
Impeccable content, as always. I’ve been in aviation my entire adult life and always thought I was pretty well versed in “space stuff,” but boy was I wrong 😂
It’s not about just cost it’s about removing the mass constraint so satellites can be much larger and cheaper including probes and space stations and interplanetary missions.
For one of my classes biosignatures and life detection we had to design a life detection mission. My team was engineering and so since this was a future mission i said we put a falcon 9 upper inside of starship, a briz M stage on top of that, and then finally our payload. I just wanted to give the instrument team enough mass budget to allow me to put a 1km deep sampling drill onboard. through e
I expect to see what you lay out here - Impulse and especially K2 will make Starship-optimized transfer stages. Impulse doesn't need to wait to accumulate 7 sats to GEO. Starship is meant to be cheap enough to launch even if it has an F9-sized payload. OK, that may take a while but something less than full load will be economical at some point. I'm sorry to see you're having to deal with some people who believe everything negative they see about Starship and discount anything positive. Ah, well, the realities of commenting on Starship. Any chance of exploring how a Starship can be used for a Mars Sample Return mission? NASA planned to launch a quite small rocket from the surface to Mars orbit. (LMO?) Starship could possibly carry that and the orbital return vehicle in one ship. Could the retrieval rover be carried on the same ship? That seems excessive. Anyway, NASA was counting on landing two separate craft on Mars close to each other, right? One with the rover and one with the small rocket. (I imagine that'd be a solid.) So landing two Starships close to each other isn't a reach.
I suspect that both impulse and K2 will be significant problems for the satellite bus companies. There's lots of fat to trim there because the old space companies are charging ridiculous prices. I think Mars sample return is a hot mess right now. NASA does not have a credible plan and it looks worse than James Webb in terms of cost. I haven't really thought about starship in that context. NASA considers the current set of samples to be the crown jewels because they spend so much getting them and they aren't going to want to risk them on a crazy plan. There's will also be a lot of lobbying by old space as there's a ton of money there. The simplest thing for starship would be to just use it to deliver a huge spacecraft -or more than one - to Mars. But it depends on how the timing comes out...
Not even accounting for the larger telescopes being planned to take advantage of the 9-meter diameter. Now, thats going to take a lot nore planning, and this video seemed to focus what could be done within the timeline of Starship actually being available, bit fun stuff
Very nice segment. Love the counterpoint at the end by Robert Heinlein ("you are halfway to anywhere."). Now I wonder about what kind of time period it would take to refuel a Starship with four "Starship tankers?" I thought the turnaround time for a Falcon 9 first stage booster was about 3 weeks now? Would there possibly be just four Starship tankers dedicated to launching consecutively after each other, to carry out timely refueling operations? I am assuming there would be a concern about boiloff of the Methane propellant if refueling operations took an inordinate amount of time (maybe not as big of a concern like with hydrogen?)?
I did a video looking at a bit of the math and physics of depots. I didn't think it's that bad: th-cam.com/video/fjWCEFioT_Y/w-d-xo.html The big bottleneck for falcon 9 is the drone ships right now, and given that they have a lot more boosters than ships I don't think there's much reason to go faster on boosters. The big limit on tankers will be orbital dynamics - you need to wait until the earth spins around enough to be able to land at the launch site. I think that's either 12 or 24 hours.
It's definitely less of a concern than Hydrogen, that thing is an escape artist. And I suspect that's why they have a separate tanker variant. That probably carries extra insulation, and active cooling systems, but you don't want to carry that on the refueling launches, or carry it to the Moon (you might have to carry it to Mars though). So the longer term storage of on orbit would be in a more suitable place, the tanker, and then Lunar Starship refuels from that in 1 go, and burns for the Moon very shortly afterwards.
I used to get to hang out with Jerry (a little bit) and his son (Alex I think) at COMDEX and CES, and his son again at a bunch of CAD related events. Boy what a hoot that was! By that point Jerry was basically just interested in video games, even when there was much more fascinating stuff going on in the booths. Wish I had asked him about the Sci-Fi stuff. 😢
You missed something: Using Starship as its own kickstage can be a fully reusable option, and largely solve the high empty mass issue. A minimalist Starship design with just tanks, engines, and jettisonable fairings could get 150 tons of payload to LEO with plenty of extra fuel to spare. From there, just one or two tankers could likely get such a Starship up to GEO with 150 tons of payload. Returning the ship to LEO is done with aerobraking. Distinct from full reentry, aerobraking does not require heat shielding, with the consequence of requiring many orbital periods to decay the orbital velocity back down to LEO velocity. From there, reuse of the minimalist Starship would require both additional refueling and a payload transfer, which would be another complicated technology to implement, but has prior precedent with the Space Shuttle. Such minimalist Starships could be stationed both in LEO and low Mars orbit to act as space optimized ships for interplanetary journeys, while fully kitted Starships optimized separately for Earth, Moon, and Mars descent could be stationed in low orbit at each destination respectively. Of course, the natural question is if the fuel efficiency gained outweighs the additional mission and hardware complexity of additional rendezvous, fuel transfers, and payload transfers. I don’t know. I would guess, in the long run, that it’s a good idea.
@@J7Handle At that point might as well just build an aluminium-lithium "Starship" for ultimate efficiency, rather than steel which is heavier for interplanetary ferry.
@@TCBYEAHCUZ true, though I imagine the number of orbital periods needed to complete aerobraking is still important, and steel’s higher heat resistance could allow for fewer, deeper aerobraking passes. On the flip side, more efficiency could be gained with hydrolox propellant or even something crazier, like nuclear engines, high thrust ion engines, or maybe more extreme chemical propellants (the least reasonable option, there’s a hundred good reasons not to use F2, FOOF, ClF3, or O3).
@@J7Handle Interplanetary ferry should be nuclear powered obligatory, at least that's what I predict will become as the forcing function for cheaper trips increase, and economies of scale will direct it that way. There's a neat little game called Delta V: Rings of Saturn that really goes into detail of different starship propulsion and the associated delta V.
@@TCBYEAHCUZ Yes, but I do think that economies of scale for interplanetary missions won't come into play for decades to come. Also, splashing cold water on everything we've been talking about, while I don't want to hate on Elon for dreaming big, I don't see Mars colonization as economically sound. There are so many untapped resources on Earth that are far more accessible than anything on Mars, even if a Mars colony could become self sufficient, the return on investment would be far faster if the resources spent on building the colony were simply spent building a new settlement or two on Earth. Imo, the only value of the other planets is for scientific research and extremely distant future colonization when resources on Earth are depleted. My main interest is in asteroid mining, because the delta-v necessary to rendezvous with some asteroids is barely more than the delta-v necessary for GTO, and return trips from asteroids are even easier because almost all the delta-v can come from aerobraking/re-entry. Thus, asteroid mining has the potential to turn a better profit than mining on Earth, for some resources at least. I am also highly interested in Saturn's moon, Titan, due to its slight potential for exotic forms of life, and all of the ice moons with potential for life in subsurface oceans. So I still see value in Starship for all of those purposes, just not Mars.
Great video. I would like to add point to point delivery on earth to the list of starship functions since it already has a DOD contract to do just that down the line.
Thanks. SpaceX does talk about point-to-point, but I'm skeptical. The real problem with the DoD contract is what do you do with the starship once you get it there? If DoD is willing to pay money to expend one on every flight, I can see that, but that seems expensive even for DoD. Hopping them back seems possible until you realize exactly how much propellant you need to wherever you landed the thing.
Also the issues with flying an ICBM into contested airspace that has such a bright IR signature and easily predictable trajectory that it could be shot down by any AA system from the last half century so flying supplies into a true hot zone is a no go. And what could you possibly need to send to the rear lines in such a small time frame that would justify expending a starship? I can't think of a single thing that needs more urgency than the 12H or so to get a C-17 there.
I'm curious what others think these third party kick stage companies can bring to the table that just putting a Falcon 9 second stage into the cargo bay of a Starship lacks. F9-2nd has hundreds of demonstrated vacuum starts, and vacuum relights, demonstrated ability to build 2 per week, mass production cost savings and enormous Delta V. Obviously it would be an interim solution until full reusability and refilling are sorted, so developing a bespoke dedicated kick stage for what will be a limited production run seems like it must entail a very high unit price, where the F9-2nd design and tooling is probably fully amortised now.
@@External2737 I've had another thought since I posted that comment. An F9 second stage fitted with a sea level Merlin would be much cheaper and take up about 2m less room in the cargo bay, giving more room for payload. It would have a lower ISP but that really doesn't matter as the stage has vastly more than almost any mission could require. You could of course fit a VacRap for any interplanetary missions that need the extra DeltaV. And another thought since this was posted. SX is now going to deorbit the ISS, and an F9 second fitted with a sea level engine, with some modification to reduce thrust, could be just the ticket. It would be hilarious if SX could do that for say 20 million dollars after being paid 800 million for the job.
Yes, theoretically. I'd have to do the math to see what values you actually get. Though if you don't mind the wait you might do better with a single Helios with a really big fuel tank as that would be lighter.
Finally, someone saying what I've been saying. Engineering development cost is proportional to the power of the number of interlocking specs.. remove 2 of them (size and weight) and the cost will plummet.
Question. Do we know if New Glann 45 tons reusable to LEO is an actual capability compared to s you say falcon heavy needing a new stage and structure? It’s my understanding that it is actually set up to carry the full 45 to Leo. Just curious if you have any info or what your thoughts are in general on new Glenn are.
I wouldn't trust any New Glenn reusable numbers any more than I trust the current Starship numbers. I *do* expect that they are design to lift whatever their design payload is. For SpaceX the higher numbers are fairly meaningless because they don't have any customers who want to do that, but Orbital Reef could easily be a very heavy LEO payload.
@@EagerSpace Your bias is really showing. New Glenn has been a stable design throughout and is about to come to market, their is absolutly no reason at all to doubt it's claimed payload numbers. Meanwhile Starship has been getting violently redesigned ever year and Musk is a serial exagerator, we now know the present design is hopelessly short of the goal and pure hopium is being used to imagine a 200% increse in payload just to get back to the original claim.
@@kennethferland5579 I'm going to reply to this comment but not your others because it doesn't seem like you are interested in a conversation. Hint: Accusing somebody of bias is not an argument that something is the way you think it is. I don't trust that any company can meet their payload goals until they are actually flying. This is *especially* true if they are doing something rare, like landing the first stage. It could be that they need more margins to get through reentry or to land than they have calculated. It may be that their vehicle is heavier than they expected. It may be that the reusable versions of the BE-4 don't hit their thrust targets. It could be 100 other things.
SpaceX's prime target is always Mars, and that's what Starship is built for. But if it ends up being fully reusable, people will find a use for it. It could, for example, launch a space station the size of ISS in 4 (ish) launches, and DoD will love to be able to launch very big satellites.
@@EagerSpace Have you seen the “Criticizing Starship” series by the Pressure Fed Astronaut? One of the main arguments is that Starship has no real market and has no real customers. Sure, there’s Mars… but that costs money, and won’t actually make any money, unless I’m mistaken? I desperately want to see the Pressure Fed Astronaut be proven wrong, but I can’t find fault with his logic. I think a video on what revenue streams could come from Starship would be really interesting. Or, maybe Starship isn’t meant to generate revenue, but rather is a philanthropic move by Elon…?
I don't watch other space videos because I don't want to be derivative in what I choose to talk about. I haven't tried to do any revenue analysis because the only real answer right now is "nobody knows", and anybody who claims to know is simply wrong. There has never been this kind of vehicle commercially available and that leaves us with a ton of unknowns. We also don't know how successful starship is going to be or how SpaceX plans on marketing it. Does it lift payloads at Falcon 9 prices, or is it cheaper? If so, how much cheaper? Make different assumptions there and you will get different answers. Questions I don't know the answer to: 1) How much DoD will use Starship? They would love to put huge satellites and constellations in space, but it's going to depend on price and budget. 2) Is there a market travel to the moon? Lots of people say there will be, I don't see it 3) What are NASA's longer-term moon plans and what will funding look like. HLS piggybacks on SLS because congress loves SLS , but if Starship has an architecture without SLS, what does congress do? 4) When will ISS retire and what will happen in commercial space stations? I assert that *nobody* has a clue about what will happen there. I'm sure there are more; those are just off the top of my head.
@EagerSpace its easy to miss as there aren't any big public announcements about it. Just a render for a planned life 3.0 that may or may not pan out. They still need to prove out life 1.0 before they get anywhere near something that big. Either way, i can see starship having a big edge in commercial space station launch. If you can put up something with a volume 1x 2x or even 5x the volume of iss in one affordable launch, that is a huge deal.
9:40 We can use refueling to turn starship into its own kickstage What if we really turn starship into its own kickstage? How much DeltaV "starship couple" have if 2 fully fueled starships dock on LEO and one of the ships start to tow another until it have just enough fuel to return back to earth and land, and second starship continue its journey with full tanks? Or because vac. raptors cant gimble, both starships use their engines and at some point one of the ship transfer remaining fuel and fly home, same result Imagine sending regular starships on mars with regular payload and sending "starship express" for humans with additional (starship-kickstage) to decrease travel time Or even 2 additional starships like delta heavy on LEO It would be interesting to know your calculations)))))))))
I was thinking along the same lines. Also since launch is so expensive, companies have to put a lot aof ressource into reliability since you might not get a second chance. With cheaper launches it start being worth launching cheaper less reliable satelites since you'll be able to launch more replacements.
We’re getting pretty close to this reality. I hope you get the chance to watch one of our flights in person - hit me up if you find yourself down here!
Thanks. I got to see the second to last shuttle flight with my daughter, and I caught a random atlas V when on a bike trip near Vandenberg, but I do want to add to that at some point
Starship is a major step forward in space exploration. The next step is the construction of larger ships in space. Ships that never enter any atmosphere and stay in space. Low (earth) orbit is the closest they get to a planet/moon and another ship (like starship) will ferry personnel and good from and to the planet. This allows the spaceship to be 100% optimised for space travel and the ferryship (yea I just made that a word) is 100% optimised for the best method of launching and landing on the planet/moon.
There are a number of proposals along these lines. The question is "what are you optimizing for?" Those optimized ships are going to be expensive to design and quite expensive to construct, with either astronaut labor or some developed alternative. One reason SpaceX has been successful is that they have regularly accepted sub-optimal designs if they believe the overall solution will be cheaper and quicker. NASA makes lots of space probes that are extremely optimized. They also tend to cost several billion dollars each.
I think both Starship-like vehicles and spacecraft built in space for space have their use, and will coexist into the future. The reality is that aerobraking provides pretty massive delta-v benefits. An architecture for Mars that doesn't include aerobraking will tend to perform worse overall. For planets and moons without an atmosphere, like the moon and Mercury, spacecraft built in space for space can come out on top. But if you are returning to Earth, then it becomes more fuzzy again.
If Starship would be operational and fully working. They could probes to every major celestial body in our solar system in no time. Imagine sending one to every one of them in span of 10 years
But only if we have money to spend on the probes. They can be much more expensive than normal satellites, since they have to deal with worse radiation. Simply trying to make it cheaper because it can be heavier might not work well for orbiter or lander probes because that'll mean that they'll need to have more delta-v in order to slow down into orbit or (safely) onto a planetary surface. Also, the further out we go, the less and less a small probe can meaningfully accomplish.
It depends a lot on the orbit of the satellite. Shuttle managed to "save" a few satellites when their kick stages didn't work when it was launching commercial satellites before challenger. It did do 4 servicing missions on Hubble which turned out to be very useful. If it's cheap enough to launch and it can carry the satellite down, I can see starship doing those missions. I'm not sure I see many of those opportunities - I think the satellites in LEO will be dominated by constellation and if one of those goes bad you just launch another. But... we don't know what's going to happen with big or expensive satellites, so maybe.
Recovery depends on how fragile your satellite is, I would imagine the flip maneuver is a bit more shaky than an airplane style landing. Repair I see no reason not to. Just equip it with the same tools the shuttle carried, like the robotic arm and docking adapters. It can easily carry as much.
Imagine a 150 ton GEO satellite. Megawatts of power, a giant antenna array, higher ping than Starlink, but it might have some benefits. One huge market that might exist is in power transmission. If your satellite could work in Medium Earth Orbit, and it has a rectenna/antenna system you could transmit power over intercontinental distances. I presume it might have a higher transmission capacity compared to space solar power on a per weight basis, so it might allow transmission of power from the EU to US or something. That would allow a massive amount of power to traded.
SHLV launch capabilities expand beyond "Heavy but cheaper designs" - To the possibility of building the Kalpana-type space habitat at Equatorial Low Earth Orbit.
It opens up new possibilities but mostly for things which aren't really commercial except for checking how fast we can Kessler Syndrome ourselves :) Sample return from Mars, permanent base on Moon, new ISS, all sorts of heavy orbiters/landers to moons of Jupiter and Saturn, with the caveat that a non reusable vacuum optimized second stage is made for interplanetary missions which would be refueled in orbit by reusable tankers.
Couldn't Starship take on more than 4 tankers of fuel and perform the geo in a reusable mode? If it used aerobraking it may not need that much more fuel!
Don't know. Maybe. Essential you need enough fuel to take your giant circular orbit and convert it into an elliptical one that interests the atmosphere, then you need to survive the higher reentry speed.
Consider the kinetic energy of Starship’s LEO payload: around 1kTon equivalent explosive yield. If harnessed, it would make quite the kinetic energy weapon.
As a rough rule of thumb, you can take a rockets' chemical potential energy on the launch pad and divide by 10 to get the energy it can impart into a kinetic impactor. For Starship there's a bit of extra penalty for reuse, but ~10% efficiency is still better than you probably expected from something as inefficient as a chemical orbital rocket.
I assume fueling the Helios kickstages, up to 7 of them, might be an issue, but I am sure SpaceX could upgrade their towers to support them if they mean to use them often.
I think return from GEO orbit is totally possible, as it would not even be as hard as returning from mars or moon, and SpaceX would not mind some free testing from higher energy orbits as well. Also, I don't think GEO is good orbit in general. There is not much appealing with that orbit in a world of cheap and massive access to LEO. Military wants their satellites there because having Starlink style coverage used to be basically impossible. Vast majority of sats in GEO are now obsolete thanks to Starlink or future Starshield version of Starlink. The only worthwhile projects in GEO and various megastructures, with capital M. Space elevators, orbital rings, orbital slings, constructs that would be thousands or millions times bigger than any current earthly constructs, so unlikely to be done by Starship.
Indeed, an operational starship is akin to establishing a beachhead in the ongoing battle against gravity. It symbolizes our potential to liberate ourselves from the confines of Mother Earth and sever the umbilical cord that has bound us to our planetary cradle. This monumental achievement paves the way for us to venture into the cosmos, unshackled and free.
this, and like a comment on ift3 spacex video, made me realise, in ceirtain situations, having like a third stage in starship could help with medium-ish sized payloads for distant destinations
Another question that someone here may know or certainly the creator must know I would imagine is he you are mentioning for reals to get to the moon where the current estimate is 12 refuels for the HLS, though that includes going to enter HO, then going to low lunar orbit, then landing, then going back to low lunar orbit, and then back to NRO. I wonder what the Delta savings would be to just go straight into low lunar orbit and land. It would need more than four refuels because it would still have to get into low lunar or land, but it wouldn’t have to do the NRO part which I think it’s kind of a dumb thing about Artemis.
I do need it explained to me how something that can haul 150 tons at a time needs 12 trips to haul 1200 tons. The reason for all the refueling is simply mass ambitions. The current moon ambitions require a lot of mass be transported there, that is going to need fuel one way or another.
I don't trust any of the refueling counts I've seen - until SpaceX decides what starship is and what HLS starship is I think it's not useful to speculate. My *guess* is it's lower than 12 but that's just a guess. As for your question, I don't think there's any meaningful difference in the landing scenario cost *as long as* you go into landing at the appropriate point in the NRHO orbit.
@@EagerSpace I was going off the 12 flights to refuel based off of this smarter, everyday video, which is really great. I would be very interested in your opinion of it, and how it talks about whether Artemis is the right plan, but more importantly, the need for engineers to speak up and for people to ask questions, and at the time it seemed that none of them could answer how many rockets they were going to need for refueling. He came up with a pretty high number and a week or two after NASA came forward with the statement that said it would take 15 total launches, so that’s where I got that number from but be interested in your opinions of that video if you care to share also I know I’m asking a lot of questions. It’s totally cool if you don’t respond to all of them, of course, but I’ve heard questions help the alogarithm to recommend your videos to more people. th-cam.com/video/OoJsPvmFixU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=M-Vl5Xmf4ZBKy1lU.
there's a slide in the NASA pdf "How: NHRO - The Artemis Orbit" that has some translation costs to lunar orbits. LLO to the surface costs 2050 m/s. Equatorial LLO insertion is cheapest at 900 m/s, while direct polar insertion costs 1350 m/s, both taking four days. NRHO injection is 450 m/s in five days or 115 m/s in 120 days. Dropping from NRHO to LLO is 750 m/s. They want to access the South pole so direct to polar LLO then the surface is 1350+2050, so 3400 m/s. Going to NRHO first is 450+750+2050, or 3250 m/s plus an extra day. Going directly to a specific polar LLO costs slightly more delta-v and will impose launch windows, while NRHO can be reached at any time, and it's cheap to change the longitude at such a high aposelene. NASA wants a 100 day loiter time, so cryogenically fuelled vehicles will suffer more boil-off in the lower orbit and most LLO orbits have a high maintenance cost due to the uneven lunar gravity. Unmanned missions can have an even greater saving by taking the 120 day path to NRHO
The problem of buran and energia was not in finding a purpose, but in funding for it At a time, ussr was starting to crumble bc of other wrong economical decisions (you cant have a bad plan-economics, you can have only a bad plan) a bad plans everywhere was the case At the time of development soviets were afraid of shuttle having a potential to become orbital nuke-bomber with quick reflight capability, so they had to build something similar At the time, when it was developed it was clear that payloads for shuttle better sent with regular rockets, and crumbling soviet economy seen it as useless had to shut down funding If ussr had enough money to continue fly energia, possibly it might have been used to send people to moon, and/or build huge space stations or satellites may be higher than at low earth orbit…
Starship is another hyperloop when you look at the realities of a Mars colony , i doubt they can even pull off the moon lander as no awkward questions have been answered at all .
A Mars colony is obviously very hard and a tremendous amount of work. Lots of things to figure out. I'm not sure why HLS is considered to be so hard. NASA clearly believed that SpaceX's approach was practical when they gave them the contract.
@@EagerSpace "I'm not sure why HLS is considered to be so hard." 1) SpaceX never flew anything outside of earth orbit / outside of GPS 2) they have to land something on a terrain that is not flat concrete - with a huge rocket that has a high point for center of mass. If they mess up the landing or and a leg breaks, then it could simply tip over 3) the full flight to the moon takes ~300-500 successfull engine starts/shut offs for all the refuling, manouvering, docking etc. This is just a completely ridicoulus amount and something will go wrong 4) at the moment they can't even fly it straight in suorbital flight or open/close their garage door in Starship Everything has to be questioned at this point. They had a great success in the past, that does not automatically translates to any project at the moment or in the future. btw. Musk stated in an Email to his staff November 2022 "If starship does not fly every 2nd week ... 'in 2023' ... then we might face bankrupcty"
@@benjaminmeusburger4254 Regarding point 3: A significant number of engine starts occur on the ground, where the launch can be aborted and attempted at a later date. Starship also has engine-out tolerance; maybe 3 on the booster and 1 on the upper stage. So engine failure doesn't automatically mean mission failure. And one of the advantages of distributed launch is that one mission failure doesn't doom the entire project (see Starlink for example). The only engine starts/stops that truly matter are those performed by HLS itself, and even then there are plenty of abort scenarios provided the failure isn't catastrophic. I'd also note that Falcon 9 has done ~4000 successful engine starts/stops since the last failure - which didn't result in mission failure due to engine-out tolerance.
@@EagerSpace You mean the deputy director which awarded SpaceX a contract in violation of all standards of fair contracting and then went to work for them? Meanwhile the current NASA directors are openly questioning their ability to deliver.
If we have the audacity to name a rocket 'Starship' I recon we should use it to start exploring distant body resource extraction and orbital manufacturing
What a world we live in where 100 tons is described as "even as little as". I'd like to know what other current or upcoming rockets can do "even as little as" 100 tons.
Why do you use the word "other"? The entirety of my point is that Starship is not capable of 100 tons, either. A 100 ton to LEO Starship is a paper rocket at this point.
@@mr.g937 I used the word "other" to highlight the absurdity of implying that 100 tons is a 'little' amount in the world of rockets. I wasn't claiming that Starship can do 100 tons, but rather taking issue with you implying that even if could, it would still be very unimpressive. Though as an aside Starship in expendable configuration is likely over 150 tons even at the current performance level. And while it hasn't flown in that configuration, it's not an entirely paper rocket either. SpaceX have built two ships in expendable configuration: 26 and 27. Even just re-programming a regular Starship to use all it's fuel rather than reserving some for landing would probably get you to 100 tons or so.
Same reason he excluded Falcon Heavy. He said at the beginning he was using 100t as the standard for super heavy lift, which leaves FH and Vulcan Centaur in the heavy category. If you mean why didn't he include it on the graph - I can only guess it was for expediency and clarity. Vulcan Centaur at its maximum capacity can put about the same payload directly to GEO as FH, so showing just FH is all that's needed on the graph. Here I'm comparing VC to a FH with 2 boosters recovered. An expendable FH can launch much more than a VC.
you are so based, keep up the good work! I would love some content about rotating detonation engines, if you feel that could make an interesting video.
Thanks. And I get to tell my daughter tonight that somebody said I was "based". I've looked a bit at rotary detonation engines and it's on my list, but I'm not sure I trust the information that I've come across and I'm not clear how to relate it to traditional engines. I'm generally skeptical about topics like this as some of the claims look unrealistic but so far I can't find the edge that is reality.
I’ve seen on Wikipedia list of heaviest payload actually lifted into space and I believe they said that starship was 225 tons. Do we know starship is only 130 tons. Since you’re quoting 150 payload for starship, I assume you were also quoting that as expendable? It seems to me it’s hard to know what it can actually do as Elon can be an unreliable narrator at times and testing is still ongoing and we don’t have a production craft as of yet
Starship is supposed to do 150t to LEO reusable, but you're right; we don't really know what the actual numbers will be. Keep in mind though that it's more limited by payload volume than mass (we'll see how much that changes once the ship is stretched), so it definitely can't actually launch 150t of anything except maybe propellant.
@@JonathanSchrock so that’s kind of my point I’ve heard it was always gonna be 100 tons reusable but then lately they’ve been saying 150 ton reusable so I’m not sure exactly where that’s gonna line up. They’ve also recently said that stretch will be able to do 200 tons reusable and 400,000 expendable, but that doesn’t seem right to me. And like I say, whether you love him or you hate him, you do have to admit that it’s hard to take things that Elon says seriously until proven out. he does often come through with what he promises but a lot of times it’s not quite what he stated. For example, the cyber truck was gonna have 450 miles range and it has about 300 and then real world about 250.
@@mcamp9445 You assume, and it's a flawed assumption that it's Elon calculating these numbers. No one knows what the final numbers are. Everyone is projecting. Projecting on the abilities of things not yet built has to be taken with a grain of salt.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoomit's not impossibly complicated to calculate the dry mass + payload numbers for yourself. We know at what altitude and velocity the staging event occurs, we know how much propellant Starship can hold, and we know the efficiency of the engines. At that altitude, drag is no longer a big factor. It's not going to get you exact numbers, but you can ballpark it from there. the exact payload mass obviously depends on the dry mass. But this is enough information to calculate the combined mass with reasonable accuracy
I had to pick a payload to be able to talk about it, and I chose 150 reusable as a commonly quoted number. I agree that there aren't any good numbers out there and spacex hasn't decided what the final version of starship is going to be. At one point I had some narration in there where I said that but for some reason I deleted it.
I don't think the actual launch market is listed here. Geopolitically the world hasn't been this unstable in at least 40 years. Russia and China are rapidly modernizing their nuclear armament. The only viable response to that is an even stronger defense posture. The nuclear triad is getting long in the tooth. American ICBMs are aged out, the bomber fleet could be easily intercepted by modern surface-to-air missiles systems and the survivability of American nuclear subs is questionable. This leaves nuclear deterrence from space as one of the few viable options for a continued MAD strategy. Very few starship launches would be required to transport a large number of nuclear warheads plus required re-entry propulsion stages into orbit should the need arise. While it may be nice to think that Starship is the brainchild of a slightly "unusual" rich guy, one should not rule out the possibility that the rich guy had a few talks with gentlemen from the US government that went like this "Mr. Musk. We all know your love for rocketry. What would you think about building a rocket with the following specs.... for manned Mars missions? I am sure you can imagine that the US government can find some other uses for such a vehicle as well, should you be able to deliver. In return the government will fund your enterprise with a non-trivial amount of money to assure that you have the best chances of success.".
For nuclear deterrence you want the ability to put a lot of warheads on targets in one country at once. Orbital warheads don't give you that. A single satellite in my LEO only passes over a site twice a day, so a constellation is very diffuse, and you would need a lot of cross range on your reentry vehicles - much more than MIRV - to get any useful concentration.
@@EagerSpace This is MAD. All it has to do is to assure that the 1st strike country pays the ultimate price. Whether that happens an hour later or a day later doesn't matter. After it's all done there are only glowing holes in the ground and the population starts dying of radiation sickness and starvation either way. Why do you think they need 100 tons to LEO? Because these vehicles will need a lot of deltaV. It's not possible with small launch vehicles. It is perfectly possible with starship.
The only point of putting nukes in space is for first strike capability. You could argue they also fit in as a 4th wing to the long standing triad but the triad is still as strong as ever and it’s not worth the international meltdown.
Due to square-cube law, boil-off is less of an issue with larger vehicles. A regular starship could loiter in LEO for quite awhile before needing to get refueled again.
So essentially Starship is a vehicle designed to put 10 tons or so of payload to GTO and rtls in a single launch. So pretty much cornering the market on any geostationary comsat. And the US tax payer is paying for its development as a lunar lander?
In the future, Starship might be able to do GTO flights; the current version cannot. NASA is paying a relatively small amount of the HLS lander - and for Blue Origin's lander as well. In neither case will they pay what it costs to do the development work.
Space Force: "So how much could Starship take to GEO?" Elon: "Well, if we refuel it we could get about 150 tons to GEO" Space Force: "Rods..." Elon: '"Excuse me?" Space Force: "Nothing, please continue, though I think we could find some use for it.."
I strongly disagree with your decision to remove the shuttle when considering super heavy lift rockets. One of the most salient criticisms I've heard about Starship is that there are not ging to be super heavy payloads for it outside of Starlink. The STS had the same problem, inventing the capability didn't mean that customers started turning up, even though launch costs were already a minor part of the cost of a satellite.
STS did not have the problem that it had a payload capacity that was too big for what it needed to do. Its payload was medium lift like Falcon 9, edging barely into heavy lift when they came up with the super light external tank.
SpaceX is always bragging about their low cost but they can’t afford to lose a stage preferring to wait to refuel… put a disposable second stage on this super booster and you double the capacity… better to lose 13 Raptors than 33… ( 13 Raptors second stage)
Well obviously reusability is why it's so cheap. The cost of the hardware itself doesn't matter as much when you can launch it 100 times. That's kinda the whole point. Even though you could launch more on a single rocket, the cost per kg is still way higher if it's disposable.
What if the heat shield was removable, so a much lighter "naked starship" could fly out to GEO, and then return back to LEO and put the shield back on? Or use a normal kick stage but it could return itself to LEO and tuck back into Starship? That seems to give you a fully-reusable GEO configuration, without the inefficiency of hauling all those tiles and structure out and back. Bonus, no spent kick stages cluttering up the orbits.
Correct Answer per recent confession (though it should have been obvious long before that due to the lack of payload simulators on all the 'tests') launch only ~40 tons to LEO. Aka less then New Gleen will do. The rocket looks to be a development disaser as the stage mass has balloned due to steel construction and countless unforseen changes which have constnatly added mass to the design. SpaceX is now trying to stetch and gamble on thrust incresses to claw back the original performance which is a sign of terminal desperation. Most rocket development fails when it hits problems like this.
Even 40 tons is better than New Glenn as that's the number with reuse. Starship would approach 100 tons with the upper stage expended, like New Glenn. Long term, New Glenn might get down to a launch cost of something like $50 million, while Starship might get down to something like $20 million. That would be $1111/kg and $500/kg respectively. But Starship can be expected to improve over time. These are still early prototypes. They haven't even started shaving off weight.
Stretching and uprating engines worked just fine on Falcon 9. Original version was 9 tons to orbit, current version with stretched tanks and uprated engines is 22.8 tons. Also, New Glenn isn't fully reusable (not to mention hasn't proven *any* capability yet). Starship in partial reuse configuration would be ~100 tons. IFT accelerated a total mass of ~198 tons to 99.5% of orbital velocity. Math indicates another 4 tons of fuel had to be burned to circularize, leaving 74 tons of fuel that could have instead been payload. Then removing the fins and heatshield and such is probably another 20-30 tons of mass, which gives a payload in the rough ballpark of 99 tons, give or take 10 or so.
How much of the SpaceX low performance beyond LEO is due to methane versus hydrogen for the second stage? Tory Bruno keeps on hitting than point in promoting Vulcan.
Using hydrogen likely wouldn't improve Starship performance meaningfully. You'd need much bigger tanks, and the dry mass would be even bigger. You get more performance from the hydrogen, but you'd lose some from the increased dry mass.
Depends on your hull material and if you need reentry or not. A disposable second stage can be very light empty, so the low density of LH2 is not a problem, regardless of hull materials. If you want reentry, you need a TPS, and more mechanical strength, which makes dry mass a problem, unless you shave off as much mass as possible with carbon fiber hull/tanks.
In the case of Starship I think 80% of the problem is the upper stage Drymass (in large part from steel construction) and the remainder is the lower ISP of the propellent. No one else in the industry would ever have even built such a heavy upper stage so from their perspective SpaceX both made a bad choice and executed badly.
@@TheBackyardChemist I'll say what I always say in this situation. Unless you are talking about an actual stage and you've run the numbers I don't think it's an interesting discussion.
Starship tanker VS disposable tank? Why send 5 Starship refueling flights when you could pre-stage a couple one-way, disposable fuel tanks in orbit? Just make an extended version of the Starship body without any of the re-entry capabilities. Over time, they become the building blocks of the SpaceX motel.
If tankers are reusable, four flights may be cheaper than fewer flights with expendable tables tankers. But it's an interesting question and we didn't know the economics of starship yet.
I think that cost of fuel is extremely insignificant compare to any possible version of starship, i heard that filling starship stack cost 1 million, if they succeed in rapid reusable mode, they can do 10 trips to LEO cheaper than 1 starship
For light payloads to high energy orbits it is. Refueling works great for heavy payloads, but if you're say, trying to send a 1 tonne probe to Pluto, that's a different story. A fully refueled Starship in LEO has ~9km/s of delta-v with 1 tonne payload. Every km/s past escape velocity also has to be scrubbed off for reuse, so that's ~6km/s effective. Even by Elon's optimistic figures, a full Starship refuel in LEO is around $20 million. Meanwhile SpaceX are likely currently producing Falcon 9 upper stages for less than that. A fully fueled Falcon 9 upper stage in LEO with 1 tonne payload has a delta-v of ~10.7km/s. Clearly the superior option in this case.
I do not have high hopes of Starship ever becoming useful. At least one engine on every flight has canablized itself, there has yet to be a successful landing for either the Starship itself or Superheavy. Remember, part of being efficient and cost effective is reliableity, and so far Starship has shown it is the opposite.
If you want my deep opinions, watch my "spacex explosions" video. The engines on both OFT-2 and OFT-3 worked through hot staging. On OFT-3 they got enough energy on Starship to get it into an orbit. I think that's pretty close to the "useful" standard. My guess is that they will figure out super heavy RTLS pretty quick, though we're all waiting to see what happens when they try to catch one. I think starship will get into useful orbits pretty quick. The open question is getting starship back through reentry to the earth. They obviously did not have good luck on the last flight. But that is probably technically the hardest thing they are doing and there's pretty much zero prior art . I'll note that during Falcon 9 first stage reuse they crashed over and over and it seemed like they would never land one. And then the started landing them fairly regularly, and then quickly progressed to landing them every time. TL;DR; don't judge the production vehicle by what's happening with development prototypes.
@EagerSpace I can, and I will, though. SpaceX is not changing the design enough during its "rapid" testing to make a noticeable difference, especially with the launch cadence being what it is. They have a deadline its called HLS and Artemis III. Falcon 9 wasn't advertised as the rockets to end all rockets, though. I'll ask this, just because it can be done, does that mean it should be done?
@@EagerSpace The methane engine is still a prototype, and the propellant itself is untested technology. Attempting numerous innovations simultaneously could lead to an overwhelming number of bugs to address. The only feature it may share with the Falcon 9 is the RTLS capability.
@@EagerSpace Nobody is asking you to judge the production vehicle by what's happening with the prototypes, the real issues are: 1. No other launch vehicle develop programs do it this way, including programs from before computer aided design and simulation was a thing. They had higher or equal success rates, back in the 60s and 70s. Saturn V flew perfectly the first time, Russian rockets blew up more back then but even then it wasn't like they make a vehicle that has no hope of reaching orbit, and it blew up. They made fully ready vehicles that could've flown perfectly, but something went wrong and it blew up. Today, it is even more true, that nobody else does "prototype" like this, the only real explanation is this is a fireworks show, for investors. 2. Getting an empty Starship to orbit, while having expended too much propellent, which caused the recovery to fail, is not anywhere close to useful, or their claimed "100t+ to LEO". 3. F9 was first and foremost, a working launch vehicle, whether or not they could land it was not ever a dealbreaker, they can keep launching satellites even if the landing program goes nowhere. The same cannot be said of Starship, the whole point of Starship was rapid reusability, and they can't even get it into orbit in the first place. 4. To date, SpaceX have not demonstrated any actual financial saving through reuse of F9, NASA pays SpaceX more money, per seat to the ISS than they did for the Russian rockets. The fastest reuse of F9 first stage to date, took 30 days, or just as long as the Space Shuttle. SpaceX currently burns $2b per year on the Starship program, they launch twice a year for a per-launch cost of $1b, far higher than HLS. It is absolutely insane to believe they can get this cost down 1000x when the current Starship vehicles they're producing are just empty shells with no payload.
@@xponen "the propellant itself is untested technology." Vulcan and the Chinese Zhuque 3 use methane and other methane rockets are in development. It's easier to use than hydrogen and hydrogen fueled lower stages have been in use for a couple of decades. Raptor 2 is far beyond the prototype stage. The testing going on now on test stands at MacGregor is of Raptor 3.
99% of starship launches are gonna be starlinks, well have to wait at least 4 years until HLS flies. Private space stations will be done maybe in 10 years, and about mars colonization... Well thats just fantazy. So i dont see a great commercial market for starship except for starlink
That does sound reasonable. I think about 50% of Falcon is for Starlink, too. Very rough estimate. It will take 2-3 years more for Starship to go operational reliably, in a sense that it will fly successfully more than two times per year and offer all it's features, i.e. cheapness with reusability and orbital re-tanking. I can imagine private station prototypes to launch before 2030. With Mars I 100% agree. Musk banks on cheap orbital launches in order make Mars a possibility, yet leaves out the fact that even with 0$ costs for transfer, building and operating a space mission is still very expensive. Artemis will likely show exactly that. All that said, I find it very note-worthy that Starship after IFT3 is already a game-changer in mayn regards. I never would have thought so four years ago.
I think it's funny that you're making these claims on this TH-cam channel, I've never seen a TH-camr that's so factual and rigorous with their information. And out of nowhere you make 5 huge claims without any proof. My problem is not with your opinion, I am interested in it, but if you are going to make such claims, you need to be able to back them up.
I expect quite a few starlink launches, though I haven't run any numbers to see what the ongoing rate will be. It's not clear what happens on the moon after HLS. Presumably we see the Blue Origin lander do a couple missions if it's available. NASA has big plans but I don't see how they pay for Artemis, Gateway, and anything meaningful even if they have one or two landers to do stuff. Mars colonization is a longer term thing and I don't speculate on those sorts of timeframes. One of my big points is that there's never been the capability to carry that amount of payload into LEO, and we're just in the very early stages of companies trying to figure out what to do with that. If a starship launch costs about what Falcon 9 does, I expect that there's going to be some major market upsets.
@@EagerSpace (Neither has Starship) Because getting to ORBIT isn’t their concern (why? Because marketing to space fanboys to raise phantom money isn’t) and they are the only serious space company when compared to the amateurish engineering approach of SpaceX. Blue Origins operates as a company should, focusing on results while SpaceX operates as a circus, showboating and hiding their failures to raise capital. If research BO, you’d find they are going to wreck this circus this decade.
@@EagerSpace I’ll explain further - If NASA did any of this back in 60s they’d be shut down next year permanently, yet here we have, a company that burns taxpayer dollars without honoring the contacts’ terms, always fails to deliver on milestones, acquires contracts (Artemis 3) with disgusting corruption, lies with every breath on camera, hyping up their livestreamed failures and marketing them as success to insult the intelligence of the viewers. SpaceX’s core engineering management who pioneered the Falcon9 landing system has long left the company.
@@EagerSpace Finally, Jeff Bezos stepped down from Amazon, and dedicates his full time to Blue Origin, you’d be intellectually dishonest if you think Jeff Bezos… the businessman man who built Amazon is not a monumental advantage in terms of management than the Twitter diva Elon who is a certified billionaire fraud.
@@EagerSpace it looks like you deleted my comments explaining in detail… or perhaps they are “pending review” on your channel. I’m not sure but likely you’ll remove this too considering you seem to be under the influence of ElonMusk KoolAid but comparing the Starship program to Falcon program is a hilariously naive and misleading take. The programs themselves have nothing in common than a “rocket go space wooooo” and the management and engineering teams are completely different.
@@EagerSpace Does that account for boil off? In a video published by Smarter everyday suggests that 4 ships won't be enough. Would you like to respond to that video's claims?
@@sidharthcs2110 That's four ships to TLI/GEO. I haven't done the math to confirm, but it sounds about right. For Artemis, Starship isn't going just to TLI/GEO. It will be going all the way to moons surface, lifting off again and returning to near rectilinear halo orbit. This is a completely different use case, requiring full tanks.
I’m kind of baffled by how someone so well versed in the subject like you, still takes Starship seriously. The third launch just demonstrated clear as day, the vehicle can barely reach orbital velocity with a completely empty interior, and both stages did not manage to conserve enough propellant for their planned deceleration/landing maneuvers. This is clearly a scam, the most expensive mock-up in history for the sole purpose of securing more private investment, as well as government funding.
This has to be bait, there was a very long propellant dump after insertion because of all the leftover propellant it had. believe it or not, they weren't trying to get into full orbit
man I am so glad I ofund this channel. Calm, on point talking. It's pure content and it's great. Hope you having a great time and don't feel overwhelmed. Take your time. This is just really neat stuff.
Yeah, it’s great to have a no nonsense, unbiased space information, and education channel
Thanks, that makes me very happy to hear..
It's a gem, that's for sure.
Yes! I love the information density in these videos
@@ramilv739comon, 😂 Scott is worth watching in addition to Eager Space here.
I trusted in my instinct of plain thumbnails, and it didn't disappoint me 👍
Hey, the *question mark* is *pink*.
(I'm still working on my thumbnail gain and this one I just wasn't inspired...)
@@EagerSpace hahaha, no worries. I just noticed that a lot of videos that don't get much attention cause of their thumbnail are of higher quality information wise than other and I was happy that this observation was once again confirmed. Do well
I would have preferred a purple question mark thou ;p
If starship can be as reliable as Falcon 9, humanity will be forever changed. Great video. This is the first I’ve watched of yours. Subscribed.
Thanks.
please elaborate.
@@kurknielsenSimply put, cheap mass to orbit opens the door to all things space.
@@rpasche go on…. can you provide examples? also, what do you consider cheap?
@@kurknielsenIt’s orbital refueling, which is necessary for starship to be a big success, will allow us to put very heavy payloads into far off orbits. This allows for a massive range of exploration.
Good questions and great answers here. If Starship works, things are about to get crazy.
James Burke used to host a series called "the day the universe changed" and it was all about how the effect of changes are not readily apparent at the time. I'm not even trying to predict what Starship will do when it shows up.
SpaceX hasn't updated Falcon Heavy's max payload to LEO for years. Block 5 has been tweaked over the years and some analysts say FH is quite a bit more now, based on the Viasat launch direct to GEO.
Pretty much confirmed by Elon. The spacex all-hands video today Elon mentioned how the mass-to-orbit slide was incorrect and that besides falcon 1 each supported more payload.
I really enjoy watching these videos keep up the good work
Thank you. Tell your friends...
The moment you put shuttle up and removed it for payload capacity, I wondered how many people would complain about leaving "Buran" there because they don't know that Energia was meant to carry multiple payloads, not just a shuttle. There are fewer comments than I expected.. but I think I thought this channel was bigger than it is. I'm curious if any will appear in the future. :3
Seems most people who watch this channel are space nerds so they already knew haha
You could also build an expendable second stage for those who want it.
We can launch stuff.
👍
bold take
@@dsdy1205😂
10:50 As a KSP player, it takes 3,500 m/s of DV to orbit the starting Earth like planet (give or take 200 based on ship design and piloting ability). It only takes 3,000 MAX to do a direct transfer to any destination in the stock system, WITHOUT GRAVITY ASSISTS. When you add your capture burn numbers (with some gravity assists to help if you want) you get around the same number to get into orbit. This can scale with the size of the system you’re in in any scenario, so these guys really were right.
Kerbin is much smaller than earth.
www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1hl70p/a_lot_of_people_dont_grasp_the_difference_between/
@@EagerSpace I know, I said it scales with the system size, 3,500 is nothing compared to the nearly 10k needed for Earth.
Great content. No bravado and clickbaiting. You deserve 1M+ subs 👍🏻
Another amazing video, loved the quote at the end. Made me so excited for the future
Thanks so much!
Could you explain how you got to 4 refuels requirement in LEO for the 150 Tons to TLI?
Once in space, and you know the DV requirements you can start to use some online calculators. I've done it.
Watch this video...
th-cam.com/video/-vVagY3O2Rc/w-d-xo.html
Then you can look up the approximate delta-v to get from LEO to other destinations - see "delta v map of the solar system" but note that these are just approximations.
Then I have a model for starship in excel that can calculate delta v using the rocket equation and I play around with propellant amounts to find out how much it will take to get enough delta v to go from LEO to GEO or LEO to TLI. I didn't actually calculate TLI in this case.
Note that this depends on starship mass numbers that aren't very accurate so it's only a ballpark estimate, but it's pretty close.
Meanwhile in the real world NASA is freaking out because the real number of launches needed will be more then a dozen.
@@kennethferland5579 That's because what he calculated in the video is only the fuel needed to go to TLI, the Artemis HLS will need to carry the fuel to get into lunar orbit, land on the moon, take off from the moon and return to lunar orbit, that requires completely filling the starship instead of just a partial refill
@@kennethferland5579Falcon 9 is launching practically every other day now. It's not hard to see starship doing the same thing.
More research on the biological effects of intermediate gravity need to be done. We currently have long-duration access to 1G and 0G, but nothing between.
The Moon will get you 1/6g, and I'm sure artemis will research this (likely with starship's help), but nothing else.
Starship could be used to build a rotating space station (like 2001) with this goal.
I agree totally. I've thought about a video on this but have done it yet.
Don't even need a rotating station or moon base for this. It's an absolute travesty that no small centrifuge for rats/mice/whatever has been sent to the ISS when you look at some of the stupid stuff they send up like baking in space...
@@EagerSpaceI’ll watch that one! You’re really good at finding obscure facts that fundamentally change how one needs to analyze these things.
On one video, I subscribed. Plain facts, shows us the math, no fluff. I love it.
Why not have a beefy kick stage craft that just stays in orbit? Starship launches to leo with a 50t payload and 100t of fuel, docks with the kick stage to transfer payload and fuel, the kick stage takes it geo, then finally returns to leo for the next run.
Also, would it be economical to use electric propulsion to move payloads to leo?
Impeccable content, as always. I’ve been in aviation my entire adult life and always thought I was pretty well versed in “space stuff,” but boy was I wrong 😂
Thanks. I'm happy you enjoyed it.
doing gods work
Which god is that? There are dozens to pick from.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom maybe the one Jerry Pournelle meant when he said "The rocket landed on its tail, the way God and Heinlein intended"
The god of the Rocket Equation and the god of Economics, sitting and playing a game of chess, with rocket shaped chess pieces.
It’s not about just cost it’s about removing the mass constraint so satellites can be much larger and cheaper including probes and space stations and interplanetary missions.
he addressed that
For one of my classes biosignatures and life detection we had to design a life detection mission. My team was engineering and so since this was a future mission i said we put a falcon 9 upper inside of starship, a briz M stage on top of that, and then finally our payload. I just wanted to give the instrument team enough mass budget to allow me to put a 1km deep sampling drill onboard. through e
I expect to see what you lay out here - Impulse and especially K2 will make Starship-optimized transfer stages. Impulse doesn't need to wait to accumulate 7 sats to GEO. Starship is meant to be cheap enough to launch even if it has an F9-sized payload. OK, that may take a while but something less than full load will be economical at some point.
I'm sorry to see you're having to deal with some people who believe everything negative they see about Starship and discount anything positive. Ah, well, the realities of commenting on Starship.
Any chance of exploring how a Starship can be used for a Mars Sample Return mission? NASA planned to launch a quite small rocket from the surface to Mars orbit. (LMO?) Starship could possibly carry that and the orbital return vehicle in one ship. Could the retrieval rover be carried on the same ship? That seems excessive. Anyway, NASA was counting on landing two separate craft on Mars close to each other, right? One with the rover and one with the small rocket. (I imagine that'd be a solid.) So landing two Starships close to each other isn't a reach.
I suspect that both impulse and K2 will be significant problems for the satellite bus companies. There's lots of fat to trim there because the old space companies are charging ridiculous prices.
I think Mars sample return is a hot mess right now. NASA does not have a credible plan and it looks worse than James Webb in terms of cost.
I haven't really thought about starship in that context. NASA considers the current set of samples to be the crown jewels because they spend so much getting them and they aren't going to want to risk them on a crazy plan. There's will also be a lot of lobbying by old space as there's a ton of money there.
The simplest thing for starship would be to just use it to deliver a huge spacecraft -or more than one - to Mars.
But it depends on how the timing comes out...
Not even accounting for the larger telescopes being planned to take advantage of the 9-meter diameter. Now, thats going to take a lot nore planning, and this video seemed to focus what could be done within the timeline of Starship actually being available, bit fun stuff
Very nice segment. Love the counterpoint at the end by Robert Heinlein ("you are halfway to anywhere."). Now I wonder about what kind of time period it would take to refuel a Starship with four "Starship tankers?"
I thought the turnaround time for a Falcon 9 first stage booster was about 3 weeks now? Would there possibly be just four Starship tankers dedicated to launching consecutively after each other, to carry out timely refueling operations? I am assuming there would be a concern about boiloff of the Methane propellant if refueling operations took an inordinate amount of time (maybe not as big of a concern like with hydrogen?)?
I did a video looking at a bit of the math and physics of depots. I didn't think it's that bad:
th-cam.com/video/fjWCEFioT_Y/w-d-xo.html
The big bottleneck for falcon 9 is the drone ships right now, and given that they have a lot more boosters than ships I don't think there's much reason to go faster on boosters.
The big limit on tankers will be orbital dynamics - you need to wait until the earth spins around enough to be able to land at the launch site. I think that's either 12 or 24 hours.
It's definitely less of a concern than Hydrogen, that thing is an escape artist. And I suspect that's why they have a separate tanker variant. That probably carries extra insulation, and active cooling systems, but you don't want to carry that on the refueling launches, or carry it to the Moon (you might have to carry it to Mars though). So the longer term storage of on orbit would be in a more suitable place, the tanker, and then Lunar Starship refuels from that in 1 go, and burns for the Moon very shortly afterwards.
I used to get to hang out with Jerry (a little bit) and his son (Alex I think) at COMDEX and CES, and his son again at a bunch of CAD related events. Boy what a hoot that was!
By that point Jerry was basically just interested in video games, even when there was much more fascinating stuff going on in the booths. Wish I had asked him about the Sci-Fi stuff. 😢
You missed something:
Using Starship as its own kickstage can be a fully reusable option, and largely solve the high empty mass issue. A minimalist Starship design with just tanks, engines, and jettisonable fairings could get 150 tons of payload to LEO with plenty of extra fuel to spare. From there, just one or two tankers could likely get such a Starship up to GEO with 150 tons of payload.
Returning the ship to LEO is done with aerobraking. Distinct from full reentry, aerobraking does not require heat shielding, with the consequence of requiring many orbital periods to decay the orbital velocity back down to LEO velocity.
From there, reuse of the minimalist Starship would require both additional refueling and a payload transfer, which would be another complicated technology to implement, but has prior precedent with the Space Shuttle.
Such minimalist Starships could be stationed both in LEO and low Mars orbit to act as space optimized ships for interplanetary journeys, while fully kitted Starships optimized separately for Earth, Moon, and Mars descent could be stationed in low orbit at each destination respectively.
Of course, the natural question is if the fuel efficiency gained outweighs the additional mission and hardware complexity of additional rendezvous, fuel transfers, and payload transfers.
I don’t know. I would guess, in the long run, that it’s a good idea.
@@J7Handle At that point might as well just build an aluminium-lithium "Starship" for ultimate efficiency, rather than steel which is heavier for interplanetary ferry.
@@TCBYEAHCUZ true, though I imagine the number of orbital periods needed to complete aerobraking is still important, and steel’s higher heat resistance could allow for fewer, deeper aerobraking passes.
On the flip side, more efficiency could be gained with hydrolox propellant or even something crazier, like nuclear engines, high thrust ion engines, or maybe more extreme chemical propellants (the least reasonable option, there’s a hundred good reasons not to use F2, FOOF, ClF3, or O3).
@@J7Handle Interplanetary ferry should be nuclear powered obligatory, at least that's what I predict will become as the forcing function for cheaper trips increase, and economies of scale will direct it that way.
There's a neat little game called Delta V: Rings of Saturn that really goes into detail of different starship propulsion and the associated delta V.
@@TCBYEAHCUZ Yes, but I do think that economies of scale for interplanetary missions won't come into play for decades to come.
Also, splashing cold water on everything we've been talking about, while I don't want to hate on Elon for dreaming big, I don't see Mars colonization as economically sound. There are so many untapped resources on Earth that are far more accessible than anything on Mars, even if a Mars colony could become self sufficient, the return on investment would be far faster if the resources spent on building the colony were simply spent building a new settlement or two on Earth.
Imo, the only value of the other planets is for scientific research and extremely distant future colonization when resources on Earth are depleted. My main interest is in asteroid mining, because the delta-v necessary to rendezvous with some asteroids is barely more than the delta-v necessary for GTO, and return trips from asteroids are even easier because almost all the delta-v can come from aerobraking/re-entry. Thus, asteroid mining has the potential to turn a better profit than mining on Earth, for some resources at least.
I am also highly interested in Saturn's moon, Titan, due to its slight potential for exotic forms of life, and all of the ice moons with potential for life in subsurface oceans.
So I still see value in Starship for all of those purposes, just not Mars.
Great video. I would like to add point to point delivery on earth to the list of starship functions since it already has a DOD contract to do just that down the line.
Thanks.
SpaceX does talk about point-to-point, but I'm skeptical. The real problem with the DoD contract is what do you do with the starship once you get it there? If DoD is willing to pay money to expend one on every flight, I can see that, but that seems expensive even for DoD.
Hopping them back seems possible until you realize exactly how much propellant you need to wherever you landed the thing.
Also the issues with flying an ICBM into contested airspace that has such a bright IR signature and easily predictable trajectory that it could be shot down by any AA system from the last half century so flying supplies into a true hot zone is a no go. And what could you possibly need to send to the rear lines in such a small time frame that would justify expending a starship? I can't think of a single thing that needs more urgency than the 12H or so to get a C-17 there.
I'm curious what others think these third party kick stage companies can bring to the table that just putting a Falcon 9 second stage into the cargo bay of a Starship lacks.
F9-2nd has hundreds of demonstrated vacuum starts, and vacuum relights, demonstrated ability to build 2 per week, mass production cost savings and enormous Delta V.
Obviously it would be an interim solution until full reusability and refilling are sorted, so developing a bespoke dedicated kick stage for what will be a limited production run seems like it must entail a very high unit price, where the F9-2nd design and tooling is probably fully amortised now.
Very interesting point. It's very typical in aerospace to not consider that.
Supposedly the Helios engine design is cheap cheap.
This should be considered. An interim to refueled Starship.
@@External2737 I've had another thought since I posted that comment.
An F9 second stage fitted with a sea level Merlin would be much cheaper and take up about 2m less room in the cargo bay, giving more room for payload. It would have a lower ISP but that really doesn't matter as the stage has vastly more than almost any mission could require. You could of course fit a VacRap for any interplanetary missions that need the extra DeltaV.
And another thought since this was posted. SX is now going to deorbit the ISS, and an F9 second fitted with a sea level engine, with some modification to reduce thrust, could be just the ticket. It would be hilarious if SX could do that for say 20 million dollars after being paid 800 million for the job.
Could you stack Helios kick stages, to get a single payload to GEO? Discard them as you go for an even better mass ratio.
Yes, theoretically. I'd have to do the math to see what values you actually get. Though if you don't mind the wait you might do better with a single Helios with a really big fuel tank as that would be lighter.
Finally, someone saying what I've been saying. Engineering development cost is proportional to the power of the number of interlocking specs.. remove 2 of them (size and weight) and the cost will plummet.
As seen by some KSP RSS TH-camrs, it COULD be used for outer solar system missions. Assembling a large mothership in LEO and that goes to a gas giant
Question. Do we know if New Glann 45 tons reusable to LEO is an actual capability compared to s you say falcon heavy needing a new stage and structure? It’s my understanding that it is actually set up to carry the full 45 to Leo. Just curious if you have any info or what your thoughts are in general on new Glenn are.
I wouldn't trust any New Glenn reusable numbers any more than I trust the current Starship numbers. I *do* expect that they are design to lift whatever their design payload is. For SpaceX the higher numbers are fairly meaningless because they don't have any customers who want to do that, but Orbital Reef could easily be a very heavy LEO payload.
@@EagerSpace Your bias is really showing. New Glenn has been a stable design throughout and is about to come to market, their is absolutly no reason at all to doubt it's claimed payload numbers. Meanwhile Starship has been getting violently redesigned ever year and Musk is a serial exagerator, we now know the present design is hopelessly short of the goal and pure hopium is being used to imagine a 200% increse in payload just to get back to the original claim.
@@kennethferland5579 I'm going to reply to this comment but not your others because it doesn't seem like you are interested in a conversation. Hint: Accusing somebody of bias is not an argument that something is the way you think it is.
I don't trust that any company can meet their payload goals until they are actually flying. This is *especially* true if they are doing something rare, like landing the first stage.
It could be that they need more margins to get through reentry or to land than they have calculated. It may be that their vehicle is heavier than they expected. It may be that the reusable versions of the BE-4 don't hit their thrust targets. It could be 100 other things.
I have a question: what markets is SpaceX targeting with Starship? How is Starship going to make money?
SpaceX's prime target is always Mars, and that's what Starship is built for.
But if it ends up being fully reusable, people will find a use for it. It could, for example, launch a space station the size of ISS in 4 (ish) launches, and DoD will love to be able to launch very big satellites.
@@EagerSpace Have you seen the “Criticizing Starship” series by the Pressure Fed Astronaut? One of the main arguments is that Starship has no real market and has no real customers. Sure, there’s Mars… but that costs money, and won’t actually make any money, unless I’m mistaken? I desperately want to see the Pressure Fed Astronaut be proven wrong, but I can’t find fault with his logic.
I think a video on what revenue streams could come from Starship would be really interesting. Or, maybe Starship isn’t meant to generate revenue, but rather is a philanthropic move by Elon…?
I don't watch other space videos because I don't want to be derivative in what I choose to talk about.
I haven't tried to do any revenue analysis because the only real answer right now is "nobody knows", and anybody who claims to know is simply wrong. There has never been this kind of vehicle commercially available and that leaves us with a ton of unknowns.
We also don't know how successful starship is going to be or how SpaceX plans on marketing it. Does it lift payloads at Falcon 9 prices, or is it cheaper? If so, how much cheaper? Make different assumptions there and you will get different answers.
Questions I don't know the answer to:
1) How much DoD will use Starship? They would love to put huge satellites and constellations in space, but it's going to depend on price and budget.
2) Is there a market travel to the moon? Lots of people say there will be, I don't see it
3) What are NASA's longer-term moon plans and what will funding look like. HLS piggybacks on SLS because congress loves SLS , but if Starship has an architecture without SLS, what does congress do?
4) When will ISS retire and what will happen in commercial space stations? I assert that *nobody* has a clue about what will happen there.
I'm sure there are more; those are just off the top of my head.
sierra space has plans for a 8m life habitat on their website which clearly has starship in mind
Thanks. Sorry I missed that.
@EagerSpace its easy to miss as there aren't any big public announcements about it. Just a render for a planned life 3.0 that may or may not pan out. They still need to prove out life 1.0 before they get anywhere near something that big. Either way, i can see starship having a big edge in commercial space station launch. If you can put up something with a volume 1x 2x or even 5x the volume of iss in one affordable launch, that is a huge deal.
9:40 We can use refueling to turn starship into its own kickstage
What if we really turn starship into its own kickstage?
How much DeltaV "starship couple" have if 2 fully fueled starships dock on LEO and one of the ships start to tow another until it have just enough fuel to return back to earth and land, and second starship continue its journey with full tanks?
Or because vac. raptors cant gimble, both starships use their engines and at some point one of the ship transfer remaining fuel and fly home, same result
Imagine sending regular starships on mars with regular payload and sending "starship express" for humans with additional (starship-kickstage) to decrease travel time
Or even 2 additional starships like delta heavy on LEO
It would be interesting to know your calculations)))))))))
I was thinking along the same lines. Also since launch is so expensive, companies have to put a lot aof ressource into reliability since you might not get a second chance. With cheaper launches it start being worth launching cheaper less reliable satelites since you'll be able to launch more replacements.
Can we make Strategic Defense Initiative 2? 🙏
We’re getting pretty close to this reality. I hope you get the chance to watch one of our flights in person - hit me up if you find yourself down here!
Thanks. I got to see the second to last shuttle flight with my daughter, and I caught a random atlas V when on a bike trip near Vandenberg, but I do want to add to that at some point
Starship is a major step forward in space exploration. The next step is the construction of larger ships in space. Ships that never enter any atmosphere and stay in space. Low (earth) orbit is the closest they get to a planet/moon and another ship (like starship) will ferry personnel and good from and to the planet. This allows the spaceship to be 100% optimised for space travel and the ferryship (yea I just made that a word) is 100% optimised for the best method of launching and landing on the planet/moon.
There are a number of proposals along these lines.
The question is "what are you optimizing for?"
Those optimized ships are going to be expensive to design and quite expensive to construct, with either astronaut labor or some developed alternative.
One reason SpaceX has been successful is that they have regularly accepted sub-optimal designs if they believe the overall solution will be cheaper and quicker.
NASA makes lots of space probes that are extremely optimized. They also tend to cost several billion dollars each.
I think both Starship-like vehicles and spacecraft built in space for space have their use, and will coexist into the future.
The reality is that aerobraking provides pretty massive delta-v benefits. An architecture for Mars that doesn't include aerobraking will tend to perform worse overall.
For planets and moons without an atmosphere, like the moon and Mercury, spacecraft built in space for space can come out on top. But if you are returning to Earth, then it becomes more fuzzy again.
If Starship would be operational and fully working. They could probes to every major celestial body in our solar system in no time. Imagine sending one to every one of them in span of 10 years
But only if we have money to spend on the probes. They can be much more expensive than normal satellites, since they have to deal with worse radiation. Simply trying to make it cheaper because it can be heavier might not work well for orbiter or lander probes because that'll mean that they'll need to have more delta-v in order to slow down into orbit or (safely) onto a planetary surface.
Also, the further out we go, the less and less a small probe can meaningfully accomplish.
What about space shuttle like missions such as recovering & repairing satellites?
It depends a lot on the orbit of the satellite. Shuttle managed to "save" a few satellites when their kick stages didn't work when it was launching commercial satellites before challenger. It did do 4 servicing missions on Hubble which turned out to be very useful. If it's cheap enough to launch and it can carry the satellite down, I can see starship doing those missions. I'm not sure I see many of those opportunities - I think the satellites in LEO will be dominated by constellation and if one of those goes bad you just launch another.
But... we don't know what's going to happen with big or expensive satellites, so maybe.
Recovery depends on how fragile your satellite is, I would imagine the flip maneuver is a bit more shaky than an airplane style landing. Repair I see no reason not to. Just equip it with the same tools the shuttle carried, like the robotic arm and docking adapters. It can easily carry as much.
Imagine a 150 ton GEO satellite. Megawatts of power, a giant antenna array, higher ping than Starlink, but it might have some benefits. One huge market that might exist is in power transmission. If your satellite could work in Medium Earth Orbit, and it has a rectenna/antenna system you could transmit power over intercontinental distances. I presume it might have a higher transmission capacity compared to space solar power on a per weight basis, so it might allow transmission of power from the EU to US or something. That would allow a massive amount of power to traded.
SHLV launch capabilities expand beyond "Heavy but cheaper designs" - To the possibility of building the Kalpana-type space habitat at Equatorial Low Earth Orbit.
Equatorial LEO is really hard to get to because the cost of the inclination change is much higher with the high orbital velocity.
It opens up new possibilities but mostly for things which aren't really commercial except for checking how fast we can Kessler Syndrome ourselves :)
Sample return from Mars, permanent base on Moon, new ISS, all sorts of heavy orbiters/landers to moons of Jupiter and Saturn, with the caveat that a non reusable vacuum optimized second stage is made for interplanetary missions which would be refueled in orbit by reusable tankers.
Couldn't Starship take on more than 4 tankers of fuel and perform the geo in a reusable mode? If it used aerobraking it may not need that much more fuel!
Don't know. Maybe.
Essential you need enough fuel to take your giant circular orbit and convert it into an elliptical one that interests the atmosphere, then you need to survive the higher reentry speed.
Consider the kinetic energy of Starship’s LEO payload: around 1kTon equivalent explosive yield. If harnessed, it would make quite the kinetic energy weapon.
As a rough rule of thumb, you can take a rockets' chemical potential energy on the launch pad and divide by 10 to get the energy it can impart into a kinetic impactor.
For Starship there's a bit of extra penalty for reuse, but ~10% efficiency is still better than you probably expected from something as inefficient as a chemical orbital rocket.
I assume fueling the Helios kickstages, up to 7 of them, might be an issue, but I am sure SpaceX could upgrade their towers to support them if they mean to use them often.
SpaceX did this for the moon lander they launched on falcon 9 recently.
I think return from GEO orbit is totally possible, as it would not even be as hard as returning from mars or moon, and SpaceX would not mind some free testing from higher energy orbits as well. Also, I don't think GEO is good orbit in general. There is not much appealing with that orbit in a world of cheap and massive access to LEO. Military wants their satellites there because having Starlink style coverage used to be basically impossible. Vast majority of sats in GEO are now obsolete thanks to Starlink or future Starshield version of Starlink. The only worthwhile projects in GEO and various megastructures, with capital M. Space elevators, orbital rings, orbital slings, constructs that would be thousands or millions times bigger than any current earthly constructs, so unlikely to be done by Starship.
Indeed, an operational starship is akin to establishing a beachhead in the ongoing battle against gravity. It symbolizes our potential to liberate ourselves from the confines of Mother Earth and sever the umbilical cord that has bound us to our planetary cradle. This monumental achievement paves the way for us to venture into the cosmos, unshackled and free.
this, and like a comment on ift3 spacex video, made me realise, in ceirtain situations, having like a third stage in starship could help with medium-ish sized payloads for distant destinations
Another question that someone here may know or certainly the creator must know I would imagine is he you are mentioning for reals to get to the moon where the current estimate is 12 refuels for the HLS, though that includes going to enter HO, then going to low lunar orbit, then landing, then going back to low lunar orbit, and then back to NRO. I wonder what the Delta savings would be to just go straight into low lunar orbit and land. It would need more than four refuels because it would still have to get into low lunar or land, but it wouldn’t have to do the NRO part which I think it’s kind of a dumb thing about Artemis.
I do need it explained to me how something that can haul 150 tons at a time needs 12 trips to haul 1200 tons. The reason for all the refueling is simply mass ambitions. The current moon ambitions require a lot of mass be transported there, that is going to need fuel one way or another.
I don't trust any of the refueling counts I've seen - until SpaceX decides what starship is and what HLS starship is I think it's not useful to speculate. My *guess* is it's lower than 12 but that's just a guess.
As for your question, I don't think there's any meaningful difference in the landing scenario cost *as long as* you go into landing at the appropriate point in the NRHO orbit.
@@EagerSpace I was going off the 12 flights to refuel based off of this smarter, everyday video, which is really great. I would be very interested in your opinion of it, and how it talks about whether Artemis is the right plan, but more importantly, the need for engineers to speak up and for people to ask questions, and at the time it seemed that none of them could answer how many rockets they were going to need for refueling. He came up with a pretty high number and a week or two after NASA came forward with the statement that said it would take 15 total launches, so that’s where I got that number from but be interested in your opinions of that video if you care to share also I know I’m asking a lot of questions. It’s totally cool if you don’t respond to all of them, of course, but I’ve heard questions help the alogarithm to recommend your videos to more people. th-cam.com/video/OoJsPvmFixU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=M-Vl5Xmf4ZBKy1lU.
there's a slide in the NASA pdf "How: NHRO - The Artemis Orbit" that has some translation costs to lunar orbits. LLO to the surface costs 2050 m/s. Equatorial LLO insertion is cheapest at 900 m/s, while direct polar insertion costs 1350 m/s, both taking four days. NRHO injection is 450 m/s in five days or 115 m/s in 120 days. Dropping from NRHO to LLO is 750 m/s.
They want to access the South pole so direct to polar LLO then the surface is 1350+2050, so 3400 m/s. Going to NRHO first is 450+750+2050, or 3250 m/s plus an extra day.
Going directly to a specific polar LLO costs slightly more delta-v and will impose launch windows, while NRHO can be reached at any time, and it's cheap to change the longitude at such a high aposelene. NASA wants a 100 day loiter time, so cryogenically fuelled vehicles will suffer more boil-off in the lower orbit and most LLO orbits have a high maintenance cost due to the uneven lunar gravity. Unmanned missions can have an even greater saving by taking the 120 day path to NRHO
@@shanent5793 thanks that’s a very helpful reply I appreciate it. Do you happen to know the name of that PDF or a link? Thank you.
The problem of buran and energia was not in finding a purpose, but in funding for it
At a time, ussr was starting to crumble bc of other wrong economical decisions (you cant have a bad plan-economics, you can have only a bad plan) a bad plans everywhere was the case
At the time of development soviets were afraid of shuttle having a potential to become orbital nuke-bomber with quick reflight capability, so they had to build something similar
At the time, when it was developed it was clear that payloads for shuttle better sent with regular rockets, and crumbling soviet economy seen it as useless had to shut down funding
If ussr had enough money to continue fly energia, possibly it might have been used to send people to moon, and/or build huge space stations or satellites may be higher than at low earth orbit…
correction orbital "refilling"
Side boosters is the answer!!
No
Starship is another hyperloop when you look at the realities of a Mars colony , i doubt they can even pull off the moon lander as no awkward questions have been answered at all .
A Mars colony is obviously very hard and a tremendous amount of work. Lots of things to figure out.
I'm not sure why HLS is considered to be so hard. NASA clearly believed that SpaceX's approach was practical when they gave them the contract.
@@EagerSpace "I'm not sure why HLS is considered to be so hard."
1) SpaceX never flew anything outside of earth orbit / outside of GPS
2) they have to land something on a terrain that is not flat concrete - with a huge rocket that has a high point for center of mass. If they mess up the landing or and a leg breaks, then it could simply tip over
3) the full flight to the moon takes ~300-500 successfull engine starts/shut offs for all the refuling, manouvering, docking etc.
This is just a completely ridicoulus amount and something will go wrong
4) at the moment they can't even fly it straight in suorbital flight or open/close their garage door in Starship
Everything has to be questioned at this point. They had a great success in the past, that does not automatically translates to any project at the moment or in the future.
btw. Musk stated in an Email to his staff November 2022 "If starship does not fly every 2nd week ... 'in 2023' ... then we might face bankrupcty"
@@benjaminmeusburger4254 Regarding point 3:
A significant number of engine starts occur on the ground, where the launch can be aborted and attempted at a later date.
Starship also has engine-out tolerance; maybe 3 on the booster and 1 on the upper stage. So engine failure doesn't automatically mean mission failure.
And one of the advantages of distributed launch is that one mission failure doesn't doom the entire project (see Starlink for example).
The only engine starts/stops that truly matter are those performed by HLS itself, and even then there are plenty of abort scenarios provided the failure isn't catastrophic.
I'd also note that Falcon 9 has done ~4000 successful engine starts/stops since the last failure - which didn't result in mission failure due to engine-out tolerance.
I'm doubtfull that the Starship will even make a viable LEO satalite launcher at this rate.
@@EagerSpace You mean the deputy director which awarded SpaceX a contract in violation of all standards of fair contracting and then went to work for them? Meanwhile the current NASA directors are openly questioning their ability to deliver.
If we have the audacity to name a rocket 'Starship' I recon we should use it to start exploring distant body resource extraction and orbital manufacturing
If you run the numbers on asteroid mining, they aren't very promising...
th-cam.com/video/BEuFNzEVncg/w-d-xo.html
A lot of this discussion needs an asterisk on it. A Starship capable of even as little as 100 tons only exists on paper right now.
Yes, the current development version does not meet the payload specs I was talking about. Later versions likely will.
@@EagerSpace In other words it's 'Full self Driving...next year'.
What a world we live in where 100 tons is described as "even as little as". I'd like to know what other current or upcoming rockets can do "even as little as" 100 tons.
Why do you use the word "other"? The entirety of my point is that Starship is not capable of 100 tons, either. A 100 ton to LEO Starship is a paper rocket at this point.
@@mr.g937 I used the word "other" to highlight the absurdity of implying that 100 tons is a 'little' amount in the world of rockets.
I wasn't claiming that Starship can do 100 tons, but rather taking issue with you implying that even if could, it would still be very unimpressive.
Though as an aside Starship in expendable configuration is likely over 150 tons even at the current performance level.
And while it hasn't flown in that configuration, it's not an entirely paper rocket either. SpaceX have built two ships in expendable configuration: 26 and 27.
Even just re-programming a regular Starship to use all it's fuel rather than reserving some for landing would probably get you to 100 tons or so.
Why didn't you include the Vulcan and Vulcan Sentar? These are great heavy lift vehicles
Same reason he excluded Falcon Heavy. He said at the beginning he was using 100t as the standard for super heavy lift, which leaves FH and Vulcan Centaur in the heavy category. If you mean why didn't he include it on the graph - I can only guess it was for expediency and clarity. Vulcan Centaur at its maximum capacity can put about the same payload directly to GEO as FH, so showing just FH is all that's needed on the graph. Here I'm comparing VC to a FH with 2 boosters recovered. An expendable FH can launch much more than a VC.
Mostly simplicity. Falcon 9 covers the low end and falcon heavy covers the higher end.
@@donjones4719 thanks
you are so based, keep up the good work! I would love some content about rotating detonation engines, if you feel that could make an interesting video.
Thanks. And I get to tell my daughter tonight that somebody said I was "based".
I've looked a bit at rotary detonation engines and it's on my list, but I'm not sure I trust the information that I've come across and I'm not clear how to relate it to traditional engines. I'm generally skeptical about topics like this as some of the claims look unrealistic but so far I can't find the edge that is reality.
I’ve seen on Wikipedia list of heaviest payload actually lifted into space and I believe they said that starship was 225 tons. Do we know starship is only 130 tons. Since you’re quoting 150 payload for starship, I assume you were also quoting that as expendable? It seems to me it’s hard to know what it can actually do as Elon can be an unreliable narrator at times and testing is still ongoing and we don’t have a production craft as of yet
Starship is supposed to do 150t to LEO reusable, but you're right; we don't really know what the actual numbers will be. Keep in mind though that it's more limited by payload volume than mass (we'll see how much that changes once the ship is stretched), so it definitely can't actually launch 150t of anything except maybe propellant.
@@JonathanSchrock so that’s kind of my point I’ve heard it was always gonna be 100 tons reusable but then lately they’ve been saying 150 ton reusable so I’m not sure exactly where that’s gonna line up. They’ve also recently said that stretch will be able to do 200 tons reusable and 400,000 expendable, but that doesn’t seem right to me. And like I say, whether you love him or you hate him, you do have to admit that it’s hard to take things that Elon says seriously until proven out. he does often come through with what he promises but a lot of times it’s not quite what he stated. For example, the cyber truck was gonna have 450 miles range and it has about 300 and then real world about 250.
@@mcamp9445 You assume, and it's a flawed assumption that it's Elon calculating these numbers. No one knows what the final numbers are. Everyone is projecting. Projecting on the abilities of things not yet built has to be taken with a grain of salt.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoomit's not impossibly complicated to calculate the dry mass + payload numbers for yourself. We know at what altitude and velocity the staging event occurs, we know how much propellant Starship can hold, and we know the efficiency of the engines. At that altitude, drag is no longer a big factor.
It's not going to get you exact numbers, but you can ballpark it from there. the exact payload mass obviously depends on the dry mass. But this is enough information to calculate the combined mass with reasonable accuracy
I had to pick a payload to be able to talk about it, and I chose 150 reusable as a commonly quoted number. I agree that there aren't any good numbers out there and spacex hasn't decided what the final version of starship is going to be. At one point I had some narration in there where I said that but for some reason I deleted it.
I don't think the actual launch market is listed here. Geopolitically the world hasn't been this unstable in at least 40 years. Russia and China are rapidly modernizing their nuclear armament. The only viable response to that is an even stronger defense posture. The nuclear triad is getting long in the tooth. American ICBMs are aged out, the bomber fleet could be easily intercepted by modern surface-to-air missiles systems and the survivability of American nuclear subs is questionable. This leaves nuclear deterrence from space as one of the few viable options for a continued MAD strategy. Very few starship launches would be required to transport a large number of nuclear warheads plus required re-entry propulsion stages into orbit should the need arise. While it may be nice to think that Starship is the brainchild of a slightly "unusual" rich guy, one should not rule out the possibility that the rich guy had a few talks with gentlemen from the US government that went like this "Mr. Musk. We all know your love for rocketry. What would you think about building a rocket with the following specs.... for manned Mars missions? I am sure you can imagine that the US government can find some other uses for such a vehicle as well, should you be able to deliver. In return the government will fund your enterprise with a non-trivial amount of money to assure that you have the best chances of success.".
For nuclear deterrence you want the ability to put a lot of warheads on targets in one country at once.
Orbital warheads don't give you that. A single satellite in my LEO only passes over a site twice a day, so a constellation is very diffuse, and you would need a lot of cross range on your reentry vehicles - much more than MIRV - to get any useful concentration.
@@EagerSpace This is MAD. All it has to do is to assure that the 1st strike country pays the ultimate price. Whether that happens an hour later or a day later doesn't matter. After it's all done there are only glowing holes in the ground and the population starts dying of radiation sickness and starvation either way. Why do you think they need 100 tons to LEO? Because these vehicles will need a lot of deltaV. It's not possible with small launch vehicles. It is perfectly possible with starship.
The only point of putting nukes in space is for first strike capability. You could argue they also fit in as a 4th wing to the long standing triad but the triad is still as strong as ever and it’s not worth the international meltdown.
Don't forget about the fuel boil off
Due to square-cube law, boil-off is less of an issue with larger vehicles. A regular starship could loiter in LEO for quite awhile before needing to get refueled again.
I did a video on propellant boil off. I don't think it's a big issue in most scenarios.
So essentially Starship is a vehicle designed to put 10 tons or so of payload to GTO and rtls in a single launch. So pretty much cornering the market on any geostationary comsat.
And the US tax payer is paying for its development as a lunar lander?
In the future, Starship might be able to do GTO flights; the current version cannot.
NASA is paying a relatively small amount of the HLS lander - and for Blue Origin's lander as well. In neither case will they pay what it costs to do the development work.
Space Force: "So how much could Starship take to GEO?"
Elon: "Well, if we refuel it we could get about 150 tons to GEO"
Space Force: "Rods..."
Elon: '"Excuse me?"
Space Force: "Nothing, please continue, though I think we could find some use for it.."
I think if you are wanting to do kinetic impact weapons you want them in LEO. It takes a *ton* of delta v to get back to earth once you are in GEO.
Booster 11 is about light up gang go to NSF
(good video too)
energia is not pronounced like that
So put more tugs on starship😂😂😂
Fireworks😂
I hope not
I strongly disagree with your decision to remove the shuttle when considering super heavy lift rockets. One of the most salient criticisms I've heard about Starship is that there are not ging to be super heavy payloads for it outside of Starlink. The STS had the same problem, inventing the capability didn't mean that customers started turning up, even though launch costs were already a minor part of the cost of a satellite.
STS did not have the problem that it had a payload capacity that was too big for what it needed to do. Its payload was medium lift like Falcon 9, edging barely into heavy lift when they came up with the super light external tank.
SpaceX is always bragging about their low cost but they can’t afford to lose a stage preferring to wait to refuel… put a disposable second stage on this super booster and you double the capacity… better to lose 13 Raptors than 33… ( 13 Raptors second stage)
Well obviously reusability is why it's so cheap. The cost of the hardware itself doesn't matter as much when you can launch it 100 times. That's kinda the whole point.
Even though you could launch more on a single rocket, the cost per kg is still way higher if it's disposable.
What if the heat shield was removable, so a much lighter "naked starship" could fly out to GEO, and then return back to LEO and put the shield back on? Or use a normal kick stage but it could return itself to LEO and tuck back into Starship? That seems to give you a fully-reusable GEO configuration, without the inefficiency of hauling all those tiles and structure out and back.
Bonus, no spent kick stages cluttering up the orbits.
Correct Answer per recent confession (though it should have been obvious long before that due to the lack of payload simulators on all the 'tests') launch only ~40 tons to LEO. Aka less then New Gleen will do. The rocket looks to be a development disaser as the stage mass has balloned due to steel construction and countless unforseen changes which have constnatly added mass to the design. SpaceX is now trying to stetch and gamble on thrust incresses to claw back the original performance which is a sign of terminal desperation. Most rocket development fails when it hits problems like this.
Even 40 tons is better than New Glenn as that's the number with reuse. Starship would approach 100 tons with the upper stage expended, like New Glenn. Long term, New Glenn might get down to a launch cost of something like $50 million, while Starship might get down to something like $20 million. That would be $1111/kg and $500/kg respectively.
But Starship can be expected to improve over time. These are still early prototypes. They haven't even started shaving off weight.
Stretching and uprating engines worked just fine on Falcon 9. Original version was 9 tons to orbit, current version with stretched tanks and uprated engines is 22.8 tons.
Also, New Glenn isn't fully reusable (not to mention hasn't proven *any* capability yet). Starship in partial reuse configuration would be ~100 tons. IFT accelerated a total mass of ~198 tons to 99.5% of orbital velocity. Math indicates another 4 tons of fuel had to be burned to circularize, leaving 74 tons of fuel that could have instead been payload.
Then removing the fins and heatshield and such is probably another 20-30 tons of mass, which gives a payload in the rough ballpark of 99 tons, give or take 10 or so.
How much of the SpaceX low performance beyond LEO is due to methane versus hydrogen for the second stage? Tory Bruno keeps on hitting than point in promoting Vulcan.
Hydrogen is great specific impulse but you can't stuff much hydrogen in a stage.
Using hydrogen likely wouldn't improve Starship performance meaningfully. You'd need much bigger tanks, and the dry mass would be even bigger. You get more performance from the hydrogen, but you'd lose some from the increased dry mass.
Depends on your hull material and if you need reentry or not. A disposable second stage can be very light empty, so the low density of LH2 is not a problem, regardless of hull materials. If you want reentry, you need a TPS, and more mechanical strength, which makes dry mass a problem, unless you shave off as much mass as possible with carbon fiber hull/tanks.
In the case of Starship I think 80% of the problem is the upper stage Drymass (in large part from steel construction) and the remainder is the lower ISP of the propellent. No one else in the industry would ever have even built such a heavy upper stage so from their perspective SpaceX both made a bad choice and executed badly.
@@TheBackyardChemist I'll say what I always say in this situation.
Unless you are talking about an actual stage and you've run the numbers I don't think it's an interesting discussion.
Nothing. it doesn't work atm.
It did work already.
@@afec7032 Fireworks don't really count with space vehicles.
@@MrSpirit99 Falcon 9 had plenty of those just a few years ago and now launches more than any other rocket in use today.
@@MrSpirit99 Ift-3 has reached its target orbital speed
@@fileoffish9395starship isn't falcon 9
Starship tanker VS disposable tank? Why send 5 Starship refueling flights when you could pre-stage a couple one-way, disposable fuel tanks in orbit? Just make an extended version of the Starship body without any of the re-entry capabilities. Over time, they become the building blocks of the SpaceX motel.
If tankers are reusable, four flights may be cheaper than fewer flights with expendable tables tankers.
But it's an interesting question and we didn't know the economics of starship yet.
I think that cost of fuel is extremely insignificant compare to any possible version of starship, i heard that filling starship stack cost 1 million, if they succeed in rapid reusable mode, they can do 10 trips to LEO cheaper than 1 starship
i mean building cost of 1 starship
!
Starship can make Reagan's star wars possible.
"The obvious solution to the extra mass of a reusable second stage is to throw away hardware." Nope.
What do you think it is?
For light payloads to high energy orbits it is. Refueling works great for heavy payloads, but if you're say, trying to send a 1 tonne probe to Pluto, that's a different story.
A fully refueled Starship in LEO has ~9km/s of delta-v with 1 tonne payload. Every km/s past escape velocity also has to be scrubbed off for reuse, so that's ~6km/s effective.
Even by Elon's optimistic figures, a full Starship refuel in LEO is around $20 million. Meanwhile SpaceX are likely currently producing Falcon 9 upper stages for less than that.
A fully fueled Falcon 9 upper stage in LEO with 1 tonne payload has a delta-v of ~10.7km/s. Clearly the superior option in this case.
Bin it!
I do not have high hopes of Starship ever becoming useful. At least one engine on every flight has canablized itself, there has yet to be a successful landing for either the Starship itself or Superheavy. Remember, part of being efficient and cost effective is reliableity, and so far Starship has shown it is the opposite.
If you want my deep opinions, watch my "spacex explosions" video.
The engines on both OFT-2 and OFT-3 worked through hot staging. On OFT-3 they got enough energy on Starship to get it into an orbit. I think that's pretty close to the "useful" standard.
My guess is that they will figure out super heavy RTLS pretty quick, though we're all waiting to see what happens when they try to catch one. I think starship will get into useful orbits pretty quick.
The open question is getting starship back through reentry to the earth. They obviously did not have good luck on the last flight. But that is probably technically the hardest thing they are doing and there's pretty much zero prior art .
I'll note that during Falcon 9 first stage reuse they crashed over and over and it seemed like they would never land one. And then the started landing them fairly regularly, and then quickly progressed to landing them every time.
TL;DR; don't judge the production vehicle by what's happening with development prototypes.
@EagerSpace I can, and I will, though. SpaceX is not changing the design enough during its "rapid" testing to make a noticeable difference, especially with the launch cadence being what it is. They have a deadline its called HLS and Artemis III.
Falcon 9 wasn't advertised as the rockets to end all rockets, though. I'll ask this, just because it can be done, does that mean it should be done?
@@EagerSpace The methane engine is still a prototype, and the propellant itself is untested technology. Attempting numerous innovations simultaneously could lead to an overwhelming number of bugs to address. The only feature it may share with the Falcon 9 is the RTLS capability.
@@EagerSpace Nobody is asking you to judge the production vehicle by what's happening with the prototypes, the real issues are:
1. No other launch vehicle develop programs do it this way, including programs from before computer aided design and simulation was a thing. They had higher or equal success rates, back in the 60s and 70s. Saturn V flew perfectly the first time, Russian rockets blew up more back then but even then it wasn't like they make a vehicle that has no hope of reaching orbit, and it blew up. They made fully ready vehicles that could've flown perfectly, but something went wrong and it blew up. Today, it is even more true, that nobody else does "prototype" like this, the only real explanation is this is a fireworks show, for investors.
2. Getting an empty Starship to orbit, while having expended too much propellent, which caused the recovery to fail, is not anywhere close to useful, or their claimed "100t+ to LEO".
3. F9 was first and foremost, a working launch vehicle, whether or not they could land it was not ever a dealbreaker, they can keep launching satellites even if the landing program goes nowhere. The same cannot be said of Starship, the whole point of Starship was rapid reusability, and they can't even get it into orbit in the first place.
4. To date, SpaceX have not demonstrated any actual financial saving through reuse of F9, NASA pays SpaceX more money, per seat to the ISS than they did for the Russian rockets. The fastest reuse of F9 first stage to date, took 30 days, or just as long as the Space Shuttle. SpaceX currently burns $2b per year on the Starship program, they launch twice a year for a per-launch cost of $1b, far higher than HLS. It is absolutely insane to believe they can get this cost down 1000x when the current Starship vehicles they're producing are just empty shells with no payload.
@@xponen "the propellant itself is untested technology." Vulcan and the Chinese Zhuque 3 use methane and other methane rockets are in development. It's easier to use than hydrogen and hydrogen fueled lower stages have been in use for a couple of decades. Raptor 2 is far beyond the prototype stage. The testing going on now on test stands at MacGregor is of Raptor 3.
99% of starship launches are gonna be starlinks, well have to wait at least 4 years until HLS flies. Private space stations will be done maybe in 10 years, and about mars colonization... Well thats just fantazy. So i dont see a great commercial market for starship except for starlink
Yep all you got to do is bribe the head of human spaceflight at NASA and boom you got the US government paying for your starlink pez dispenser.
That does sound reasonable. I think about 50% of Falcon is for Starlink, too. Very rough estimate.
It will take 2-3 years more for Starship to go operational reliably, in a sense that it will fly successfully more than two times per year and offer all it's features, i.e. cheapness with reusability and orbital re-tanking.
I can imagine private station prototypes to launch before 2030.
With Mars I 100% agree. Musk banks on cheap orbital launches in order make Mars a possibility, yet leaves out the fact that even with 0$ costs for transfer, building and operating a space mission is still very expensive. Artemis will likely show exactly that.
All that said, I find it very note-worthy that Starship after IFT3 is already a game-changer in mayn regards. I never would have thought so four years ago.
I think it's funny that you're making these claims on this TH-cam channel, I've never seen a TH-camr that's so factual and rigorous with their information.
And out of nowhere you make 5 huge claims without any proof. My problem is not with your opinion, I am interested in it, but if you are going to make such claims, you need to be able to back them up.
@@TheDj4088 That makes no sense.
I expect quite a few starlink launches, though I haven't run any numbers to see what the ongoing rate will be.
It's not clear what happens on the moon after HLS. Presumably we see the Blue Origin lander do a couple missions if it's available. NASA has big plans but I don't see how they pay for Artemis, Gateway, and anything meaningful even if they have one or two landers to do stuff.
Mars colonization is a longer term thing and I don't speculate on those sorts of timeframes.
One of my big points is that there's never been the capability to carry that amount of payload into LEO, and we're just in the very early stages of companies trying to figure out what to do with that. If a starship launch costs about what Falcon 9 does, I expect that there's going to be some major market upsets.
Would help if it could reach orbit first 😂
Anyway, Blue Origin’s Glenn will be far more successful, safe and reliable
Why do you think a company that has never launched a rocket to orbit will be more successful, safe, and reliable than one that has launched hundreds?
@@EagerSpace (Neither has Starship) Because getting to ORBIT isn’t their concern (why? Because marketing to space fanboys to raise phantom money isn’t) and they are the only serious space company when compared to the amateurish engineering approach of SpaceX. Blue Origins operates as a company should, focusing on results while SpaceX operates as a circus, showboating and hiding their failures to raise capital. If research BO, you’d find they are going to wreck this circus this decade.
@@EagerSpace I’ll explain further - If NASA did any of this back in 60s they’d be shut down next year permanently, yet here we have, a company that burns taxpayer dollars without honoring the contacts’ terms, always fails to deliver on milestones, acquires contracts (Artemis 3) with disgusting corruption, lies with every breath on camera, hyping up their livestreamed failures and marketing them as success to insult the intelligence of the viewers. SpaceX’s core engineering management who pioneered the Falcon9 landing system has long left the company.
@@EagerSpace Finally, Jeff Bezos stepped down from Amazon, and dedicates his full time to Blue Origin, you’d be intellectually dishonest if you think Jeff Bezos… the businessman man who built Amazon is not a monumental advantage in terms of management than the Twitter diva Elon who is a certified billionaire fraud.
@@EagerSpace it looks like you deleted my comments explaining in detail… or perhaps they are “pending review” on your channel. I’m not sure but likely you’ll remove this too considering you seem to be under the influence of ElonMusk KoolAid but comparing the Starship program to Falcon program is a hilariously naive and misleading take. The programs themselves have nothing in common than a “rocket go space wooooo” and the management and engineering teams are completely different.
4 refueling ships isn't enough.
It'll take nearly a dozen refueling ships
My model shows 4 ships is enough
@@EagerSpace
Does that account for boil off?
In a video published by Smarter everyday suggests that 4 ships won't be enough.
Would you like to respond to that video's claims?
@@sidharthcs2110 That's four ships to TLI/GEO. I haven't done the math to confirm, but it sounds about right.
For Artemis, Starship isn't going just to TLI/GEO. It will be going all the way to moons surface, lifting off again and returning to near rectilinear halo orbit. This is a completely different use case, requiring full tanks.
@@SpaceAdvocate
Thank you , I got both missions mixed up
You forgot starship can refuel in LEO ,and go to GEO!
The video literally talks about that.
@@EagerSpace I'm sorry, I didn't watch the whole video. My bad!
I’m kind of baffled by how someone so well versed in the subject like you, still takes Starship seriously.
The third launch just demonstrated clear as day, the vehicle can barely reach orbital velocity with a completely empty interior, and both stages did not manage to conserve enough propellant for their planned deceleration/landing maneuvers.
This is clearly a scam, the most expensive mock-up in history for the sole purpose of securing more private investment, as well as government funding.
Scroll down and ready my reply to @ViperPilot16.
This has to be bait, there was a very long propellant dump after insertion because of all the leftover propellant it had. believe it or not, they weren't trying to get into full orbit
@@reagank.2268 it's not a propellant dump it's a leak....
You don't understand Elon. They move forward by blowing things up, even launch pads.
@@reagank.2268keep drinking the Nazi kool-aid.
"You launch 15 tons, 🛰and what do you get? another day older & deeper in debt".........Chevy Chase