Mr. Haney.
That does indeed seem much roomier proposition. I had the mental image of a bunch of expressive creative types crammed into a snug capsule. Maybe squabbling over whose turn it to use the video camera for a selfie.
I guess we will be well accustomed to the remarkable size of this spaceship by the time it is ready for their excursion.
Launching large numbers of satellites into orbit may not attract as much public interest as flying crew of media savvy creatives around the moon. But I am sure it is Starlink and other satellite payloads that will generate the revenue to pay the bills.
How many successful orbital launches and returns before the technology is considered proven for human use, I wonder?
That brings up a question about starship being used as a lunar lander. Will the astronauts transfer from Orion by EVA, or are there hatches to connect the two craft?
Why is there an 18-24 month gap between Artemis 1 and Artemis 2?
As I understand it, the two missions use essentially the same hardware, so nothing new to develop/test.
According to Wiki it’s because of “the need to recycle and refurbish components from Orion that flew on Artemis 1”.
I suppose the gap has also been built to study Artemis 1 and implement any fixes or improvements from their learnings. Plus there are some new elements such as space suits.
The idea of Starship landing on the lunar surface is still quite incredible to me. A reusable lunar lander! It’s incredible.
Actually, here’s a question about the Space Shuttle, and it also applies to Starship.
It seems to me that these crafts are doing two unrelated jobs.
- Ferry people up and down to and from orbit
- Maneuver in orbit, for example fly put to service a telescope (shuttle) or take people to the moon (starship).
These two jobs have totally different requirements. A craft that reenters the atmosphere will need lots of heavy shielding, which will need to be carefully serviced after every use. The smaller the craft, the better, since that means less area to shield. If it will be doing its own thrusting, it needs engines that work well in atmosphere.
A craft that moves from one orbit to another doesn’t need that kind of shielding at all, but it does need lots of living space for the crew, which means the bigger the better. Aerodynamics don’t matter, and the engines should work well in a vacuum.
By combining the two roles, we get opposing design goals tugging us this way and that, leading to compromise. Hence, the Shuttle, and also Starship.
But it seems to me that the roles don’t have to be combined. What if we had two crafts - one, not much larger than a fighter jet, would be the top stage of a reusable rocket, and carry people into space or back down. The other could be as big as you wanted it to - basically a space station with engines, that permenantly stays in space, either with a skeleton crew in Earth orbit, or it can be loaded up with a larger crew and sent to high orbit, to rendezvous with a satellite, or even to the moon.
The space station would seem to prove that a craft of this scale could be maintained in orbit indefinitely. It even has small thrusters. The only thing it doesn’t have are full on engines, but if we can maintain every other part of the ISS I don’t see why engines couldn’t be done.
So… what’s the big advantage of having the “take people to orbit” vehicle and the “travel around in space” vehicle be the same vehicle, that massively outweighs the benefits of decoupling performance in space from performance in reentry? I must be missing SOMETHING there.
I think one of the reasons for a large lunar lander is to carry equipment to construct permanent shelters on the moon, and equipment larger than a lunar buggy.
Then why travel to the moon in Orion and land in a Starship that made the same journey, and can return to Earth by itself?
Well, that’s what I’m saying. Using a regular Starship to ferry people and equipment between the moon’s surface and orbit is dumb. Wouldn’t it make more sense to design a variant Starship that cuts the equipment necessary for landing on Earth (ablative shielding, aerodynamic surfaces, engines powerful enough to fight 9.8 m/s^2 of gravity in an atmosphere, etc) and instead allow for more payload mass to be moved on and off the moon?
That Starship can permenantly stay on the moon (if a base is constructed) or in its orbit (if there’s a station there). Meanwhile, a different Starship -also without ablative shielding, but this one with no landing gear either - could be used in space, while a third craft is the only one that lands on and takes off from Earth.
And since they’re three different vessels, you don’t HAVE to make them all Starships. In fact, the design of one isn’t constrained by the others at all (aside from where you can use common parts to benefit from economies of scale).
It seems to me like the three jobs are so different, that building a single vehicle to do all three is as impractical and foolish as building a flying road-legal submarine.
They foolishly threw away their rocket. (-: So they have to build a new one. And each one is bespoke. There is no assembly line. And for political reasons, the construction and assembly of the rocket is about as complicated and dispersed as it can be.
Hey, it takes a lot of work to get the price of a rocket launch up to $4 billion dollars.
That’s essentially what they are doing. The Lunar Starship is not capable of returning to the surface of Earth. It has no heat shields, its landing engines are in a ring halfway up the vehicle, etc. It’s optimized as much as possible for lunar lander use, withiut designing an entirely new vehicle from scratch.
I’m not even sure it will be reusable. I think the contract for the second lunar landing involves a second HLS Starship, not a reuse of the first.
I would think they would want to do a very thorough inspection of HLS once it returns from the lunar surface. Lubar dust can get into everything, and it’s really nasty stuff. But how thoroughly can they inspect it without landing it back on Earth? An operational detail that will have to be solved. Maybe they’ll use a fresh one for people, and use the first used one in unmanned mode to drop cargo on the surface to prove out its ability to make multiple trips.
(written while Sam Stone was posting, so slightly redundant)
That’s exactly what they’re doing. The lunar Starship has no aero surfaces, heat shielding, etc. It adds landing legs and a few other things required for the Moon.
We’ll see several Starship variants. Already we know of a propellant depot variant as well, which sits in LEO and has some extra insulation and cryo equipment to keep the propellant liquid. There may be a tanker variant that just shuttles propellant from Earth to LEO. There will be a Starlink satellite “Pez dispenser” variant. A standard cargo variant for normal satellites. A passenger variant, which will be used for dearMoon. And, long-term, probably a couple of Mars variants.
They’re all the same basic architecture to save development costs. Same engines, same diameter, same materials. Some will be stretched/shortened, the fitting of the payload bay will be very different, and so on. But that should be cheaper than developing all new vehicles each time.
BTW, the Sea Dragon–a design study for a super heavy rocket that would have made Starship look tiny–was intended to be made in a submarine drydock, and using largely the same materials and construction techniques.
It does make me wonder why they didn’t make a ‘stubby’ Starship for their lunar lander. As it is, they are way, way over the minimum specs NASA requires. A shorter, lighter Starship would require fewer tanking flights, the elevator would be a little less daunting, it would be more stable on landing and still be an order of magnitude larger than any competing design.
They could probably cut 30ft out of the cargo/crew area and still leave a nice 2-3 story living/cargo area ten times the size of any other lander. At least 500 sq m
I’m not sure that’s out of the question yet. We still haven’t seen a final design. Last I saw, they haven’t even decided whether to have the ring thrusters or not. The ring assembly technique would make it easy to build a stubby version if desired.
This isn’t good:
The Russian space program has been going downhill for years, and I’m sure the sanctions and other effects from the Ukraine war aren’t helping matters. But the Soyuz has generally been a reliable craft, so it seems the rot in their space program continues to spread.
Video of the leak:
What is that, an IR or some other special camera?
I think they just cranked the brightness way up.
Is glow of superior technology of People’s Super Duper Socialist Spacekraft.
I wouldn’t want to ride that Soyuz home. There is always a spacecraft docked to the station to evacuate the crew, but is there one that serves as a spare? I imagine there is a procedure to get an empty spacecraft to dock and evacuate other crew members.
A physics lesson. The particles keep their velocity and keep on going in a weightless vacuum. Cool.
It is pretty neat to see the droplets radiate away in essentially straight lines
There are six vehicles currently docked at the ISS:
Cygnus-18 freighter
CRS-26 Dragon cargo
Crew-5 Dragon Endurance
MS-22 Soyuz crew
Progress 81 resupply
Progress 82 resupply
Only the Crew Dragon and Soyuz vehicles are rated for crew. And the Dragon can only carry four. So, no spare.
In a true life-or-death emergency, the cargo Dragon could be ridden back, or more people stuffed into the Crew Dragon. But it wouldn’t be a fun ride. Cygnus and Progress don’t come back to Earth (except in tiny particles).
Early assessment is that the Soyuz is still usable, though I still wouldn’t want to be a cosmonaut on the ISS right now: