Yeah, orbital refueling basically the gating technology for significant development beyond Earth orbit. We just barely landed people on the Moon with a 3-stage single-use rocket using hydrogen propellant. Sending significant mass to the asteroid belt or Mars or whatever can’t be done like that. All of Starship’s missions beyond LEO depend on refueling.
Everyone that isn’t SpaceX will eventually discover the same truth. Cheap launch requires full reusability. And you can have full reusability, but it costs so much performance that you’re limited to LEO. Therefore you must refuel in orbit to regain that performance–which is relatively cheap because you’re fully reusable. It resets the rocket equation, which is notoriously “tyrannical”.
The earliest depiction of asteroids as rubble piles that I’ve encountered yet!
Here’s an interesting graphic I ran across: it shows how much the mass for a round-trip to the moon could be reduced depending on how much refueling is available and where (of course the fuel has to come from somewhere; the presumption is lunar propellent production and LEO/ L1 depots fueled from the moon):
Orbital refueling is one of two badly neglected technologies that Apollo skipped over in favor of specializing in a “dog sled to the South Pole” approach to get to the moon as fast as possible. The other is rotational gravity. Both are indispensable if we’re ever going to have any meaningful manned presence in space.
I don’t think there’s any question that we ultimately need a space station that’s more depot and utility station than research outpost. My dream plan is for such a facility to become the hub of a manufacturing facility that will construct space-to-space vessels. We don’t need a dedicated vessel to take a lander all the way from the Earth’s surface to lunar orbit, or fuel tanks to Mars, or mining drones to the Belt. We need what amounts to tug boats that can haul standard packages around the system.
And yet the genius of Starship is that because it’s not specialized as a spaceplane like the Shuttle was, once refueled it can also be an orbital transfer vehicle and with very little modification both a lunar and Mars lander. This might end up working better than the old presumption of specialized vehicles for each leg of the trip. It’s close to the old concept of a “rocket ship”, albeit one without the ridiculous amounts of delta-v it was presumed atomic energy would provide.
Is this some sort of joke I’m not in on? Or am I going crazy? To me this video looks very obviously like CGI, but the posts and commenters are talking like they believe it is real?
Why don’t you think it’s real? It’s filmed with a high-performance drone with camera tracking, and IMO is nausea-inducing, but there’s nothing impossible about it. It’s not that large a craft and they aren’t doing anything that SpaceX didn’t do a decade ago (or the DC-X did decades earlier). Drones can easily go 100+ mph these days and zip around in arbitrary directions.
ETA: The distortion from the wide-angle lens also makes it look a little CGI-like, but there’s nothing impossible about that, either.
I didn’t spot a shadow either. But the rocket is 3.35 m diameter. The drone might only be a tenth of that–and much of that in a sparse structure that doesn’t leave much of a shadow. Could easily get lost in the pixels.
My copy of Eric Berger’s Reentry is on its way. Hopefully it arrives before the weekend.
Ars put a chapter of it up:
SpaceX owes a lot to Phil McAlister. When NASA was deciding between Boeing and SpaceX for Commercial Crew, Boeing was looking like a sure bet. But McAlister asked a few very important questions that gave them the chance. For one:
McAlister asked if the veteran procurement official had ever seen a federal agency choose a bidder that cost 60 percent more when both bids were technically acceptable.
And the response (from someone that had voted Boeing):
McNally shifted uncomfortably in his seat at this question. Eventually he remarked that the source selection official, Gerstenmaier, could do whatever he pleased. McAlister pressed further, repeating the question. “No,” McNally replied. “That would be uncharted territory.”
And then:
Next, McAlister questioned the engineer representing safety and mission assurance, Deirdre Healey. When she had spoken, Healey said the safety division preferred Boeing as long as the company performed an in-flight test of its spacecraft’s abort system—powerful thrusters that push the vehicle away in case the rocket malfunctions during launch. But Boeing did not plan to do so. Their bid included a ground test of this abort system, not one in flight. McAlister seized on this, asking Healey if this meant Boeing’s proposal should really be considered unsatisfactory.
And in the “aged like milk” category:
A few weeks later I had an interview with John Elbon, a long-time engineer at Boeing who managed the company’s commercial program. As we talked, he tut-tutted SpaceX’s performance to date, noting its handful of Falcon 9 launches a year and inability to fly at a higher cadence. As for Musk’s little Dragon event, Elbon was dismissive.
“We go for substance,” Elbon told me. “Not pizzazz.”
Frankly, this is the kind of event that shows why NASA is no longer capable of managing a space program. Everything they do costs more than it should and works less often that it should because NASA is a Congressional jobs program. They should write requirements and then get the fuck out of the way and let the bidders figure out how to make it happen. If they had, in 2018, given SpaceX + 2 other rando companies the amount they’ve spent on Artemis to date (with many more billions to go), we’d have men on Luna now or expected to there next year at the latest. NASA is now an antagonist of practical human spaceflight.
In that a substantial human presence on the moon is not of practical use? I’m inclined to agree. In the medium term, an automated facility for collecting and refining certain materials could be worthwhile. There are useful minerals accessible at the Lunar surface, and if a practical automated system could be built to extract them, lifting them from Lunar gravity would be cheaper than launching them from Earth.
Even so, asteroid mining is likely to be a better solution in the long term, in my opinion, so the trade-offs would have to be weighed carefully.
“The trajectory was nominal throughout,” he said on the company’s launch webcast. “We did, however have an observation on SRB No. 1, so we will be off looking at that after the mission is complete.” No other details were provided.
“An observation.” Ha! Half of the SRB nozzle exploded and it’s just “an observation.” Even “anomaly” is apparently too strong a term here.
