Elon says SpaceX Starship with improved Raptor 3 engines should lift 300 tons in expendable mode which should mean mean 180 tons in reusable mode.
The International Space Station weighs about 420 tons and took about fifty space shuttle launches to build. The Starship upper stage has more volume than the International Space Station. A larger, stretched Starship upper stage could be built and launched to enable larger space stations by just leaving Starships in orbit.
An older SpaceX design was the Interplanetary Transport System. This older design was larger than the Starship Superheavy. ITS would outperform the Saturn V by a factor of 4.1 on the mass delivered to Low Earth Orbit. In a fully expendable configuration, ITS would loft a LEO payload of 550 metric tons while the reusable booster can send 300 metric tons into orbit. The improving Raptor engines are getting to 60% of the proposed ITS capability.
If SpaceX achieved a further 20% improvement in the Raptor engines could enable about 360 tons in expendable mode and 216 tons in reusable mode.
Starship payload is 250 to 300 tons to orbit in expendable mode.
Improved thrust & Isp from Raptor will enable ~6000 ton liftoff mass.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2023
Two years ago Elon estimated a Starship would lift 250 tons to orbit in expandable mode and 150 tons in reusable mode. If Starship can be optimized with improved Raptor 3 engines for 300 tons in expendable mode then this should mean 180 tons in reusable mode.
Well-optimized Starship would do ~250 tons to orbit as expendable & ~150 tons fully reusable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2021
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First Starship has to take successful test flights. It seems we’re far from that. Even getting permission to launch is a daunting task.
SpaceX is currently at Falcon 1 stage with Starship.
“Even getting permission to launch is a daunting task.”
Which is to my point about highly probable DOD interest in Superheavy/Starship (if it works as promised) for their uses. One thing to sue to stop a “crazy rich man” who wants to “colonize Mars” quite another matter to stand in the way of what DOD/Pentagon/NSA/CIA wants. They want to be able to orbit large masses for SDI/spysats/SpaceForce/etc. Don’t think a lawsuit will stop them from getting what they want. Sure Musk is smart enough to make use of that even it that isn’t his ultimate purpose in developing it.
Talk to me when you make it to LEO then again when you land. You’ve only proved you can make steel get to mach 2 and explode. Not mach 24 and come home.
But of course… in a couple of test flights we will get to this point.
Sure, because they have failed every single rocket project they committed to build?
Eh, not really. I wouldn’t bet against SpaceX.
The real value will be larger more powerful satellites for DOD; thinking not only spy-sats but SDI/SpaceForce components. Limiting factor for anti missile powerful laser/particle beam Sats was mass; once you get to a solid state laser of useful power output (megawatt or greater) you start running into the 100’s of tons. No longer prohibitively expensive with reusable heavy lift. Don’t know if said superheavy/Starship will ever be used for manned much outside of the Earth-Moon (basically Cis-lunar) space. For going to Mars/Asteroid belt and beyond I would expect a more proper manned interplanetary (likely nuclear powered) vehicle assembled in orbit from multiple superheavy/Starship launches. In the meantime Musk’s profit bread and butter would be launching larger more complex Sats; also possibly site to site transfers of men/material anywhere on Earth in approx an hour for some sort of DOD “rapid deployment force”.
Crucial factor for safety is ability to defeat a Kessler cascade. Ground-based lasers would need to deliver about 1 megawatt of laser heating over 5 minutes to vaporize small metal chunks. Factors are: ‘specific heat capacity’ (titanium is about same as iron); albedo/absorption of light by target metal, beam spread, focus time, amospheric losses, radiative losses if heating is too slow.
Putting a 500 MW laser in orbit would do this now, but would need small reactor. Best option might be putting parts on moon, assemble there, so no risk could change orbit, reenter atmo, ‘meltdown’ poison Earth.
I’d guess a 100 MW nuclear pile would mass 100 tons to 1000 tons, would need lots of mass for radiative coolers and coolant. Note, I’m a software engineer and armchair guesser, defer to powerplant mass of L.A. class nuclear subs, maybe?
“I’d guess a 100 MW nuclear pile would mass 100 tons to 1000 tons..”
So at 180MT per launch you could put up a 1800MT payload in 10 flights; DOD might buy/lease 50-100 Superheavy/Starships exclusively for their use. Five flights a day would put up ~ 300K metric tons of payload in orbit per year. In ten years 3 million metric tons of payload launched into orbit. More than enough for SDI/Starwars/SpaceForce and whatever else they would want to do. Musk’s goal of going to Mars would largely be a sideline as far as profits to SpaceX would be concerned.
Too bad Bigelow doesn’t seem to be doing anything anymore. A Starship + inflateable combo would mean a massive space station. A single launch would dwarf the ISS.
Sierra Nevada is working on inflatable habitats. And they seem to get along with SpaceX, so there’s a chance of that.
Aesthetically offensive? There must be another, more distasteful, motive.
Is there anyone out there thinking SpaceX should add an optional 3rd stage thats reusable to Starship? I’m thinking a tricked-out winged crew transport to eliminate the flip landing turn with crew aboard. This is one of the many options for a 3rd stage. You could add a 45 foot/D fairing as another option.
Make a 16-20 foot/diameter methane version of the F9 too and retire F9/Heavy. S3XY.
I’m having trouble seeing the scenario where this is useful.
Remember, the Starship doesn’t have to be manned to fly most missions. And SpaceX already has the Dragon capsule that’s man rated. If they wanted to bring people down from orbit, why wouldn’t they use that?
Most likely they’ll continue to use the Falcon/Dragon combo for manned flights until they’ve flown so many Starship missions successfully that NASA relents and man rates it.
Up to 300 tons to orbit? A foldable or inflatable station? Esp with an extended fairing like the 10m+
You dont need people on the ship at time of launch
The top half of a cargo variant of the Starship would basically be a fairing anyway, all adding a third stage to that would do is add more engine mass for the sake of it when the ones you have already put you in orbit.
>I’m having trouble seeing the scenario where this is useful.
land a crew on Mars, perhaps?
Literally thousands of scenarios where higher payload to orbit in one go is useful. THINK!
Retropropulsive landing on Mars is essential, due to the thin atmosphere, and the Starship was actually designed with landing on Mars in mind, remember.
How about a Starship where the cargo section is detachable, for use as a station or satellite, and a crewed section on top of the tank/propulsion section and make a space tug.
This is one of the post-Moon phase applications for the Saturn series that was proposed and studied.
Or a small crew section on top of the tanks and engine section, and make a space tug after dropping off the cargo/research section.
Which is, not surprisingly, one of the many proposals for post-Moon Saturn applications. A powered space tug.
It’s been obvious since Skylab that the best way to loft space station segments is by launching rockets whose tanks are designed to be used as living space once in orbit.
You’d have a reduced payload section which just contained the fittings that needed environmental protection, and the necessary tools. The rest of the rocket would be enlarged tankage with flow-through grid flooring already installed, ports, airlocks, and utility pass throughs behind protective covers that would keep the fuel away from them, and be removed in orbit.
The only reason Nasa hadn’t been doing this is that they find this approach aesthetically offensive. They could easily have built a space station this way out of the Shuttle external tanks, for instance, as was continually being pointed out to them at the time. They were violently opposed to the idea.
The same principle, of course, applies to a Moon base. Forget all those fancy plans Nasa has, it should be composed of the tanks from one-way lander missions.
Yea but that was before we had things like inflatable habitats. And you can develop automated assembly of a station unlike before
If all you need is the space then building structures out of empty tanks is a good idea.
Space isn’t *all* you need, but it’s sure nice to have. Especially if you want to experiment with genuinely closed life support systems.
The tank is a pressure vessel designed for fuel. Not so sure that putting extraneous items inside before launch will keep the tank structurally sound enough to withstand the forces of a launch. Could put inflatable items inside after launch, but need a hatch. That could create fuel leakage problems (through hatch sealing gaskets) and structural issues but is likely technically doable.
The sheer size of the station we’d have now if they kept using the Saturn V (or a modernised variant) instead of the Shuttle boggles the mind. Dozens of Skylabs bolted together in a large ring… We could be so far ahead of where we are now, in terms of microgravity research.
Many lessons learned from ISS: vibrations aren’t dampened in resonant structures, and things are always more resonant than you think. The truss arms turned out to have standing waves that shook the station, they had to tune where things were attached to prevent this…
SO: a ring structure might never have worked, it needs shock absorbers and moving mass-dampers, complex interlinks in 3-D to prevent resonances. Think: Borg cube, not 2001-Space-Odyssey long-thin-truss.
GOOD: trusses linking starship-habs, held in 3-D.
BETTER: Counter-rotating rings, with central non-rotating zero-G core. Humans need gravity, a lot. Min distance of human to center of rotation – per NASA – is 3 meters (I read it was 14 feet), much better if this is 25 meters so fewer motion sickness worries.