There is some debate on how many people could fit inside SpaceX Starships that are converted into Space Stations. We can get a better maximum estimate by looking at the Apollo mission and German and American submarines.
Apollo’s Command Module had a diameter of 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) and a height of 11.4 feet (3.47 meters). Total dry weight was 12,787 pounds (5,800 kg) and its crew cabin volume was 218 cubic feet (6.17 cubic meters). This held three astronauts for about one week. If one were to pack Astronauts with Apollo standards then 400 could fit into the 1000 cubic meters of the SpaceX Starship. Tripling the space given for each Starship Astronaut would still leave room for 150.
Type VII U-boats were the most common type of German World War II U-boat. They were notorious for being cramped. They had about 800 cubic meters of volume and a lot of the space was for torpedos, fuel and engines. They could hold a crew of about 52.
The current crew capacity permitted on the International Space Station is limited to how many can be evacuated in the event of a disaster. A SpaceX Starship space station can have high capacity Starships for evacuation. 500-1000 people could be packed in like people on a passenger plane.
There is a Youtuber channel called Common Sense Skeptic who criticizes (or debunks) claims that the Starship could hold 100 people on a trip to Mars. This is different question than how many can be in an Earth orbiting Starship. The Skeptic makes a big deal calculating the food and water needed for a 9 month trip.
UPDATE : Common Sense Skeptic says nine month travel time in his calculations is changed to 6-months.
Skeptic says Another error you’ve made, likely knowingly, is saying we use the nine month travel time in our calculations. Now, despite that being a number generally agreed upon by NASA and others (where nobody in their right mind supports a three-month travel window), we moved out calculations to 6-months to accommodate people like yourself.
And finally, NASA has calculated their Minimal Habitable Volume ratio for astronauts enduring a longer space flight. It’s 25 cubic meters. The imagined interior volume of Starship’s cargo bay was set at 875 cubic meters (as a completely empty chamber with no deckheads) when we did our first episode on the topic. We took half of that volume away for stress/gears/equipment/tanks and came to the conclusion there was possibly enough room for 17 people.
Nextbigfuture response – Skeptic is fixated on the 100 person max-crew for a single SpaceX Starship on slides made a few years ago. I am interested in how we can safely send lots of people to Mars to achieve the big goal of a Mars City. SpaceX Raptor engines are being improved and will enable Starship to reach 300 tons of non-reused launcher payload. This will enable a larger volume Starship. Assembling multiple Starships in orbit, will enable a larger mission with water or supplies acting as radiation shielding. Refueling in orbit means more delta-V and faster transit options. It would better to build bigger and send more Starships on each fleet going to Mars. It will also be useful to send unmanned missions first to have supplies waiting along the way. The D-Day invasion was made with 7000 ships. They did not try to cram the maximum number of troops into each ship or a single ship.
Space Missions to Mars up to now have been small satellites where the entire mission was launched from Earth. The delta-V has been about 3.2 to 3.5 kilometers per second. An hyperbolic orbit depending on aerocapture for braking can reduce this to 90-150 days depending on the year of travel. For example in aug. 2020 for a delta-V of 4.8 km/s Mars could be reached in 96 days according to the Trajectory Browser.
By refueling the SpaceX Starship in orbit and assembling a few stages in high orbit, a large chemically powered space mission can get up around 9.0 kilometer per second delta-V.
The new Raptor version 3 engines could enable the Super Heavy Starship to lift 300 tons into orbit. The Starship would be fully refueled in orbit before going to Mars. The 300 ton capacity for a Mars trip, perhaps double the internal volume and a shorter travel time of 90-100 days would totally invalidate the Common Sense Skeptic analysis. Multiple SpaceX Starships can be used for the Mars mission. They could dock and share their living space.
Crewmembers could be sedated and placed into a Topor state. This would reduce the amount of food and water needed.
The Ohio class US submarine has about 18000 cubic feet of volume and has a crew of 160. They are designed to go underwater for months.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
So its sorted…
Musk versus CommonSenseSkeptic in a cage fight !
Get your tickets please….
Brian,
You made a big mistake engaging with CSS. The videos I published attacking his warped claims just fed his public exposure. Now, he has even more.
Hi Angry Astronaut, that is the way of the internet. People fight on the internet, there is controversy and both sides get some more exposure. He was ranting that I was riding his coattails. He might make a video attacking me. I don’t care.
BTW: I liked your Space station video. We should talk about it sometime.
I predict that the first parts of the first three items will be settled in 2024.
* Starlink will be profitable. The evidence for this might not be conclusive until there are financials released as part of an IPO.
* Starship will become operational. It will successfully fly to orbit in one of the next three launches.
* Tesla Cybertruck will sell over 50k units in 2024.
Tesla will not become bankrupt.
He ran away.
My last messages to him before he disabled direct messaging. – I said- No more BS that I did not try to get your side. You are the coward who could not handle talking. Bye bye whiny baby. I will still remind you when your crap predictions are wrong. STARLINK profitable. Starship regularly flying. Cybertruck selling in the hundreds of thousands. Great for humanity and I will get to rub it in your face as a bonus. You are very thin skinned for an internet troll. When those things happen I will get to humiliate you repeatedly afterward. Not for clicks. Not for ad revenue. Just for the I told you so and you were wrong and stupid. You get your traffic now but your humiliation will be perpetual
CSS said – Not thin skinned at all – just no time for people like you. Time murdering coat tail rider.
Cyber truck will flop.
Starship will be shitcanned.
Tesla will die from a thousand cuts.
Starlink never hits profitability.
====
But he still ran away. He can’t take it. In 2024, Cybertruck passes 50,000 production, Starship is flying, Starlink IPOs and the profits are shown. All things they said will never happen. Tesla gets more and more profitable. Morons who a hundred fifty years ago would betting against Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
====
I want a ring station cycler for Starship to dock to.
What’s another scientific neutral view from a third party?
(Having access to ChatGPT i would provide a summary like below with naming ChatGPT being source)
“ChatGPT’s opinion (short version) on “Youtuber Common Sense Skeptic”, intention and each point (?)”
I have screen-capped the claims and counter claims made here. I look forward to reviewing these in 2030 to see who was right and who was wrong.
There is an issue with your statements Brian. Math dusproves most if musk’s claims. Common sense skeptic thunderfoot and others are the ones doing the math for everyone to see. Attacking someone becase they take the time to show you that something does not add up is childish at best. Also because their reputation has been consistently accurate (and you value track records because you always point out nbf acvuracy) musk very iften over promised and under delivered in an abysmal way (vegas hyperloop, cybertruck, full self driving, truck convoys, solar city, and yes even starship)
I have showed their Math is wrong and their predictions are wrong. Also, Musk (and others) being late is not the same as Musk being wrong.
Yes, Musk promises many things. All he is doing is bringing up 75% of space payload mass to orbit and pushed Russia, China and Ariane Europe almost completely out of commercial launch.
He proved that electric cars can be commercially successful, which was not the case before he started. Tesla has 60-70% market share for electric cars in North America. Tesla has about 40% market share in Europe and Asia for electric cars in its price segment.
CS Skeptic says Starlink revenue will NEVER exceed $6 billion. This is wrong.
Cost calculations for CS Skeptic and Thunderfoot are wrong. Usually by 4 to 10 times.
Getting revenue and costs wrong by 4-10X each ends up with wrong conclusions.
CS Skeptic said Hughesnet and Viasat would beat Starlink. Hughesnet has been saying that they are losing 30k-60k customers each quarter. Viasat has growing financial net loss. No positive net income.
Thunderfoot said the concrete barriers carried by the Semi were 6 feet long and weighed 4000 lbs. I counted the pixels and compared to known height and length objects in frames and confirmed those were 10 foot long jersey barriers that weigh 10,000 lbs each.
For point to point on Earth travel, they both assume both the Starship and the booster are used. This is wrong. It is only the single stage Starship.
I take the time to show exactly where they are wrong and where their analysis does not add up.
Hey Brian,
Your article is quite incorrect on a number of fronts. For example, we never said the StarLink programme will never make more than $6billion in revenue. We demonstrated how the financial is unsustainable and will never generate the profits Musk said it would. And that holds up, since Musk still requires VC money to the lights on at star link.
Another error you’ve made, likely knowingly, is saying we use the nine month travel time in our calculations. Now, despite that being a number generally agreed upon by NASA and others (where nobody in their right mind supports a three-month travel window), we moved out calculations to 6-months to accommodate people like yourself.
And finally, NASA has calculated their Minimal Habitable Volume ratio for astronauts enduring a longer space flight. It’s 25 cubic meters. The imagined interior volume of Starship’s cargo bay was set at 875 cubic meters (as a completely empty chamber with no deckheads) when we did our first episode on the topic. We took half of that volume away for stress/gears/equipment/tanks and came to the conclusion there was possibly enough room for 17 people.
Now, we can go on like this all day, ripping apart your claims of “exactly where we went wrong,”
OR,
Next time you mention us in an article perhaps have the stones to interview us directly since you apparently need a brushing up on the facts and how we come to our determinations.
Brian, your numbers for the Ohio class don’t agree with the source you cite. The source gives the Ohio class as having approximately 24K m cubed with a crew of 155. That gives a volume per person of 154m cubed. At that cubage you only support 6 astronauts in a Starship.
Using the per person cubage of an Anchorage class LSD, like I served on, which was 75 m cubed with complement and marines (not forgetting to exclude the volume of the well deck. You get about 13 in a Starship.
The weakness of using ships for your calculations is that much of the interior volume is taken up with the main propulsion machinery, which is of course external to the Starship
The claims he makes are rife with errors like this. We just demonstrated three biggies in a previous reply.
Glad to see someone else catching his errors.
You would probably enjoy our episode dedicated directly to sub life vs starship life.
https://youtu.be/8sMl6_mSSa8
If you give it a watch, leave us your feedback 🙂
As a more impartial observer, I think both you and Brian have some factual gaps. It would serve you all well to approach these debates with more humility and willingness to understand/steelman each other’s perspectives rather than just ‘to win’. Brian’s point about Thunderf00t making the error with the jersey barriers hauled by the Tesla Semi are a good example.
The goal of these debates is to be less wrong, and to get a better understanding of reality and what is likely to happen.
Musk definitely does overpromise and underdeliver. But he delivers a lot, and much more than critics ever thought he would be able to. Not all of his ideas are winners, but to say all of his businesses are doomed to fail doesn’t comport with how wildly dominant they are in their industries.
So, to catch you up, he’s referring to a video that’s three years old now, that still stands quite well on its own, with thousands of comments attached including from submariners who confirm we are on the right track. The video also enjoys a 95% approval rating with views in the 6 figures.
And in the past three years, our investigations have only gotten better, more in depth, more conclusive.
We’ll take our approach over Brian’s any day.
You are getting approval in an echo chamber of Musk haters. Irrelevent.
You are fixated on 100 people figure mentioned in one slide. Raptor 3 engines and soon hot staging will increase the payload to orbit. Perhaps to 330 tons in an expendable mode.
Larger version of Starship can be made with larger payloads and better engines.
More Starships can be sent. Unmanned Starships can be sent first and with any crew or colonists. It is not necessary or wise to maximize the people placed into a Starship most of the time. People can be packed in for 30-60 minutes for point to point travel on Earth. Even 500-1000 people. After tens of thousands or millions of paid cargo missions prove safety.
Starships in Earth orbit can have more people inside for different duration and different reasons.
There is no benefit to proving more people can go to Mars in a Starship. There is no prize for setting a capacity record. There is no lets pack people in like a clown car. The prize is developing and colonizing Mars. There is no prize for matching some 2016 slides.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/06/we-will-build-cruise-ships-in-space-so-radiation-problems-of-life-rafts-go-away.html
While it’s physically possible to use that hyperbolic trajectory, it hardly makes sense to. Colonists would naturally want to prioritize chance of success over comfort during the trip, (They’re signing on for a very uncomfortable and risky life, after all!) and taking the low energy trajectory puts much more in the way of cargo on Mars per colonist, as well as minimizing the risk of the aerobraking maneuver when arriving at Mars.
This is still consistent with keeping the radiation dose during the trip down, because you can place the living capsules down the spine of the ship, with essential life support, and surround them with cargo deployed as radiation shielding. This at the tankage end of the Starship, reserving the other end for open space for exercise and socializing. So everybody sleeps in the storm shelter, and it is already set up to be comfortable enough without any redundant hardware, if people have to spend an extended period in it.
The first arrivals will certainly be the kind of person willing to endure some discomfort. Having the settler mentality, and going there for taking part in the construction of a new world.
Besides, they won’t have much of a choice, with Starship being the first and only method of travel, in whatever way it is, it will be take it or forget about it.
Later arrivals, a few years or decades later, will eventually include a lot of “daring” tourists and people just seeking experiences and returning. That public will start wanting some additional comforts. But the process of improvement will be slow.
It’s a nascent industry after all, with almost everything pending to be defined by experience.
Musk could set up a tether assist for departure, that would be good for an extra 3k/s or so. But I tend to think they’d keep the low energy trajectory for colonists, and start using a cycler for the trip, instead. It would still be more efficient.
48 seems like about the most you’d want to have spending months together in transit to Mars, and even then you’d probably split them into at least two shifts, probably four or even six, to spread out use of different areas and facilities.
200m^3 for sleeping/personal space,
60m^3 sanitary facilities,
40m^3 food prep,
100m^3 dining/conversation,
100m^3 plumbing/life-support/recycling,
50m^3 exercise,
50m^3 command deck and window area,
200m^3 general activity area,
200m^3 storage and airlocks – some supplies and equipment could be shifted outside during transit – allowing more cargo (using the general activity area during launch/landing) or more open space during transit.
I also find the comparison of a Starship to a Submarine interesting. Trouble is, it evokes the militarization of space. We can resist that evolution, but it seems inevitable, unless we suddenly find ourselves in a StarTrek economy.
– Now….what would that Torpedo Tube be used for? Rapid Response Interplanetary Satellites?
– And…how nimble can we make that craft, say in Cislunar space? From stationary in L4 to Stationary in L5 in how many…hours?
– And would they carry Reusable Landers?
– How much tonnage and volume could they be AND remain nimble/useful?
– Ten flights of Starship delivers 3000 metric Tons (not re-using tanks). and 10.000 mÂł of volume before use of any inflatables.
Surprise me: what would you do with such a behemoth? How would you envision it?
I was just pointing out volumes and fitting more people into the Starship. Building massive space stations would be good for assisting the industrialization of orbit. Hotels, apartments, factories. If there are millions of satellites, that would justify having thousands of people and tens of thousands of bots working to support an orbital and lunar space economy.
Good luck launching through a veil of millions of satellites in orbit.
Wow, just wow. In the entire history of manned space flight, ~600 people have been into space, and there are 10 people in space right now. But Musk and Starship are going to radically change these numbers? To Thousands? Who is picking up the tab for this?
A few years after the Wright brothers flew, there were 600 people who flew on planes, now there are tens of millions per year. Who is paying the tab for this? Each person voluntarily chose to buy tickets for the value of flying. People and businesses are going to space for specific valuable purposes.
There is absolutely no economic case for space exploration. None. There’s nothing on the Moon, nor Mars, and not even in the asteroid belt, that can be mined or returned to Earth for profit.
This would have been the same argument for Spain, Portugal and Europe for not colonizing North America. North America did not send mined materials as a significant part of trade until centuries later.
There are plenty of space startups and companies working and funded for space development.
$20.1 billion in private market equity investment in space in 2022 and $47.4 billion in 2021.
The space market has grown to approximately $447 billion—up from $280 billion in 2010—and could grow to $1 trillion by 2030. (McKinsey).
The Space Market is not mining but it is still closing in on half a trillion dollars. There is launch, communications satellites, services to governments, GPS, imaging, astronomy, etc…
Over 600 space startups. They have enough of an economic case to get funding. Some are publicly traded. You assume that because you do not understand and do not research to understand that things cannot exist.
Mars Direct 3, NASA Moxie ISRU demo and other research shows that your anti-ISRU videos are wrong. You create objections about rate of production during the mission. You can send things unmanned first. You can send ten ships to return one at a particular time, the other ships and their payload can stay longer. You created artificial time bounds and straight jacketed the options. This is why you will not solve anything. You can only NOT solve problems. You are unable to to figure out an economic case while hundreds of others can.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/06/mars-direct-3-0.html
This will take some time to build a module to complete mission. My background in project development. You are headed in the right direction. Hydrogen will need to play a role in the startup’s.
I stopped listening to “Common Sense Skeptic” when he essentially said Elon Musk was an awful person because his father was pro-apartheid. Playing the race card and judging someone based on their relative was enough to never give this smear merchant any more clicks that he could monetize.
BTW: here’s a video on guys like “Common Sense Skeptic”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJHPqlpTPnM
Odds better than not whatever positive character traits they espouse with their chosen internet handle are traits they don’t practice. There’s a reason why he says he’s a common sense skeptic rather than show it: because he isn’t a skeptic with common sense.
See, here’s another fake claim.
Nobody here has ever said that.
Musk is an awful person, certainly and indisputably – but your fake claim on this is laughable.
I dispute your claim of indisputably. Show your work.
On which of the false claims you’re making? Be specific.
Unless you’re speaking about the claim that Musk is indisputably an awful person.
We HAVE shown our work on that topic, in a number of videos. Laid it all out for you with easy to understand words and pictures. Those series have over 2 million combined views.
Thanks for the link, I did not know this channel existed. We have too many of these dishonest skeptics who are either grifting or are political activists. People like The SkepDick who will hide on controversial topics and let his community of wack jobs handle it instead. Or The Credible She Hulk who bans people for providing evidence that refute her feminist ideology. On the other hand you have someone like Norman Fenton an expert statistician and Bayesianist who still continues to be censored and harassed for pointing out the statistical impossibilities of Covid data coming from world governments.