Elon discussed SpaceX plans to send a fleet of 1000-1200 Starships every two years to Mars. SpaceX Mars fleet operations would have huge challenges.
The plan is to launch 1.5 million tons to orbit every two years. They would then send 250,000 tons to Mars.
If every Mars-bound SpaceX Starship can take 250 tons of payload then there would need to be 1000 Starships to Mars.
Bringing 1.5 million tons to orbit means about 6 orbital launches per Mars vehicle. This would mean five refueling tanker missions for each Mars Vehicle.
SpaceX wants to launch about 10 times per day for two years ahead of the fleet departure every two years.
Every day about two Mars Starships would get fueled up and then wait for the departure. In one year, there would be 500 Mars Starships in orbit.
The ships will need to be able to prevent fuel loss while waiting in orbit.
The Mars ships will arrive on Mars and the first ships will be unloaded and then taken apart for the Mars colony.
It only makes sense for risk reduction, that there will have to be a smaller fleet of perhaps ten Starships in a first wave. One hundred in the second wave. Those unmanned ships would be preparing to receive the main waves of ships. They would be placing the systems for getting fuel from the atmosphere.
The new SpaceX Mars plan is far larger than previously envisioned.
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Clearly elon has read lucifer’s hammer (niven/pournelle) and gets it. It’s far more than anyone else has done.
2026 for small Starship Mars mission is doable. They need to nail a few landings this year to get Starship certified and reliable enough. Tesla Bots will get good enough till 2026. So instead humans they will pack a few Tesla Bots into Starship with life support systems just to be tested or with some animal to be monitored. They will add few things to do some science on Mars, try to grow some vegetables,.. so they can do more in 2028. Then they can send more robots to prepare a base for human settlers. Prepared base will mitigate lots of risk.
If you used a cycler to transfer people every two years, you could send freight by starship in low energy orbits continually.
The scale of this is approaching the point where you might actually want to resort to non-rocketry approaches to putting things into orbit, such as a Lofstrom launch loop, or cargo mass driver. The primary drawback of such approaches is the initial capital investment, which is so large they only make economic sense at large volumes.
This is large volumes!
Beyond a small number of early ‘bootstrap’ missions, it’ll make more sense to use Starship only for carrying people to and from Mars, and for orbit/surface deliveries. With far less payload mass, passenger Starship could get to Mars somewhat faster – or use fewer refueling launches to keep costs down.
For cargo to Mars orbit, create a solar powered, ion-engine, space-only vehicle. At Mars, a Starship would launch to intercept, off-load the cargo, and take it to the surface (or to a Phobos base).
The first haulers might be delivered to orbit in one launch of a Starship, fully ‘fueled’ and with cargo in place. Probably with enough reaction mass to return from Mars to Earth – later Mars or Phobos might supply reaction mass for the return.
By the time the first hauler returns to Earth, on-orbit refueling and cargo-loading from a single Starship launch can be ready, as well as module-swapping repairs of any damaged components. The hauler could transport more cargo since the Starship didn’t have to launch with the mass of the hauler as well as cargo and reaction mass.
Some good thinking. Bear in mind that cargo can be conceptually divided between simple, bulky mass that can be produced at destination and low-mass, complex parts that is most easily produced in Earth. The former includes: Water, plastics and other organic compounds, gross metals, and food. There should be able to be produced in quantity on Mars probably within the first five years and so the majority of cargo mass doesn’t have to be launched from Earth at Mars. The lower mass, complex parts will continued to be shipped from Earth until
that time when the production costs on Mars of those items is less than the cost of producing them on Earth + the shipping costs.
It does not make sense to have a 1000 starships, each with 33 engines, travel to Mars.
The requirement for liftoff from Earth, landing on Mars, and an interplanetary craft are wildly different.
Liftoff needs to produce over 1 g of acceleration. Landing needs just 0,33 g to brake against Mars gravity, and interplanetary travel needs just 1 engine to push up to speed.
If they just use 1 engine, they get 1/33 g of acceleration, and instead of a 15 min burn, it will take 8 hours to get up to speed, and this is fine for a 2-3 month trip.
The interplanetary also needs spin gravity so use the steel for 1000 starship fleet to weld up 3-4 giant cylinders in space. Then line the rim with engines and off they go.
If its just one trip, sure, use the standard craft, but if we talk 1000 it is much better to specialize.
Also, how about closed cycle lifesupport?
For spin gravity you can just take two or more Starships, connect them with tethers, and spin them bolo style. Then drop the tether before you hit the atmosphere for your aerobraking.
Sure, for the trip itself, larger seems more efficient, and you don’t need 2-3 Gs acceleration for a transfer orbit insertion. But the required delta V goes up enormously if you can’t aerobrake on arrival, and the bigger your rocket, the harder aerobraking becomes. You probably don’t want to get too much larger than Starship if that’s part of your mission profile.
You could go with a huge transfer vehicle if you were to opt for a cycler, because it wouldn’t need the aerobraking. But cyclers have a poor duty cycle, and you need orbital taxis/landers that are capable of inserting themselves into the transfer orbit anyway; The cycler can’t stop for them to dock! Those orbital taxis end up looking a lot like Starship once they have all the necessary capabilities.
So in the end the only thing you get from the cycler over using the Starship is better radiation protection and more living space on the trip. You can likely get enough radiation protection in the Starship if you cluster the sleeping quarters inside the cargo area, and more living space for the trip is a luxury, not a necessity.
If you really want to improve the mission plan, it would be by finding a way to reduce the refueling missions. Like maybe using orbital tethers for transfer orbit insertion?
i like the bold scale and the intent of elon to actually DO IT,
such endavour would not slip through the cracks of Nasa bureaucracy.
What I wonder about is whether Elons iterative design approach falls apart under the limitation of the two year mars orbit cadence. Two years is long time to wait before the next design cycle. The pressure will be on to get all core life systems to work perfectly due to the obvious implications of failure.
Core life support systems can be tested in LEO, though. No need to send a ship to Mars to see if they work.
A quick web search gives the following: “According to Andrew Wilson, assistant professor in environmental management at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, one Starship launch produces 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure combining different types of greenhouse gases in one unit).” How to reconcile this with Elon’s stated goal of reducing global emissions?
There are 1 trillion tons of extra CO2 in the atmosphere, put there over the 200 years of the industrial revolution. The world civilization is making about 37.5 billion tons of CO2 per year. Despite spending over $1 trillion on supposedly fighting climate change, the amount of CO2 emissions is still increasing. The energy industry produces most of the CO2 but other industries use the energy from the energy industry. The efforts to do something have been ineffective at the scales needed. It is not the only problem and may not be the most urgent one. wE can continue for decades or centuries and not cause problems that cannot be managed. 110,000 launches of Starship to equal one year of the aviation industry. Moving 10% of industry offworld could reduce CO2 by 3.75 billion tons per year. The CO2 problem is best reversed by increasing the trees in the world from 3 trillion trees to 4-6 trillion. The world used to have over 6 trillion trees. A tree is about half CO2 by weight. A 2 ton tree is 1 tons of CO2 by weight. One trillion trees would need to take CO2 from the land and air to make the wood and would store the CO2. Earth observation satellites can be useful for managing increasing agriculture and forest management.
Yea, easy.
It’s all from methane, which is 20x WORSE as a greenhouse gas.
Better be glad Starship is expending all that harmful methane.
You get your CO2 FROM the atmosphere, then release it back upon launch.
Or they could instead use the same tonnage to orbit to build huge space stations and shipyards to build space only vessels with capacity for 1000 people per trip, with more confort.
Maybe with nuclear engines to make the trip in 30 days.
Then you have two big problems instead of one. These complex missions really favor the KISS principle.
But these things will come to pass, albeit not before humans get there in numbers.
If Elon Musk was Bond Villain he could use this plan as a cover story to stage a huge fleet of Starships in Earth Orbit to instead put an automated military fleet in place to take over the planet.
I think that so many refueling missions makes it harder and less appealing. Perhaps for initial stages, but not on the massive scale.
Another option is 1.use Starship for ground- Earth orbit(space dock 1), 2. Space tug with efficient engines and less refueling for Earth orbit (space dock 1) – Mars orbit(space dock 2), 3. Starship for Mars to Mars orbit(space dock 2).
Both options have trade offs. 2x extra cargo transfers doesn’t sound good and you need infrastructure. But if you want to do it on massive scale we will need some space docks and orbital station around Mars. I think some nuclear electric space tug.
For the first missions they will send Tesla bots – robots with some monkey (study of effects) and lots of hassle is solved. They will prepare the ground for human settlers.
They’d be better off sending Tesla bots and a few space mad old geezers like me. Plenty of space mad techies who wouldn’t mind a one way trip to Mars to cap off our lives, so long as we were assured of being kept supplied with expendables. It’s not like we’re going to live forever otherwise, after all.
For me this is a bit of mental exercising. Thinking how it will be done when it’s possible and needed.
But IRL it will take some time to reach such a scale, if ever.
What I can see is a modest growth when they show the full architecture works more or less reliably, across several synods. With NASA, ESA and maybe some other paying partners ponying up the money to try a fee exploratory missions for science or for the thrill.
But for having hundreds of Starships and thousands of travelers every synod, you need something else altogether.
You need a colony, with thousands or more already there, producing and needing to move things and people from here to there. Not that I think it’s possible, just that it won’t be soon, like in more than 15-20 years.
Which matches his 2050s City on Mars stated plans, I guess.