SpaceX Launches Starship 'Hopper' On Dramatic Test Flight (spaceflightnow.com) 126
SpaceX launched its sub-scale Starship 'hopper' spacecraft on a brief unpiloted up-and-down test flight at the company's Boca Chica, Texas, test facility Tuesday, a dramatic demonstration of rocket technology intended to pave the way to a new, more powerful heavy lift booster and, eventually, crew-carrying interplanetary spacecraft. Spaceflight Now reports: Running a day late because of a last-second technical glitch, the squat Starhopper's powerful methane-fueled Raptor engine thundered to life at 6:02 p.m. EDT, pushing the stubby test vehicle straight up into a clear blue sky atop a jet of flame and a churning cloud of exhaust. The spacecraft, shaped a bit like R2-D2 from the "Star Wars" movies, appeared to reach its FAA-approved 492-foot (150 meter) altitude limit, moved sideways and slowly descended to touchdown on a nearby landing pad. The approximately one-minute flight was the rocket's second "untethered" test following a July jump to an altitude of about 65 feet.
The hardware SpaceX is testing is intended for a fully reusable two-stage vehicle featuring a powerful first stage, dubbed the Super Heavy Rocket, and the winged Starship. The hopper is a sub-scale version of the Starship's propulsion system, the first to utilize a SpaceX-designed Raptor engine burning cryogenic methane with liquid oxygen. SpaceX says the new booster-Starship system eventually will replace the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as the Cargo and Crew Dragon capsules used to deliver supplies and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station. In other SpaceX news, the company's Dragon supply ship successfully departed the ISS and returned to Earth Tuesday to conclude its third round-trip flight to the orbiting research outpost, bringing home a spacesuit, mice and numerous experiments.
The hardware SpaceX is testing is intended for a fully reusable two-stage vehicle featuring a powerful first stage, dubbed the Super Heavy Rocket, and the winged Starship. The hopper is a sub-scale version of the Starship's propulsion system, the first to utilize a SpaceX-designed Raptor engine burning cryogenic methane with liquid oxygen. SpaceX says the new booster-Starship system eventually will replace the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as the Cargo and Crew Dragon capsules used to deliver supplies and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station. In other SpaceX news, the company's Dragon supply ship successfully departed the ISS and returned to Earth Tuesday to conclude its third round-trip flight to the orbiting research outpost, bringing home a spacesuit, mice and numerous experiments.
You ask, "Why methane?" (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a very well done video on the Raptor engine that explains why they chose to use methane for fuel. It's a bit long at nearly an hour but worth every minute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Here is a very well done video on the Raptor engine that explains why they chose to use methane for fuel.
I have this bizarre image now of a spacecraft powered by the astronauts' flatulence.
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Suddenly relevant: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]
=Smidge=
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Oh man, I was hoping someone was going to mention Thunderpants. Or I was.
Great movie, or greatest movie?
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>Note that they didn't use solids even before they decided to do propulsive landing.
True, but I don't think environmental impact had much to do with that.
As I recall, reusability and getting to Mars and back was their long-term goal from the very beginning. Propulsive landing is pretty much essential for that plan, while solid booster technology doesn't really have anything to offer toward those goals.
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I'm not saying any particular rocket strategy is better or worse. I'm saying that environmental concerns aren't all that important for this project. Wow - it's pretty
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Larger (longer-burning) solid fuel boosters are the primary source of small debris in LEO. SpaceX avoids generating debris with a religious fervor. They won't even use exploding bolts during stage separation, as is normal for most rockets - everything is hydraulic.
Satellites designed for long service already need to be armored against small debris (1 cm or smaller), and carry maneuver fuel for dodging large debris (10 cm or larger). Debris in the 1-10 cm range currently has no defense. If we were launch
Re:You ask, "Why methane?" (Score:5, Interesting)
They also avoid pyrotechnics (explosive bolts) because that cuts into the 100% reusable thing. ANY explosion will result in removal of debris (sheared bolts, supports, etc.) and reset. More specialist equipment. More, and more intensive visual inspections.
By using, say, hydraulic pushers on the Falcon 9 Heavy stage 1 separation, they have a testable repeatable, reusable system.
That, and you know, debris reduction.
Starship? (Score:2)
Its not a starship.
It doesn't have the ability to leave the solar system.
Re:Starship? (Score:5, Funny)
I know, right? And Boeing's Starliner [wikipedia.org] - it's not going to the stars either, and nor is it much of a liner! Also, I tried to eat my Android Oreo smartphone the other day, and it didn't taste AT ALL like chocolate!
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I know, right? And Boeing's Starliner [wikipedia.org] - it's not going to the stars either, and nor is it much of a liner! Also, I tried to eat my Android Oreo smartphone the other day, and it didn't taste AT ALL like chocolate!
And I was very disappointed to learn that the Airbus Beluga isn't actually a flying whale.
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Looks like one, a bit, if you squint...
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I second this!
I pushed my Dodge Falcon off a cliff and it did NOT fly.
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I pushed my Dodge Falcon off a cliff and it did NOT fly.
But it did .. dodge... all the falcons on the way down.
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years ago, as a new attorney, another attorney came back to his office, shaking his head.
He had been at a traffic session, and a subgenius had been contesting his ticket, claiming that he drove a (dodge) Stealth, and that the cop was clearly lying, as stealth didn't show up on radar!
(this was back before you could actually get a picture of a real F-117 . . .)
hawk, esq.
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I second this!
I pushed my Dodge Falcon off a cliff and it did NOT fly.
Did you forget to attach the JATO units?
Re: Starship? (Score:2)
Reminds me of First World Problems
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
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Well,
if it did not taste like chocolate, you probably were holding it wrong?
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Oh look another one of the Elon haters out to claim that the rocket is pointless. You guys are as tiring as the fanboys are.
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But... but... but... It is pointless! It has as round a nose as an old black powder .30-30 bullet! No resemblance at all to a more modern cartridge, like a .30-06 spire point, boat tail round.
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It should, perhaps, be noted that the .30-30 was the first commercial rifle using smokeless powder.
In other words, there was no "old black powder .30-30 bullet"...
Do remember that black-powder firearms did large caliber bullets because they couldn't get enough muzzle speed from black powder to allow for effective small caliber bullets....
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Yes 30-30 was a smokeless cartridge but it started as blackpowder. The name means 30 caliber bullet over 30 grains of black powder. The same convention used for 45-70, 50-90, 50-100, etc.
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Umm, no.
In this case, it means a .30 caliber bullet over 30 grains of SMOKELESS powder.
Yes, the format of the name is the same as the .45-70, etc. But it's still a smokeless powder round, and was never a black powder round....
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You're absolutely right. I went and double-checked, thinking for sure I was right, but nope, I'm wrong.
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Yeah, that flying trash can you are kvetching about is not intended to be aerodynamic, it is a flying test stand and that is all it will ever be
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The 30-30 also a relatively low muzzle velocity, that it requires a hunter to get relatively close to their prey in order to get a good shot.
A friend who regularly hunted with one compared it to using a bow (he also was a bow hunter) and required good hunting skills to be effective
Where did the all the guns come from? (Score:2)
The 30-30 also a relatively low muzzle velocity, that it requires a hunter to get relatively close to their prey in order to get a good shot.
A friend who regularly hunted with one compared it to using a bow (he also was a bow hunter) and required good hunting skills to be effective
Is this supposed to be leading to a justification for fully automatic weapons for hunting? If you don't have any hunting skills, you'd need to spray an entire herd of deer with an entire magazine to hope of bringing one down.
Old saying: One shot, one deer. Two shots, maybe one deer. Three shots, no deer.
Maybe the "hunter" should just go to Japan and wait for a tame deer to start poking at his pockets in search of food? Then he could "hunt" with a .22 pistol.
Re:Starship? (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX has cut the cost of launching cargo to LEO by over 60% in the last three years. This is a nontrivial achievement, and the cost is projected to continue to drop thanks to their developments of reusable rocket components.
Who gives a shit if it's polishing is ego if we're getting significant gains out of it? Maybe *his* ego isn't the problem here...
=Smidge=
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the Boring tunnel...is just a tunnel.
Yeah, but at least it's named correctly.
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"Its not a starship.
It doesn't have the ability to leave the solar system."
We know, it's a test object that can't even leave the atmosphere.
That will come with version 7.1
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Its not a starship.
It doesn't have the ability to leave the solar system.
...yet.
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In theory it could slow down enough to spiral into the sun, which is a star...
What theory is that???! A bad one.
Orbital mechanics is a funny thing. It turns out that it is much, much easier for a rocket to escape the solar system and visit another star (eventually) than to go close to our own sun. Just ask the engineers on the Parker Solar Probe project.
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A fully refueled Starship in orbit doesn't have enough delta V (6.2 km/s) to hit the sun in a reasonably short amount of time (28.5 km/s to get close enough to count, IIRC?) by itself, but that 6.2 km/s is with 150 tons of payload. Use that payload capacity for a high-density power source (an RTG or a nuclear reactor) and an electric propulsion system like some hall-effect thrusters, and you could probably do it.
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but that 6.2 km/s is with 150 tons of payload. Use that payload capacity for a high-density power source (an RTG or a nuclear reactor) and an electric propulsion system like some hall-effect thrusters, and you could probably do it.
You could. I was just saying that counter-intuitively, the Sun has similar Delta-V to hit with a rocket to other stars. Being closer does not help.
I believe the easiest way to reach the sun, without a gravity fly-by assist, is to almost leave the solar system, do a small retrograde burn at aphelion, and "fall" straight down into the sun. So similar delta-V to reaching other stars, but a lot quicker. You could even get a free ride back to Earth if you just fly past the Sun rather than stopping.
The bette
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I believe you're mistaken on that one. Earth orbits at around 30km/s which is the speed anything orbits the sun once you bounce out of Earth's gravity. Looking at the Parker Solar Probe wikipedia page it's lowest velocity, that I see, is about 20km/s which would be
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30km/s which is the speed anything orbits the sun
Orbital speed decreases with distance. Neptune is only going 5km/s...
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Parker's orbital speed at aphelion is closer to 10 km/s, and that's deceptively high because its various flyby maneuvers have reduced its aphelion to around the orbit of Venus. And it's still a ways from actually hitting the sun, it'll only get within 8.5 solar radii. A half-Hohman transfer to impact with the sun's photosphere requires around 28.5 km/s.
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In a simplistic world, yes. But once you start adding in the gravitational affects of other bodies orbiting the sun, it's not as bad. The inner solar system offers frequent gravitational assist opportunities, and nobody trying bring a spacecraft near to the sun would avoid them.
Contrarily, if your goal was to avoid gravity assists, you could take a bi-elliptic transfer and still use less delta-V than a Hohmann transfer :)
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>It doesn't have the ability to leave the solar system.
Are you sure about that?
I'm mean, it's extremely unlikely for the prototype - they're going to need Super Heavy and orbital refueling capability before they can even get to the moon and back. But once they have those, leaving the solar system is just a matter of having the desire to do so.
Of course, I don't imagine anyone is going to have much desire to do so at speeds that will see civilizations rise and fall many times before it could reach even t
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just leaving the solar system is actually fairly easy - we've got a few spacecraft doing so already.
They were taking advantage of chained slingshots by a near optimal planetary constellation we won't see again until 2150. Super Heavy or not is small potatoes compared to successive boosts from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. It's going to be a long time before we launch anything going further and faster than the Voyagers.
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Could someone ELI5 why this isn't possible now? Obviously for interstellar distances, at our current velocity, the traveling time between planets for slingshots is effectively irrelevant. So what about the current configuration prohibits this?
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It doesn't have the ability to leave the solar system.
Yes it has. It helps to have a clue about physics.
Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
News for nerds, stuff that matters!
I was getting desperate.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Even better angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Star-Hopper really is a stupid name. Unless they plan to launch from the freakin' Sun.
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Star-Hopper really is a stupid name
It's the public-facing version of the real name, which they took from a certain song on the album Goat's Head Soup.
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Grasshopper was the first one, for Falcon. This is the "Starship grasshopper", shortened to Starhopper.
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Cool: How you can see the engine exhaust diamonds, watch it correcting by gimballing the engines.
Not cool: The guy screaming like he's having sex.
Star Wars? Really? (Score:2)
Thanks for reminding us because if you had not, I am pretty sure most of us would have remembered R2-D2 from the Star Trek universe.
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... assuming he got stranded somewhere and had to rebuild his rocket out of parts scrounged together at a junkyard. ;)
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which brings us back to R2-D2 . . .
hawk
Couldn't help it (Score:3)
Luke Skywalker: "Did we unplug the toaster Artoo?
Artoo: "Jesus Christ, Luke - I've taken off already!"
Luke: "You know how I worry."
Artoo: (sighs) I'll check - hold on, I go back and check. .... (mutters to himself) "Obsessive compulsive asshole"
Rent that thing out as a weed-burner? (Score:2)
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You should have bought Musk's flamethrower when you had the chance. Apparently people were actually using it successfully for brush clearing.
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...because brush clearing is exactly what it was designed to do. The Boring Not-a-Flamethrower is basically just a commercial gas flame unit used in agriculture and forestry for brush management, done up in a cool sci-fi exterior.
You can go down to your local ag supply store (if you live in an agricultural area) and buy one off the shelf, it just won't look as futuristic.
Why Methane? (Score:2)
Why Methane?
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Methane, CH4. You can manufacture it on Mars from the CO2 in the atmosphere and H2O. Split the H20 into H2 and O2, burn the CO2 and H2 in some funky high pressure environment and you can get CH4.
Any other fuel is going to require you to take it all up in space with you.
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where is the power to do that splitting coming from? nuke plant?
solar is of course half the amount on earth in the best spots, not a showstopper but for high power app like fuel making would needs lots of acreage.
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Man, how will Musk possibly get the land rights for deploying panels on Mars... ;)
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Another advantage of methane is its fairly low freezing point of 91 Kelvin. This is important when you want to coast in space for a while, and then restart the engine. Current Falcon9 upper stage uses kerosene with freezing point of 200 Kelvin.
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Mom! Elon's going to Mars again...
Now if he could take a handful of politicians . . . from both sides of the aisle . . . and leave them there on Mars . . . that would be great.
Elon can come back. He seems to be doing some great stuff!
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If we plan on colonizing Mars it's probably not wise to pollute it ahead of time. Send them to Mercury. I doubt anybody would ever try to utilize that real estate.
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If we plan on colonizing Mars it's probably not wise to pollute it ahead of time. Send them to Mercury.
Sorry, delta-V to Mercury is a killer. How about Venus? Or just a sub-orbital to Antarctica.
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Venus is where all the Marching Morons need to be sent
Of course, Cleano don't lay around for you to pick up like the soap-root on Venus, but it's pretty cheap and it's almost pretty near just as good. So for us plain folks who ain't lucky enough to live up there on Venus, Cleano is the real cleaning stuff." [du.edu]
Re: Nice flight (Score:2)
Elon can come back. He seems to be doing some great stuff!
He needs to be working on opening dimensional gates to parallel realities so that we can read more books from our mutual favorite author, Mr. Ian M. May he R.I.P.
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Now if he could take a handful of politicians . . . from both sides of the aisle
This kind of thinking ignores the well-known equilibrium between predator and prey. If you remove predators from an ecosystem, it will restore equilibrium by producing more predators.
So the real answer to detestable politicians is for the voters to stop acting like prey.
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Just tell the movie makers that a dust cloud is like a CGI swarm of something and we'll be seeing dust clouds in every movie from then on.
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If you want to see a dust cloud check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Northrup Grunman static fire testing an OmegA solid rocket booster. The dust cloud dwarfs whatever mountain they've got it all set up on.
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They kicked up plenty of dust [youtu.be] when landing with Apollo. Of course, the thrust needed to stay aloft on Earth is over six times as much for a given weight, and Starhopper is surely much heavier than the mostly-emptied LM (something like 7 tonnes wet mass at landing?)
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I think you have confused weight (force due to gravity) and mass.
The relationship between weight (force) and mass is force (weight) = mass x acceleration (due to gravity)
In order to stay aloft (hover), the weight of the vehicle needs to be equal and opposite to the thrust (force) so that the net acceleration is zero. In addition the speed needs to become zero to sustain the hover.
The thrust applied to the vehicle is an acceleration of the mass of the vehicle.
Your corrected statement is "the thrust needed to
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It does raise a serious issue, in that how vastly more massive Starship is than the LM, it's going to have vastly greater regolith-clearing power than the LM. NASA currently has a joint project with SpaceX to study how this is going to impact landing. The worst case would theoretically be that they'd have to build a landing pad with smaller spacecraft first. IMHO, that'll never happen; that's a very "NASA approach" (e.g. something that could take much of a decade to complete, with whole new spacecraft and
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It's a *huge* problem, you're accelerating dust and pebbles into projectiles that will follow a ballistic path wherever they travel and will not slow down until they reconnect with something. You could be 100 miles away from the landing site and still get a nice hole in you like from a bullet by a pebble it kicked up.
It's easy enough to protect a base from a landing site (locate it behind a hill) and most landing sites should be located inside a crater, but the stuff you kick up can fly very very far, and o
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In addition to what others have already posted, in the vacuum on the moon you're not going to get any kind of "cloud". All particles of dust will be launched on their own individual ballistic trajectories and disperse within a fraction of a second. Only in an atmosphere will the particles be constrained in one area and then held suspended there in a cloud.
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I realize this is a troll, but for those wondering the reason you kick up dust clouds on earth and not on the moon is that the speeding dust is slowed and diverted by contact with the air, as well as being carried up by the rising hot exhaust. On the moon, the dust sprays out laterally until it falls back to the surface or hits something. Also related, the only way for dust to be dislodged from the lunar surface is being hit by exhaust, where on earth the exhaust creates wind that blows more dust. If you w
Mars Direct! (Score:2)
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That's the plan. Starship is designed for several types of operations.
* Earth to Earth: Starship-only
* Earth to orbit (& back): Starship + Super Heavy
* Earth to lunar transfer (& back): Starship + Super Heavy
* Earth to lunar surface (& back): Starship + Super Heavy + ~3 LEO refueling events.
* Earth to martian surface (& back): Starship + Super Heavy + ~3 LEO refueling events + ISRU refueling on Mars.
* Other destinations: Depends on the mission
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3 refueling missions? I'm surprised. How can it take more than half of Starship's fuel to get into its elliptical parking orbit? Do they need an "almost to the moon" orbit or something, to complete the remaining mission on one tank?
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Not just "more than half of Starship's fuel" - almost all of its fuel. And this is just to LEO. Specifically because it's not going to orbit empty - it's going to orbit carrying a massive payload, pushed to the limits of what it can carry to orbit.
Subsequent starships arrive in LEO carrying a massive payload as well - fuel. It just so happens that this payload works out to about a third of a Starship's worth of fuel
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ED: Actually, checking back, it wasn't explicitly stated that the orbit was LEO. It might be higher than that.
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Ah, I hadn't really looked closely at Super-Heavy, and was just guessing at it's delta-V. Looking at the mass on Wikipedia and some guesswork, it seems it would only have around 25-2600 m/s, much less than I thought. Starship really is a lot to lift.
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Yeah, for an upper stage, Starship is truly massive - even for a beast like Super Heavy. It needs to be, as the mission profiles it's designed for require that.
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Last I'd heard, Earth-to-Earth commercial flights were going to use Super Heavy boosters as well (though no in-space refueling). I'm not actually sure Starship by itself has the margin to make it halfway around the world and then land, especially while carrying any appreciable payload (its pressurized capacity suggests it could easily end up carrying 800 passengers, figure cargo seating and emergency equipment for each one and you're pushing 100T at least). Even if it does, though, it'd require cutting the
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Musk made a comment on Twitter some months back that Super Heavy won't be needed for Earth-to-Earth. I had also previously expected that it would be used. But Starship has some crazy delta-V when it's not too heavily loaded.
The details are constantly fluctuating on everything, of course; this is just what I've gathered from watching the presentations and the correcting it based on
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Re: A better video (Score:2)
nope, that's a Delta Clipper launch from a few years ago.
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Don't mod up the anti-space troll! I don't even need to click to know it's a trolling video. What is it - a Rockroll, or some old NASA video?
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He is not really a troll, just a guy who makes sarcastic fun.
His video is about a Lockeed Delta flyer from 20 years ago, nice video.