Will the US Air Force Use SpaceX's Starship for Speedy Cargo Deliveries? (arstechnica.com) 133
The U.S. Air Force wants to invest $38 million next year in projects under the heading "Rocket Cargo." Ars Technica reports that Air Force is already spending $9.7 million on the projects, "but seeks to increase that total for the coming year as it moves into the test phase of the program. The funds will have to be approved by Congress as part of its budget deliberation process this summer and fall."
The Air Force's 462-page budget-justifying document says their branch of the military "seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver Air Force cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity."
Although this does not refer to Starship by name, this is the only vehicle under development in the world with this kind of capability. The Air Force does not intend to invest directly into the vehicle's development, the document says. However, it proposes to fund science and technology needed to interface with the Starship vehicle so that the Air Force might leverage its capabilities. Clearly, some Air Force officials are intrigued by the possibility of launching 100 tons of cargo from the United States and having the ability to land it anywhere in the world about an hour later.
The Air Force's 462-page budget-justifying document says their branch of the military "seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver Air Force cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity."
Although this does not refer to Starship by name, this is the only vehicle under development in the world with this kind of capability. The Air Force does not intend to invest directly into the vehicle's development, the document says. However, it proposes to fund science and technology needed to interface with the Starship vehicle so that the Air Force might leverage its capabilities. Clearly, some Air Force officials are intrigued by the possibility of launching 100 tons of cargo from the United States and having the ability to land it anywhere in the world about an hour later.
$38 million with an M? (Score:4, Interesting)
$38 million is not much of an investment. That is, like, a third of a one F-35.
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Because it's really just for a study to see if it's feasible to do it.
My money is on the answer being no.
100 Tons Via Air? That's a LOT Of Fuel (Score:2)
USA is running out of oil now [macrotrends.net].
IMHO we should be thinking more about conservation than new highly inefficient uses for fuel.
Re:100 Tons Via Air? That's a LOT Of Fuel (Score:4, Informative)
USA is running out of oil now [macrotrends.net].
IMHO we should be thinking more about conservation than new highly inefficient uses for fuel.
Raptor engines on Starship use Methane/LOX, so don't whine about oil
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I don't think I'll post on this any more. Talking about fossil fuel is like arguing with a junkie, it's a waste of time and effort, they will justify their behaviour in all kinds of irrational ways and OD in the end whatever you say. heh.
Re:100 Tons Via Air? That's a LOT Of Fuel (Score:4, Interesting)
> Talking about fossil fuel is like arguing with a junkie, it's a waste of time and effort, they will justify their behaviour in all kinds of irrational ways and OD in the end whatever you say.
Irrational behavior like insisting that Methane/LOX is fossil fuel?
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Where do you think the methane comes from?
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Cows?
Seriously, though, yes methane currently comes from wells in the ground for the most part. But methane is produced by other processes including organic decomposition, to say nothing of the potential to create methane using solar-powered chemical processes. So it's entirely feasible that in the future sources of methane could come from carbon-neutral, renewable sources.
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The same could be said for gasoline or diesel. One can synthesize long chain hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon, with the former coming
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Sure. You can make gasoline for about twice the price of the pumped out of the ground variety. The US Navy keeps working on making it at sea, for example. Even so, it's a hell of a lot easier to synthesize CH4 efficiently than it is to make the witch's brew that is gasoline.
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I'm referring to it being a fossil fuel. Most methane comes from natural gas, which is mostly methane, with some coming as byproducts of refining fossil fuels. There's also some from coal gasification.
Sure it can be made via other means. But I'm not finding a commercial viable approach on any large scale.
Which seems to indicate that, like gasoline, it should be referred to as a fossil fuel.
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I'm not really interested in discussing the pedantry going on in this thread. The OP asserted that we shouldn't be looking for applications for rockets because we should be conserving fuel. Methane is typically pulled out of the ground today because it's cheap and easy to do so, but it's expected to be manufactured from renewable sources more and more, on a fairly short timeline, and applications like rocketry (where fuel is the cheapest thing involved) and users like the US military (for which money is pre
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Methane from solar power on Mars may make sense, but that's because even a kg to LEO is costs around $2500. (Meaning a gallon of gas costs about $7500 to space.) Methane would be a slightly better deal since it's a little more energy dense than gasoline.
Currently, natural gas is about $1 per therm. One therm is 29 kwh. Which if we assume energy in equals energy out, and $0.10 per kwh, that's $2.90 in electricity for $1 of natural gas.
So probably not economically viable any time soon.
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Natural gas is ridiculously cheap because it's a waste product of oil production. Ten years ago they used to light the stuff on fire and burn it at the well site.
Your economic "analysis" is grossly superficial. The raw price of mined natural gas is dominated by oil, and will be affected a lot by carbon taxes. A lot more factors go into "economic" than the raw price, particularly when you're doing things like launching rockets. You keep avoiding the fact that SpaceX are already planning to make their own.
Stu [sciencedirect.com]
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Methane is as much of a fossil fuel as octane. The same geological processes produce all of these hydrocarbons and we usually extract them at the same time because if you have natural gas, you probably have oil in the rocks under it.
Natural gas can be produced organically, but it's rarely harvested and and our consumption vastly exceeds the supply of human made organic Methane. The world consumed 3.9 trillion cubic meters (about 3 billion tons) of natural gas in 2019 and about 95% of that was Methane. All o
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The very purpose of using methalox was refueling on Mars using solar power.
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There are almost no fuels with energy density high enough to transport very heavy cargo across the planet (via air anyway)
Unless you want to try ballons with solar powered propellers.
Other than that, you're stuck with breaking carbon bonds.
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It is, because it's a bit cheaper that way. It's pretty easy to produce if you've got a supply of electricity though, and it's expected that will be the main source in the future.
When you're talking rockets, fuel is such a small part of the cost you can do all sorts of crazy things anyway. SpaceX is planning to make their own, on Mars because there's no choice, and on Earth because why not?
Synthetic methane is a good match for a military transport system because you wouldn't have to depend on suppliers (oop
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Most methane used is from wells specifically explored and exploited to get natural gas. Oil is sometimes a byproduct of a gas well (especially early in the life of a fracking site) as well as natural gas sometimes being a byproduct of an oil well.
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Sure. But there is just as much irrationality on the other side. For example, many people urging the immediate cessation of all fossil fuel use believe that this can be done without any significant price to pay, either on the part of civilization at large, or on their personal part, specifically. Or that the cost will be borne by "others." Or worse, simply be forced in its entirety on the energy companies, as if they are solely to blame for our CO2 problem. I often see people believe that the problem o
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USA is running out of oil now [macrotrends.net].
IMHO we should be thinking more about conservation than new highly inefficient uses for fuel.
But the chart you show seems more like a quick market response to the precipitous drop in oil prices due to the pandemic. There was less demand for oil and therefore some of the oil fields shut down (or went bankrupt) either because the price fell below production costs or because they wanted to wait until the oil price recovered.
But given the high price of rocket transport compared to more traditional modes of transport it will definitely also only be used in exceptional circumstances. This could be in cas
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I do agree that we should be more focused on reducing the use of oil, but that chart is production which has slowed down due to lower demand in the past year or so.
On the same site is the chart you're looking for U.S. Crude Oil Reserves [macrotrends.net] which shows... reserves are increasing.
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So, when you're a Doctors without Borders section chief requesting a mobile trauma unit's equipment be flown into the boonies in Africa, so that the MD's being parachuted in to operate on the 500 people who have just been gunned down (including several of your family members) and won't live the next 90 minutes without urgent care, you're going to say nope, don't do it, it will be too inefficient a use of fuel, put it on the solar plane that will take 12-24 hours to fly from Miami?
Or you're in Jakarta and th
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Wonderful. Ideas are easy as any wanna-bee business man will tell you. Succeeding at them is the hard part. Think though all the things needed for those ideas to work, and just as important, look at all the current solutions.
Re: 100 Tons Via Air? That's a LOT Of Fuel (Score:2)
How does low oil production equate to "running out"? Production is only down because of reduced demand. A third of the world's oil is in North America, we're not running out any time soon.
Scott Manley Explains (Score:5, Informative)
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Will watch later but I'm guessing the payload is relatively small, there aren't many scenarios where you need to deliver stuff that fast, and even if there were it might not be a good idea to send something that is hard to distinguish from an ICBM towards a hostile country.
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It does not take hours to fuel a rocket, on a Falcon 9, they only start prop loading 35 minutes before launch. Otherwise you just site there boiling off fuel and having to top it up. I don't know what the number is for Starship, but there's no need for it to be hours. So if you had a rocket on the pad ready to go, the limiting factor would probably be getting the payload to the launch site and getting it on the vehicle. You'd need some sort of rapid payload adaptor and rapid loading rig, but depending on th
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Fueling RP-1 is a helluva lot easier than fueling methalox
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Also, it's cute they can get anywhere within an hour but this does not include cargo and propellant loading which will take several hours at best.
So? If you ship stuff around the world in planes or ships you also need a lot of time to board the cargo and prepare the plane/ship. So you're not loosing any meaningful amount of time here in comparison. But you win a lot of time in actual transit.
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Yes and no. The tools, infrastructure, and expertise for rapidly loading/unloading a boat or cargo plane are well understood, widely available, and in continuous practice around the world by both military and civilian organizations. Payloading (is that even a word?) a rocket is a much slower and methodical task, usually measured in days, and practiced at only a handful of
Answer is obvious (Score:2)
Betteridge says “No”.
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First obvious question: what do they do with the rocket at the other end?
Unless they have a launch facility that can provide supercooled liquid methane and oxygen and all the necessary launch electronics, they're going to be buying the rocket.
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Launch in another ship with 100 tons of fuel, then it can refuel and take off out of there!
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Send another rocket with the supercooled liquid methane and oxygen and the launch electronics, d'uh!
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These Starships are extraordinarily cheap to build, that was (is) a design requirement. My guess would be to salvage the Raptors (250,000 USD each, and these suborbital Starships will likely have three Raptors, or at most six) with trucks and scrap the vehicle.
Are they nuts? (Score:2)
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Starship is designed to do all those things. If they didn't study using it for what it's designed for, and study it in advance so they're ready to go when it's ready, then they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
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Which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan: "If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliway's - the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!”
Cargo = BOMBS (Score:5, Interesting)
Hidden in the text of the accompanying article is: the potential ability to AIR DROP a payload after reentry. So this could be construed as using the Starship as a (very) fast bomber capable of reaching anywhere on earth in an hour. Still, it seems a shame (by reentering the atmosphere) to waste one of the key advantages of the Starship, its incredible kinetic energy.
Maybe instead the Air Force should consider using the Starship as an (sub?) ORBITAL BOMBER like the Sanger design first promoted in WWII. In this case, the AF would launch a Starship towards the Chinese (oops, did I say that?) target and release up to 100 tons of "payload" but outside the atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory. The exact sequence could be something like this: A Starship atop a Super Heavy booster would be launched from Cape Kennedy, Boca Chica or Vandenberg on an orbital path whose trajectory would take it directly over the target in say, mainland China. As soon as the Starship's engines cut off and the vehicle is on a ballistic trajectory, it would release its "cargo" of 100 1-ton (modified) tungsten Rods from God. The modifications would be: make them conic (not a rod) and give them a slight asymmetry. This, in combination with a small control unit (guidance and a small mass to change the center of gravity) on the protected rear, would allow for maneuvering.
Anyway, immediately following the release of these projectiles, the Starship would make a minor change in its course so that it would no longer pass over mainland China, this would hopefully put it out line of sight of any directed energy weapons that the Chinese would have in the next decade or two. (If the U.S. can keep China from basing any of these energy weapons and anti-sat weapons overseas or remove these overseas assets at the start of a conflict then the Starship should be safe; conventional anti-aircraft weapons would not be remotely close to shooting it down)
Meanwhile, the projectiles would enter the atmosphere at close to orbital velocity. Not only does the (spinning? reflective?) tungsten cones survive reentry, but even a megawatt laser would find them hard to melt (compared to the heat of reentry they might not even notice it). The guidance system not only would allow a pinpoint impact but could be used to slightly modify its flight path to evade ABM interceptors. (Traveling at several miles per second would allow even a tiny change in direction to cause an interceptor to miss by hundreds of yards). Even a direct hit by a non-nuclear interceptor might not be fatal, again these projectiles would be almost a solid ton of tungsten! They would go through most defenses like a bullet through tissue paper (the guidance system would have to be pretty good though to be able to correct the course if knocked off course by an interceptor).
The result would be tons of super hardened metal hitting a hundred separate targets at hypersonic speeds. The energy deposited in each small area would be extreme (the energy deposited overall by each projectile would be equivalent to a ton of high explosive!). That might even be enough to destroy hardened silos, anything else would be completely obliterated. If SpaceX can really bring the launch costs of a Starship/SuperHeavy down to $10M or less, then this would be a not-too-expensive way of destroying any extremely high value targets anywhere in the world in less than an hour.
Meanwhile the Starship would land at an oil rig in the ocean or at an ally's launch site (or maybe, depending on orbital mechanics, at whichever site the Starship didn't launch from. If Elon is to be believed (a big IF) in a few hours it could be refueled and ready to go, maybe even launching in a reverse sequence. (For example: Cape Kennedy to Beijing to Vandenberg, then Vandenberg to Beijing to Cape Kennedy). So the cadence could be very fast. Anyway, remember that SpaceX wants to build dozens (hundreds?) of these giant rockets.
This could provide the U.S. with a an extremely effective non-nuclear first strike
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I don't think that's the point of this - we already have ICBMs that are better at the job and less expensive
Cargo != bombs. (Score:2)
Far more likely, it is troops/supplies. But even if just pure cargo, one of the better ones to send would be FUEL.
In particular, for a number of bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, we were paying over $300 / GAL (and with bribes, sometimes up to $500/gal) just for fuel.
And that does not include the far more important lose of life that we saw.
Why this isn't a job for ICBMs (Score:2)
So from the above comments, a common thread is why not just use ICBMs?
Basically it is COST, the NON-REUSABLE ICBMs are (I read somewhere long ago but it should still be accurate?) at least $10M a pop. Since they're designed to carry a few (less than 12?) warheads which are small and light miniaturized nuclear re-entry vehicles their throw weight is only on the order of a few tons.
Compare that to a fully REUSABLE Starship who, Elon promises, can be launched for $5M and carry upwards of 100 tons. Because of
Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:4, Interesting)
The current USAF heavy lift work-horse - the C-5A/B Galaxy - can lift about 250 tons and flies at about 540mph, or Mach 0.72.
So the USAF consideration here would seem to be purely down to two things: speed-of-deployment and the potential to reach locations that don't have Galaxy-friendly runways. The C-5 lifts considerably more than the 100-ton proposal here and for sure it is going to be significantly cheaper to fly a single Galaxy to any serviceable air strip around the world.
The C-5 is also likely to be able to handle somewhat more adverse weather - at both launch and landing locations - than Starship. In fact, to be able to give the Pentagon 24x7 capability [anything less and you have to start to question the value of a rapid-delivery solution] you're going to have to have multiple launch sites - east and west coasts at minimum - as well as multiple vehicles.
Or put that another way: to guarantee that get the same payload as a C-5 to anywhere in the world more quickly, you'd need a minimum of 6 starships - three on each coast [assuming that each starship was lifting 100 tons and you wanted to equal/exceed the 250 ton lift of a C-5. You'd also need all the launch infrastructure, fuel, emergency air-traffic clearance and so on.
Then, when you've achieved your drop and landed a starship vehicle somewhere really quickly - say on the outer limits of a zone hit by a natural disaster, or a location where you need to get equipment in a hurry - you've got to develop the means to get the vehicles back again. Now in reality the main ingredient to this is going to be the need to re-fuel your vehicle with methylox... but maybe you'd want to do some vehicle inspections first? You know, looking for things like fractured landing gear and so on...
I'm not suggesting that these challenges are insurmountable - far from it. I'm just wondering out loud of the challenges we see facing us today are demanding such an extreme solution. Maybe if your justification is that this would give the Pentagon a rapid-deployment/rapid-projection capability for military force that no other nation can match, then perhaps it might become a more substantial argument. Still not a very strong one, mind you.
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If we assume that a vehicle will cost an order of magnitude more more than it's meant to cost, then things look challenging, sure. The goal is to make Starships for under $10M, and to fly them for less than that since they're reusable.
Recovering a Starship landed on Earth is rarely going to be an issue. Most of the Earth's population lives near a coastline where you can load it on a barge, and most of the rest has roads leading to the coast. For the
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Your first assumption is wrong. The costs for a Falcon Heavy (with first stageS reuse, remember there are 3 cores) is 90M. To compare this with a Starship of which the entire rocket is designed, from the ground up to be completely reusable is wrong. It's like saying that the flight cost of an airplane where we "only" throw away the bottom two thirds is comparable in cost to a fully reusable airplane that has been designed for easy maintenance, durability, fast turnaround etc. Add to that the costs of us
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A C-5 is also completely reusable... and costs significantly less to run than Starship. The only reason that I brought in mention of FH to my post was to try and get an "order of magnitude accuracy" to a rough idea of the per-trip costs of Starship. I will gladly accept your corrections on that if you can cite an authoritative source... However, since starship hasn't yet left experimental flight status and since we don't know the cost of any post-flight maintenance or pre-
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I'm guessing less.
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This will no doubt be used for fast strike forces. It likely will not be cargo, but ppl. And it is very doubtful that they will be landing these in warzones, but far more likely 100s of miles away. From there, C5, Osprey, etc can fly in.
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I'm not suggesting that these challenges are insurmountable - far from it. I'm just wondering out loud of the challenges we see facing us today are demanding such an extreme solution.
One use I can think of is a submarine rescue system [wikipedia.org]. If you could airdrop it into the sea near a submarine in distress, a support vessel could then directly tow it to the submarine location and begin a rescue attempt. I'm not sure if current vessels can be piloted remotely, but that would probably be necessary to expedite the rescue.
You could also drop supplies into remote locations in any weather conditions. As an example, the ability to drop supplies into Antarctica during winter could be useful. C
Delta Vee (Score:2)
anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity
Would not a Starship's payload capacity depend on how much it has to change its orbital direction from the latitude it lifts off from?
It seems to me that the specification can have either 100 tonnes dropped on - sorry: landed from the lowest-energy orbit, or delivery in one hour.
Re: Delta Vee (Score:2)
Couldn't it just launch in a direction that puts its orbit directly over the target location?
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What, in geosync?
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It's not orbiting.
Landing from orbit? (Score:2)
There's a lot of discussion of whether the rocket could land on any terrain at the target location, but wouldn't you also need a structure to climb to the top of the rocket and pull off the payload?
What about instead a flyover from low orbit? Could the rocket drop its payload from, say 50 miles altitude, maybe with some remote drone-style steering for the payload so that it's over the correct location when chutes deploy, then have the rocket continue in its orbit and and land back on its launch pad?
Also, c
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The cargo would have to have heatshields capable of re-entry and probably thrusters for that to work. Those plus chutes would add a considerable extra weight so they wouldn't really be able to deliver as much cargo
SciFi book fans, help me out... (Score:2)
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An enemy with a $500 Shoulder-launched missile... (Score:3)
Could easily ensure that that rocket delivers 100 tons of supplies to a burning heap of slag. It's not like you can distract a heat-seeker with chaff when you're tossing gazillion-degree rocket exhaust out your tuchas. If you're delivering cargo "anywhere in the world," you have to remember that a lot of "anywhere" doesn't want you delivering cargo.
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Could easily ensure that that rocket delivers 100 tons of supplies to a burning heap of slag. It's not like you can distract a heat-seeker with chaff when you're tossing gazillion-degree rocket exhaust out your tuchas.
Only if the enemy knows when and where it will be, with enough advanced notice to set up his rocket-launcher at an appropriate location before the rocket has landed. I would think one potential advantage of a rocket over a plane is that its increased speed makes it harder to anticipate in advance.
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Yes, I'm an "idoit".
However, even us idoits are aware that rocket launchers (and eyeballs) have a fairly limited range, and so the chances of you being able to eyeball it are equal to the chances of it landing close enough to you that you can get to it before it has landed and been secured. Which, again, may be fairly small, unless you've been given advanced notice regarding its trajectory. The world is a big place. At least with an airplane you can be fairly certain it's going to land at an airport, wit
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Have you watched a Starship test? It lights up the engines for a few seconds before landing, and falls mostly straight down from a high altitude.
Compare that to a cargo plane, that saunters into an area at medium altitude spewing hot jet exhaust, wanders down to low altitude spewing hot jet exhaust, then ambles along a 5-10 degree approach to land, spewing hot jet exhaust.
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Seems to me USAF had (Score:2)
What about Space Force? (Score:2)
Shouldn't something like this be the job of the Space Force?
makes good sense (Score:2)
In fact, I would if it would be possible to submerge it in the water except for when it has a landing coming in. This way, they are more protected from aerial attacks, though it will certainly mean submarines/torpedoes can do a number.
Re:Yeah, to hell with planning ahead. (Score:5, Insightful)
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100 tons.
how much would it take to build a space based vehicle that would have a earth lunar orbit.
of course.
i am curious.
what would a earth lunar orbit look like
Re: Yeah, to hell with planning ahead. (Score:2)
Re: Yeah, to hell with planning ahead. (Score:3)
Re:Yeah, to hell with planning ahead. (Score:5, Interesting)
Turn it into a question. When would it be useful to deliver 100 tons anywhere on short notice? There are three obvious scenarios: response to terrorism, a sudden military emergency, or a natural disaster. For terrorism, imagine a nerve gas attack. 100 tons of protective gear and anti-nerve agent doses sent from a depot in the US could make a huge difference. Similar reasoning applies to a natural disaster for medical supplies. The miliary action case is not as obvious if it's not something like medical equipment. 100 tons is not much when it comes to supplies like ammo, fuel, or gear. Military actions chews through expendable resources like a wild fire through a dry forest.
In order to enable any of these possibilities the rocket has to land at a site with little or no preparation. It seems like $38 million could pay for a preliminary study. A real program would cost a lot more, but a study is an obvious first step.
Re: Yeah, to hell with planning ahead. (Score:3)
Area effect. (Score:2)
The Starship is designed to land on uneven terrain like the moon and Mars.
And it also can land there, because there's no delicate structure around for multiple kilometers km.
A desert on earth seems like an obvious inclusion in its mission profile.
...as long as either:
- The landing spot is indeed not only flat enough, but literally in the middle of nowhere. Which would limit its practical usefulness.
(You would need to travel between the actual place where the cargo is needed and the landing point)
- You are pretty okay with a large area in the vicinity your landing spot being subjected to the rough equivalent of giant sand storm and a small-scale earth-
Re:Area effect. (Score:5, Interesting)
You are pretty okay with a large area in the vicinity your landing spot being subjected to the rough equivalent of giant sand storm and a small-scale earth-quake, all while the local personal are waiting hidden in a bunker until the area is clear for them to emerge
You are conflating where the _rocket_ lands with where the _payload_ lands, and they do not need to be the same. The payload can be ejected and parachute close to where it's needed, with no more danger/disruption than a regular air resupply (do not stand where pallet of MREs is about to come down). The rocket can land elsewhere.
Are we still talking about rockets? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are conflating where the _rocket_ lands with where the _payload_ lands, and they do not need to be the same. The payload can be ejected and parachute close to where it's needed, with no more danger/disruption than a regular air resupply (do not stand where pallet of MREs is about to come down).
Okay, maybe I am not understaing everything clearly:
- Are we speaking about rocket-assisted take off (e.g.: JATO, RATOG [wikipedia.org]) of a heavy but other normal plane that travels at normal speed and whose cargo starts dropping at the same normal speed, and therefore doesn't have much speed to shed and therefore parachute are practical as they mostly need to slow down the landing of the cargo?
In which case, yes: parachuted pallets! With space rockets!
- or are we speaking about something derivative of SpaceX' Spaceship, a.k.a. rocket. That would need to travel sub-orbital trajectory [wikipedia.org], i.e.: just a tiny bit under the escape velocity.
(quoting the linked article:
In which case, any cargo separating from the main rocket would inherit basically the same speed (with a not so large difference from orbital velocity), that it would need to shed before reaching the destination in order to be successfully distinguishable in practice from a kinetic ballistic missile, in which case relying on a simple parachute would be as comical as confusing an escape pod aboard the ISS and Felix Baumgartner (hint: the difference between two is not the altitude. It's again this thing called delta-v), and which case some powered deceleration might be needed, at which point you cargo requires a rocket engine and might be the rocket itself (once the extra weight of side boosters or first stage has been shed during take-off).
A.k.a:
- there's a reason why the space shuttle could only successfully(*) recover parachuted boosters - i.e.: which separate relatively early at a lower detla-v that can be shed by atmospheric deceleration - and not the external tank - which was left to destructively splash and break over the ocean - and which separated at roughly the same delta-v as a potential "space drop cargo".
(*) defined as something that could be reusable under some circumstances(**)
(**) defined as only roughly needing to rebuild half of it.
- there's a reason why SpaceX is again delicately landing boosters and first stages- which not only separate earlier, but rely on high-temperature resistant grid-fins and extra fuel for powered declaration. And why the recovery of fairing [wikipedia.org] is still an ongoing research (and currently it seems that they'll go the "let it splash in the ocean" route).
Because if the only thing you want is deliver the cargo, no matter how violently it might reach the destination, there's already a vehicle for that and it's called an ICBM.
The only realistic way something deployed out of the cargo bay of SpaceX' Spaceship could safely touch-down the ground without any rapid unscheduled disassembly occurring on arrival, is if the deployed cargo is a whole freaking re-entry vehicle like some Dragon-capsule derivative, and even that thing has to perform re-entry burns and rely-on heat shield and fuckton of parachutes, and currently is still coming in hot enough to be splashing down on the ocean, not gently landing on a landing platform (SuperDraco-based propulsive landing isn't there yet).
So whatever sub-orbital transportation is going to look in 20 years from now, it is going to be closer to w
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You are conflating where the _rocket_ lands with where the _payload_ lands, and they do not need to be the same. The payload can be ejected and parachute close to where it's needed, with no more danger/disruption than a regular air resupply (do not stand where pallet of MREs is about to come down).
In which case, any cargo separating from the main rocket would inherit basically the same speed (with a not so large difference from orbital velocity), that it would need to shed before reaching the destination in order to be successfully distinguishable in practice from a kinetic ballistic missile...
You are making an unwarranted assumption about when the payload would separate from Starship. The GP assumes Starship would provide the bulk of the required deceleration, with the payload only separating in a flight regime suitable for parachutes.
The Air Force has dredged up an old idea from the 1960s and is now going to spend almost $50 million exploring whether or not it can be made viable using Starship. It's not as ridiculous as it sounds. SpaceX themselves is a big fan of the "That's crazy! It just
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Personally I think the Air Force will decide to accept a bellyflop reentry and just use Starships in a variant of the Lunar Lander configuration, with deployable landing legs and an integrated deployable elevator.
(Going to have to post this a paragraph at a time due to Slashdot's totally screwed up filters):
I suspect once the full lifecycle costs are calculated, such as retrieving the reusable bits from a hostile area, someone is going to say: Given how many of these we need on standby at all times, and how many we think we're going to use per decade, the best cost/benefit is to ignore reusability and use the system in single-use mode, saving only the first stage
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Talk of delivering vaccines and life-saving serums and antidotes to Klingon poisons to save the tribbles is all very nice, but practically speaking every single cargo will have to be qualified for the vibration, temperature, radiation etc. profile of the flight. Which your average pharmaceutical bottling company does not do, and which surely would take significant time.
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So, again, I suspect there will be a limited number of qualified payloads ready to go, and they will of necessity be very generic. Water purification equipment, generators, fuel, etc? Sure. Is it worth the cost of delivering these ballistically? Well... maybe. Would it be more cost-effective to buy the same supplies closer to where they're needed, and hire some maybe not so friendly people to deliver them from that shorter range? The calculation
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The Starship is designed to land on uneven terrain like the moon and Mars.
And it also can land there, because there's no delicate structure around for multiple kilometers km.
A desert on earth seems like an obvious inclusion in its mission profile.
...as long as either:
- The landing spot is indeed not only flat enough, but literally in the middle of nowhere. Which would limit its practical usefulness.
Oh, the faithful will jump on you like Crocodiles on a wildebeest!
But these things need analysis, and one part of analysis is the positives and negatives - and the Muskovites can't do that. Aside from the ones you've pointed out, there is the problem of what an attractive nuisance this would be. A big and slow (on decelerating to land) rocket that makes more local damage the closer to ground if you destroy it.
Defensive analysis is important, like what are the weaknesses that an enemy can explolit? Th
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Pretty much any major military air base would do just fine. Given the length of a runway needed for large planes and the width of security buffers around it, they already have enough exclusive land area that it wouldn't be a problem to evacuate a large enough radius around the landing pad. The article also talks about rapidly preparing a landing surface where one doesn't exist. They aren't planning to just land these on loose sand.
Also, the goal of the Starship is to enable aircraft-like operations with mul
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The miliary action case is not as obvious
20 light armored tactical vehicles like the Oshkosh L-ATV.
Or 66 SM-6 missiles to reload 2 guided missile destroyers.
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Well you're living up to your moniker but the attitude still doesn't answer the question if rocket delivery is the best way of doing things over the simple expenditure of having a base close by.
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[...]simple expenditure of having a base close by.
I don't think having a base on foreign soil is a "simple expenditure". The cost of maintaining such bases isn't trivial; I don't have numbers, but I'd expect a single base would cost in the hundred millions to billions every year. Even then, a military base gives you some manpower, and basic weaponry/equipment. However, if you want the capability to respond to all kinds of unknown situations within a few hours (faster than it would take to fly needed materials from depots located on another continent), then
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Turn it into a question. When would it be useful to deliver 100 tons anywhere on short notice? There are three obvious scenarios: response to terrorism, a sudden military emergency, or a natural disaster. For terrorism, imagine a nerve gas attack. 100 tons of protective gear and anti-nerve agent doses sent from a depot in the US could make a huge difference. Similar reasoning applies to a natural disaster for medical supplies. The military action case is not as obvious if it's not something like medical equipment. 100 tons is not much when it comes to supplies like ammo, fuel, or gear. Military actions chews through expendable resources like a wild fire through a dry forest.
Something to note about this 'one hour deployment' would presume that whatever is needed, is already assembled and just has to be pushed onto the launchpad. I surmise that it would take quite a bit longer to have a package assembled, prepped and loaded before it can be pushed onto the launchpad.
However, if you're sending troops somewhere, they'll take longer to get there than it likely will be to get the first resupply setup, so this could be used to resupply a force, perhaps creating a surprise element, o
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The military is a logistics machine.
I would kind of expect if we actually got to the point where we're using re-usable ballistic delivery vehicles that the military would have adapted its logistics exactly for this, with purpose built containers, packaging and staging around these launch platforms. I think it really will be fairly trivially assembled and pushed out into a waiting launch vehicle.
It might even aid rapid troop deployments. Right now air insertion of airborne troops beyond simply parachuting
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Loading a rocket for even sub-orbital flight is far from a trivial matter. Misloading cargo to one side of the vehicle by as little as a pound, throws off potential landing by 100's if not 1000's of miles, depending on range. You will have to overburn fuel to compensate, and likely miss your target by falling too short.
Current large missile technology doesn't have nearly as many 'moving parts' with cargo that's different sizes, weights and shapes; so it's a very big, very new variable that will rely more o
Re:Yeah, to hell with planning ahead. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget "giant nuclear warheads disguised as a pallet of 'medical aid'" in a rocket that "accidentally" goes off-course.
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Planning ahead really is a problem with this, but not in the way you mean. A rocket can reach anywhere on Earth in an hour, but you can't launch it on an hour's notice. Preparing for a Starship launch is a major project involving days to weeks of preparation. Suppose you could somehow get all that preparation down to just a day. You can already reach most places on Earth by airplane within a day, so there's still not much advantage.
You could eliminate most of the preparation time by keeping a spare Star
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For terrorism, imagine a nerve gas attack. 100 tons of protective gear and anti-nerve agent doses sent from a depot in the US could make a huge difference. Similar reasoning applies to a natural disaster for medical supplies. The miliary action case is not as obvious if it's not something like medical equipment. 100 tons is not much when it comes to supplies like ammo, fuel, or gear. Military actions chews through expendable resources like a wild fire through a dry forest.
The military uses are more varied than you think. The US Air Force delivers up to 18 pallets of supplies by air drop from the cargo bay of a C-17. It's how to get a lot of materiel in-theater in a hurry, with no ground infrastructure, in locations that are difficult or impossible to reach in other ways. In particular it's how you deliver a heap of equipment for paratroopers, who will appear in a location and from a direction that was entirely unanticipated because hostile forces thought (correctly) that
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It doesn't actually take an hour for the rocket to fly. I imagine the use case would involve fetching cargo that's already packaged into plug-and-play fairing adapters and hoisting it into the fairing for rapid mating, at the same time as fueling the rocket, then launching it for a 20-50 minute flight.
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A few hours, vs a few hours with a 747â"8F (Score:2)
That's kinda what I'm thinking. To get the stuff from the warehouse to the where the rocket is and get it it loaded into the rocket is a going to take a couple hours.
This after making the decision to use the every expensive) rocket and getting that setup, the papers signed etc.
Then the rocket flies to somewhere in the general area of where it's needed but you can't deliver it to just anywhere. That takes an hour or so.
Unload it it and get it to where it's actually needed.
You're looking at maybe 8 hours tota
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Yeah, to hell with planning ahead, if we forget the loo paper we can send it there within the hour.
Cost to wipe your ass? Getting pretty damn expensive.
Mussolini famously "made the trains run on time". This crap, like interstate highway systems, is sold to the people as a thing for them, when in reality it is about moving troops and equipment as fast as possible when a battle starts somewhere.
Tank-capable cargo drop planes were a further improvement, and this further still.
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This crap, like interstate highway systems, is sold to the people as a thing for them
OTOH it's quite accurate to say that interstate highway systems are a "thing for the people"; we've been using them to good effect for 70+ years now.
The fact that they could also be used for military purposes in an emergency is a bonus; it doesn't take away from its primary utility as a means of civilian transport. Perhaps one day rocket travel will be the same.
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He needed to make an important meeting at parliament, what he said was "Make my bloody train run on time, or I will rip out your guts and kill your family".
Suffice to say, his train ran on time. The rest of the time the trains were a shambles.
But hey, don't take my word for it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]