If current Starship is 130t dry, with 30 ton in the headers as written in the March 2024 FAA environmental report, then even with 0 gravity losses on the S2 and running the Raptor SL as little as possible, with the IFT-2/IFT-3 separation speed, and considering that musk called "100 tons ship" as a long term goal, the current-size starship won't be able to launch more than 100 tons with its current propellant mass, going significantly above 100 tons requires a stretch and higher propellant mass. Which is what they're doing.
Not one bit because it is an iterative design. You need to wake up. It is the same group of people doing the designs. You made the foolish claim it was going to fail. The existing design was overbuilt but easy and quick to manufacture and easy to modify. It was not poor design as far as structural integrity, only inefficient in that it was heavy and single use. Designing and manufacturing struts and the interstage rings would take time and would not be easy to change
Disagreement isn’t bullying.
Emphasis on this.
| A little learning is a dangerous thing ; |
| Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring : |
| There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, |
| And drinking largely sobers us again. |
Neither SpaceX nor you ever claimed that the present interstage design was for single use only.
Right here.
That is wrong.
Wrong. The interstages were different between flights. Not if they want to change strut length or diameter or spacing between test flights. And the rings that the struts attach to would even be harder to change. They don't know what the final design is going to be at this time.
A real engineer would understand what SpaceX is doing and not make crazy clueless posts.
Pentagon working with Ukraine, SpaceX to prevent Russian exploitation of Starlink - Breaking Defense
“Just the idea of this being more available and so people can find it and try to exploit it, that's something we just have to bake in and understand,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said of commercial services like SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.breakingdefense.com
A nuclear reactor and generator would give a better electrical output and a sustained one too.
.None. Just stop. How many times does it have to be repeated. SpaceX's efforts are to reduce launch costs by developing a large 100% reusable vehicle. Actual Lift capability is secondary. They will adjust the vehicle size once they get reusability down.
Depends on the amount of reactants/propellants delivered. Fuel cells can use NG and O2. Actual fuel cell mass is small. Radiators might be the mass and volume issue.
Fine - solar cell arrays then. I hear they have quite a track record for scalable, sustainable space based power...Don't mention it to Greenpeace though as they'd have a cow at the though of an orbiting nuclear-reactor
The stretch Starship doing a belly flop worries me a bit.
No, more compact doesn't have the propellant to do the mission.
Touche'
No, it needs to be simple and cheapThe pattern here looks like something that could flex:
Laser-patterned thin films that swell into kirigami-like structures offer new opportunities in hydrogel technology
New options for making finely structured soft, flexible and expandable materials called hydrogels have been developed by researchers at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT).phys.org
Perhaps a similar pattern can help unitize things somehow. This is meant for small applications of course---but that pattern may be of interest.
That stretch Starship looks like it could hold this:
You have to know a lot to realize you really don't know as much as you thought you did.
You could call it. . .Zenith Star.That stretch Starship looks like it could hold this:
Chemical oxygen iodine laser - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Maybe a subvariant that has special tankage that---when free of propellant--can use refueling tech to pump new chemicals in.
Maybe use those or other chemicals to keep an NR-1 type reactor going for the solid State laser added on at a later date
That's honestly a crap laser compared to what can be done now. Fibre lasers and Metastable Rare Gas Lasers (MRGLs) are what give the best efficiencies. Zenith Star was to weigh ~40t. USNC were advertising a 10t 50MWth reactor. If we assume 10t for the laser and 10t for the generator and 10t for the rest of the satellite and a 40% generator effiency and a 50% laser efficiency (which is actually conservative for the best fibre lasers and MRGLs), you get an output of 10MW for the same size without the need to refuel it... well except once every 30 years maybe.That stretch Starship looks like it could hold this:
Chemical oxygen iodine laser - Wikipedia
Maybe a subvariant that has special tankage that---when free of propellant--can use refueling tech to pump new chemicals in.
Maybe use those or other chemicals to keep an NR-1 type reactor going for the solid State laser added on at a later date
The stretch Starship doesn't have anymore volume than the current one. It juat gets the payload mass to level they wanted.That stretch Starship looks like it could hold this:
Chemical oxygen iodine laser - Wikipedia
Maybe a subvariant that has special tankage that---when free of propellant--can use refueling tech to pump new chemicals in.
Maybe use those or other chemicals to keep an NR-1 type reactor going for the solid State laser added on at a later date
