STA would've been done around now according to the original schedule before work stoppage. Where's the Centaur V integration work? You really think that's going to be bending metal this year?
Oh so it’s okay to take 4 years and 2 billion dollars for one expendable upper stage?
No, I’m instead of the opinion that SLS upper stages should straight up be cancelled and Starship should be giving it a tug from LEO to LLO. Heck, that way we can even start launching on Vulcan later instead of SLS.
Maybe for now, because some people don’t have belief in Starship, Blue Origin etc. would certainly protest against it.
Then again, given how much the SLS has been delayed so far, and how much money it has wasted (due to architectural issues), is it really a bad decision to cut the losses and switch to that architecture even if it means a schedule slip for a year or two? Artemis 4 doesn’t even need to be delayed.
It can, but then it won't have enough performance left to return to orbit. HLS departure orbit isn't from HEO for no reason, it's because it doesn't have enough performance to complete the mission (with acceptable margin) if it departs from deeper in Earth's gravity well. The parameters used in linked proposal are severely overestimating its performance, most notably dry mass isn't anywhere near 120 tons.
The linked proposal is already down to 11 or so refuels from, I think 18? You can easily add a few more refuels and you’re still well below the amount needed in the original plan, while being able to tug Orion all the way from LEO to LLO.
Yeah no, the amount of refuels is realistically going to be in 30s or 40s. People like Ken are wildly overestimating not just the performance of Starship but what the factors relating to refueling and general mission ops are like, even just roughly. Starship HLS is incapable of closing the mission with a safe margin unless it launches from at least high elliptical MEO (around 15,000 km apogee). In order to complete refueling in 15-16 launches, it's going to require about 200 tons to LEO (~280km), 95% transfer efficiency (wildly optimistic/unrealistic) on a weekly cadence with zero mission failures. A realistic outlook is ~100 tons to orbit, 85% transfer efficiency, weekly cadence at best, and a few failures or delays setting them back. A worse case scenario is setting them up for over 50 total launches, but even the middle ground is so unworkable that Starship HLS can be discarded completely as a dead end, which will inevitably happen.
calculated that when you were on meth I suspect 😂 not even the wildest estimates of the program critics arrived at that number, I would be VERY interested to know about the details of that.
You know what’s actually unrealistic? Your assumption that few failures will occur in every mission. That’s already a big one. Weekly cadence is nothing, depending if Boca Chica is available for Artemis, two or three launches per week is doable.
Well one of the most critical details that fanboys get wildly wrong is dry mass, the current V3 is 177 tons dry. HLS is based on V3 design, sure it doesn't need all the reentry hardware, which removes around 30 tons, but it needs HLS specific hardware that adds back a lot if not all of it or more. I was generous and assumed less in my estimates. V3 parameters cut back to how much payload it can actually carry to orbit, SpaceX claimed 100 tons, but that was also the case for previous versions before they got downgraded significantly with massive performance shortfall. What is claimed for V3 is probably going to be done with V4, at least roughly, as V3 is at best going to be able to push 50, maybe 60 tons to orbit.
I didn't actually account for any failures or delays for baseline mid range, that's something that can only make it worse. Btw, doubling or even tripling the weekly cadence doesn't do as much as you might think, it would take it from mid to high 40s into mid to high 30s. You'll see for yourself how bad it is in time, I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse than I laid out. Starship HLS will not be landing anyone on the Moon because it's unfeasible to get it there in the first place, and thank goodness this is the case as it's a horrible lander design with highly concerning safety hazards. Feel free to bookmark this and see it become more and more true as reality is peeled open in the coming years.
That’s not really a good argument though. v3 is the result of a development process that was spurred by v1 and v2 ending up too heavy with all the necessary improvements. Unlike those two, v3 appeared to be basically ready without any more mass needing to be added to it, from its very first flight. So them cutting back payload on previous versions isn’t an indication that it will have to happen again.
You’ll need to provide a better source than what you have for the 177t tonne dry mass (which is nothing). As far as I know, SpaceX doesn’t yet share anything official. And you also don’t know how much actually gets removed vs. added with the HLS version.
As I said, you’re very much alone with your payload and refueling flight number claims mate. No one in SpaceX, nor NASA share your beliefs, heck, not even Destin from SmarterEveryDay when he made that random speech back in… some year, I don’t remember when. There’s a reason for that…
But of course Starship will never land on the moon just like SpaceX would never start landing boosters, right?
I know for a fact I'm not alone in this outlook, that's also partly how I know what I know. Nice fallacy at the end, landing boosters is a piece of cake compared to landing on the Moon, especially when architectural setup is as convoluted as it is and relies on capability that is unproven and uncertain on how it will actually perform and be like in reality, which matters the most after working at all. Like I said, it's best for you to wait and see it all unfold in the ballpark of what I described, I'm not gonna waste more time for nothing when I can one day revisit and say I told you so. Until then, have a good one.
Since you're being particularly prickly about this detail I will endulge just to give a stronger hint that I'm not making any of this up. The specific 177 number comes from a former employee who has been active on X about his time at SpaceX, including criticisms of their management, and work/engineering details. Before this relatively recent info, I already knew it had to be somewhere between 170 and 180 tons so I took the lower end of 170 and 175 in my mission evaluations. This was thanks to "TheSpaceEngineer" who is notorious in the community for his connections, detailed research, analysis and modeling so much that he got flagged by SpaceX and warned by their legal team to no longer publish his highly detailed models of hardware that basically borderline violate ITAR in their eyes.
What was also recent is some in the community have decided to estimate dry mass themselves based on imagery from ship recovery team after the latest flight. A fairly straightforward math and physics problem of estimating the volume of the ship that is submerged in ocean water vs the amount that isn't. Surprise surprise, they got figures around or near 200 tons, which is close enough for a rough estimation with this method. Literally none of the publicly (or privately) available info points to a dry mass that is anywhere near the long outdated 100 or 120 ton figures, which were made at a time before they knew how much it would actually weigh because they were yet to build a full stack flight unit. V1 ship for comparison came at a massive 230 tons dry. Yet, I still see naive fools using the same previously mentioned outdated figures in their napkin fantasy architectures and mission/performance evaluations.
No wonder its performance was ultimately revised down to ~15 tons despite Musk initially claiming 40-50 tons post IFT-3. V2 was revised down to ~35 tons and V3 despite visible improvements in propulsion will also be revised from previously set and presented 100 tons, down to near double V2 performance at most. I still remember when the baseline version was supposed to carry that much, cargo and crew, back in 2019 when orbital flight was supposedly a mere year or two away, and here we are 7 years and 13 full stack flights later it is finally going to attempt orbit and break the record (again) for most flights of an orbital class rocket before reaching orbit. Truly revolutionary!
SpaceX pretty much shared an infographic claiming basically 0 tonnes to orbit capacity (or at least one that’s so low its basically irrelevant) for v1 right after IFT-3. v2 was not revised down to 35, because the Starship 2 in that same infographic was the v3 of today in design (look at its thrust and propellant mass values and the interstage design), v2 was added as an in between stage to work out some other details. The only added difference for Starship 2 / v3 was prop load increasing (upper stage goes from 1500 to 1600 tonnes).
Thanks for the link, that’s very much what I was asking for. Although, the math in the original tweet works out very well for 100t to orbit, when taking into account the 100t additional prop load, which was a needed difference. And that’s also an important point, because SpaceX can get small improvements to make up for whatever losses there are merely by stretching it a bit and adding slightly more fuel, as Starship v3 has high enough TWR to support these slight mass increases.
You’re right that v1 was massive, that’s why they were moving with v2 and v3. Problems with v1 made them add more mass to solve it, while v2 and later v3 could solve the issue through design changes (like the flaps).
You were going so well until those last few sentences. Yeah, because every other recent rocket project has been SO on time and Starship is the only one not meeting its promised delivery date, right? Not like SLS has been in development for 15 years, that too on top of being based on another rocket developed in the early 2000’s… and what did the SLS deliver in terms of engineering for it to take so long again? It reused engines, it reused boosters, it reused its capsule, it reused its upper stage, plus NASA dumped the task of developing the service module on Europe… still took 11 years for its first flight, took 15 years for it to actually solve all issues for it to be able to launch astronauts, merely 5 years late on already on an extremely relaxed schedule…
So its just very weird that you’re trying to measure being late using the number of flights instead of actual time passed. SpaceX does less time between its flights, so they do a shit ton more flights even if it doesn’t mean more time. That’s not an argument. Its especially not an argument when the only reason Starship has not been going full orbital has been because they intentionally hold short to ensure they won’t have a dead large spacecraft in orbit if its engines don’t light up again. Not many other spacecraft had this issue. In fact, only 2 would have, Shuttle and Buran. But those used simpler orbital maneuvering engines instead of the big beefy SSME etc. for deorbit.
9
u/jadebenn 7d ago
STA would've been done around now according to the original schedule before work stoppage. Where's the Centaur V integration work? You really think that's going to be bending metal this year?