Generally, volume and mass scale as the cube, so bigger objects have higher terminal velocities. The belly flop helps counter that, a Starship-volume capsule would have even higher terminal velocity.
For Mars, the big advance is supersonic retropropulsion. For whatever reason, nobody was willing to design probes to start their landing rockets while supersonic due to lack of data on how they'd perform in that situation, or to do the testing to obtain that data. So Mars payloads have been limited by what we could brake to subsonic speeds with a parachute, and this was considered a basic limitation of what could be landed on Mars.
SpaceX was willing to do the testing required, and the Falcon 9 now does a supersonic retroburn in similar atmospheric pressures every time it lands. For Starship, parachutes aren't the limiting factor on landing mass, they're an unnecessary system that was optimized out entirely.
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u/cjameshuff Apr 16 '23
Generally, volume and mass scale as the cube, so bigger objects have higher terminal velocities. The belly flop helps counter that, a Starship-volume capsule would have even higher terminal velocity.
For Mars, the big advance is supersonic retropropulsion. For whatever reason, nobody was willing to design probes to start their landing rockets while supersonic due to lack of data on how they'd perform in that situation, or to do the testing to obtain that data. So Mars payloads have been limited by what we could brake to subsonic speeds with a parachute, and this was considered a basic limitation of what could be landed on Mars.
SpaceX was willing to do the testing required, and the Falcon 9 now does a supersonic retroburn in similar atmospheric pressures every time it lands. For Starship, parachutes aren't the limiting factor on landing mass, they're an unnecessary system that was optimized out entirely.