Mike Griffin wants to shut down government use of commercial space companies

[JB47394]

It sounds like booster + completely new upper stage(s) would be needed then...

Going from LEO to NRHO and back is 7.9 km/s. With a 50 ton payload, a fully-fueled Starship could just make that trip. It could be pretty luxurious because Orion, including its structure, propulsion module, propellants, heat shield, etc is 26.5 tons.

Using only SpaceX hardware:

1. Launch HLS Starship Lander, fuel on orbit, go to NRHO.
2. Launch HLS Starship Transporter, fuel on orbit
3. Launch Dragon, dock with HLS Starship Transporter, go to NRHO.
4. Dock with HLS Starship Lander, go to Moon, mission, go to NRHO.
5. Dock with HLS Starship Transporter, go to LEO
6. Dock with Dragon, go to Earth.

Tanking the two HLS Starships would require a crapton of launches. Also, I don't know if Dragon can stay on orbit for the two or three weeks between departure and return. And then there are the boiloff issues for HLS Starship Transport while it's sitting at NRHO.

That leaves you with a empty HLS in NRHO and an empty HLS in LEO. The LEO one can be refueled, but the NRHO one is pretty much just a space station.

If you want to develop some hardware, you can skip the HLS Starship Transporter, its needed tanker launches, and Dragon. You put Orion, its support module (ESM), and a 75 ton tug in the cargo bay of a Starship. Starship gets it to LEO, and the tug gets it to NRHO. It comes back on its own.

 

[JB47394]

It just occurred to me that I've got full life support, etc, on two HLS Starships.

If propellant transfer is reliable enough, you send a tanker to NRHO , then follow it with the crew in an HLS Starship. The HLS starship arrives, lands, performs its mission, returns to NRHO, tanks off the tanker and returns to LEO. The crew stays on their one HLS the whole time, and the tanker can carry that much more propellant.

After the mission, you've got an HLS Starship at LEO, and an empty tanker that doesn't do anything useful at NRHO. I guess it could be used as a propellant depot once the Moon base is cranking out propellants. In 2050.

 

[Grendal]

Fundamentally, Starship is excellent for getting large payloads into LEO. Thereafter it is overkill (way too much mass) for almost everything else except going to Mars or turning the Starship into a permanent 'base" somewhere. I expect that once Starship is putting large payloads into orbit with regularity that a new industry develops of "we're in LEO, now let's have our thing do this." There may be a lot of orbital objects around Earth, Moon, and Mars that can be rendezvoused with and a transporter is used to shuttle stuff to and from those places. The transporter stays in space permanently. The craft in the movie "The Martian" is an example of this concept.