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Wiki Super Heavy/Starship - General Development Discussion

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Sounded like they had designed a better, lighter hot staging ring that would be reusable. I suspect it’s either not ready yet, or is a lot more expensive, so this jettison idea makes sense while they are still lofting test ships that they don’t plan to reuse.
They may stick with the one they have, but I'm kinda doubting it. The reason for dumping the ring on this flight was that it was detachable and expendable, and they had blown their mass budget by reinforcing the crap out of the booster. The methane tank has triple the number of internal stringers as prior builds. To make the landing, they needed to be lighter, and the staging ring was the natural candidate to be thrown off the island.

Elon showed the following graphic at his April company presentation. Note the V2 and V3 boosters have a very different design which matches a Soviet implementation. I assume it must be created as part of the booster's top structure and cannot be built separately and then latched on top.

IFT-5 is going to be another V1 Starship, so I expect to see pretty much the same flight profile as IFT-4.

1717709843414.png
 
They're trying to get to 1 Starship per day!
Because folks can sometimes be confused over what that means, remember that Tesla "produces a car every 40 seconds". That doesn't mean that they can go from raw materials to a finished car in 40 seconds, but that they have a finished car roll off the assembly line every 40 seconds.

So if SpaceX wants to have a Starship rolling off the assembly line once a day, and it takes a month of work to produce a Starship, then they'd need to have an assembly line 30 Starships long.

That production rate isn't going to be needed for a very long time. Getting Moon operations up to the level of a functioning colony is going take a couple decades, and that should be done before attempting Mars. I figure Elon might make it to Mars before he dies, but he won't be Grand Poobah of a vast city there.
 
That production rate isn't going to be needed for a very long time. Getting Moon operations up to the level of a functioning colony is going take a couple decades, and that should be done before attempting Mars. I figure Elon might make it to Mars before he dies, but he won't be Grand Poobah of a vast city there.
100 ships to Mars:
100 Depot to fuel the ships
100*10 depot loading launches
Three launches per tanker per day = 333 tankers
533 ships total
 
100 ships to Mars:
100 Depot to fuel the ships
100*10 depot loading launches
Three launches per tanker per day = 333 tankers
533 ships total
If you want to tank them in a day, yes. Tank them in 10 days and you need 33 tankers. SpaceX is going to have to learn how to store propellants, so by the time they're assembling a fleet of 100 ships, they're going to be able to take their time.

That said, 1000 launches in one day is bonkers. Even given 10 launch towers, that's a launch every 15 minutes. IFT-4 started propellant load 50 minutes before launch. That'll obviously come down, but below 15 minutes? (They've also gotta deliver and stack the vehicles) At least they won't have to keep using lots of liquid Nitrogen to chill the ground support equipment before each launch.

Then there's the question of where you store that much propellant on the ground. A thousand launches plus propellant cargo is approaching 5 million tons of propellant (assuming 120 tons of propellant per tanker). This is all using V1 numbers. Using V2 and V3 Starships should reduce the number of launches, but I wouldn't expect the propellant requirements to change much.

Five million tons of liquid oxygen (it's not all oxygen, of course) would require a sphere with a diameter of 2 km. If we flow the propellants in via pipes to maintain a 15 minute launch cadence on 10 towers, then that's 184,000 tons per hour. Flowing at 10 m/s, that would require a pipe 3 meters in diameter. I'm ignoring the use of Nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide and Helium, though the Nitrogen demands are probably significant as well.

Oh, and water for the deluge system.

Hmmm. I wonder what all the residuals of launch will do to the area. Nitrogen, CO2 exhaust, CO2 fire suppression gas, vented oxygen (and methane?).

In any case, Elon's expectation is that the first fleet will consist of 10 ships. I wonder if he'll name any of them Niña, Pinta, or Santa Maria.
 
If you want to tank them in a day, yes. Tank them in 10 days and you need 33 tankers. SpaceX is going to have to learn how to store propellants, so by the time they're assembling a fleet of 100 ships, they're going to be able to take their time.

That said, 1000 launches in one day is bonkers. Even given 10 launch towers, that's a launch every 15 minutes. IFT-4 started propellant load 50 minutes before launch. That'll obviously come down, but below 15 minutes? (They've also gotta deliver and stack the vehicles) At least they won't have to keep using lots of liquid Nitrogen to chill the ground support equipment before each launch.

Then there's the question of where you store that much propellant on the ground. A thousand launches plus propellant cargo is approaching 5 million tons of propellant (assuming 120 tons of propellant per tanker). This is all using V1 numbers. Using V2 and V3 Starships should reduce the number of launches, but I wouldn't expect the propellant requirements to change much.

Five million tons of liquid oxygen (it's not all oxygen, of course) would require a sphere with a diameter of 2 km. If we flow the propellants in via pipes to maintain a 15 minute launch cadence on 10 towers, then that's 184,000 tons per hour. Flowing at 10 m/s, that would require a pipe 3 meters in diameter. I'm ignoring the use of Nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide and Helium, though the Nitrogen demands are probably significant as well.

Oh, and water for the deluge system.

Hmmm. I wonder what all the residuals of launch will do to the area. Nitrogen, CO2 exhaust, CO2 fire suppression gas, vented oxygen (and methane?).

In any case, Elon's expectation is that the first fleet will consist of 10 ships. I wonder if he'll name any of them Niña, Pinta, or Santa Maria.
Ack, good catch. 333 tanker-days of launches, constrained by number if launch sites.
 
However, having a thin ablative layer underneath the HRSI tiles might still provide just enough additional protection to survive reentry in the event a tile or two does fall off. I’ll be interested to see what final design they come up with.
Replying to myself, it seems like this two-layer heat shield structure is exactly what they’re planning to do:
 
Replying to myself, it seems like this two-layer heat shield structure is exactly what they’re planning to do:
Does "twice as strong" mean mechanically? There didn't seem to be a problem with the tiles staying on their mounts, only with having the stainless melted.

Elon seems to be tempering his weight-elimination obsession with a need to make sure the derned thing survives reentry. I wonder if the second layer is intended to be a temporary thing just to make sure the vehicle survives reentry. Once they have some examples to inspect, they can figure out how the vehicles are being attacked by heat.
 
Replying to myself, it seems like this two-layer heat shield structure is exactly what they’re planning to do:
So this means they are abandoning the soft insulating layer under the current tiles and replacing it with something hard that will ablate if the tile fails? I wonder how much additional weight that will add to the ship; some tens of tons?

Even though I follow Starship development very closely I still have to remind myself that the vehicles are early prototypes and it is expected they will change significantly, especially the ship since it is trying to accomplish something that is unprecedented in the history of space flight.
 
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It's from gaming stream:

-Flight 5 in about a month, after replacing the heatshield on the ship with a new tile twice as strong.
-Ablative protection underneath will act as secondary heatshield layer.
-Starship to Mars in 3 years.

"The chance on having both the booster and ship soft landing was about 20%"
"I was really walking on clouds after the Starship launch, @Spacex's team did an amazing job"

estimates 50% chance of Mechazilla catching the rocket.

-The booster's impact point will be at sea, it will either change course towards the tower or RUD itself over the ocean.
-The tower will be robust to 1000s of landings, Elon thinks.
-Starship Florida launch mid next year