To send an uncrewed ship to Mars, basically a test vehicle whose primary objective would be to survive the landing, I would think could be done in much less than 3 years. Once LEO refueling is achieved and the ship TPS is refined, hopefully next year, what else needs to be done for the first Mars test flight?
You need an Earth Mars transfer window which optimizes every ~26 months. Earlier than 36 months is 10 months. Q4 2024, Q4 2026, Q4 2028/Q1 2029.
It has always been like that. He's been kicking out aggressive timelines for various goals ever since the beginning. First cargo flight to Mars with Starship in 2022. First manned circumlunar flight by Starship in 2023. First manned flight to Mars in 2024.
Yeah... I've argued much the same... Musk does a mental first-principles analysis of what should be possible and then sets that as the goal.
You are right of course, I completely forgot about that when composing my post! Thanks for the correction.
I interpreted "twice as strong" as toughness / fracture resistance.
The low-energy transfer window is only a couple months long, every 26 months. My guess is that they might send several Starships per window with intentionally different designs, to learn as much as possible per window, and to have the highest chance that at least one will land successfully. If carefully staggered and positioned, perhaps each Starship entering the Martian atmosphere could even communicate to the Starship behind it during descent, much as reentering Starships on Earth communicate with Starlink now to provide live telemetry during reentry, and to avoid the loss of all prior telemetry in the event of a RUD. Imagine a train of ten Starships entering the Martian atmosphere at five-minute intervals! Now that I'd like to see.
The reality is that Earth itself is a much more difficult environment and atmosphere for a ship to work within. By the time SpaceX is really going for Mars they will know the ins and outs of Starship. Much like they understand and know Falcon 9 strengths and weaknesses. You are right that they will still do a number of test runs to truly understand how Starship will work in the Mars environment.
The window really does close. (The required delta-V quickly exceeds Starship's capabilities.) Take a look at this plot: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/explanation.png The blue regions are ideal, and anything outside blue-cyan is probably not realistic.I know they'll want to optimize for those transfer windows. But it's not like it's a window that closes, right? As you leave the window and transit time is going up then maybe sending one ship every 4 weeks would mean they arrive every 5 or so. Or am I missing something (quite likely)?
I like the rest of what you said. Just trying to understand the window; I am not a missile man, steely eyed or otherwise.
And you made me wonder... maybe they can load a couple of the ships with Starlink satellites. Do you even need a license for deploying a Mars constellation? What if you deploy the constellation before the politicians can say you need a license?
@TunaBug, if you want to look around for more on these sorts of charts, look for "porkchop plots".
I'd be simulating as much as I could in more accessible locations such as the Earth, Moon, Lagrange points, etc. The big advantage to testing missions to Mars is that you can be sending supplies and equipment to the surface. Nothing of great value, but mass that isn't found on Mars. Perhaps building materials to start with.
Send some relay satellites as well, providing laser communication with Earth. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is getting a little long in the tooth.
Does the droneship capability imply landing legs, or would each droneship have its own catch tower? (I’m not sure how they could possibly do that, but fun to envision!)
Landing legs at sea makes sense. I can’t imagine chopsticks at sea with wave movement being amplified at the top of the tower. Since the boosters don’t need to fly back to Starbase, should have more fuel for landing leg weight. The problem with at sea landings is slower turnaround speed.
I haven't read it, but the screenshots in the tweet are from https://www.faa.gov/media/80626, which is an Environmental Impact Statement prepared by the FAA. It probably makes more sense to analyze that than the tweeter's interpretation. From skimming the document, this is at the "scoping" phase. In other words, it's not even a "draft". The PDF is 12 pages long, and only pages 3-6 (i.e. one third of it) is a description of the project, the rest is boilerplate, so the interesting bits should be a short read if you're inclined.
It also bumps the payload capacity by about 10%. Well worth keeping.
That's what Blue Origin is planning to do, and it works for them because they're only going to fly at intervals. Starship is shooting for rapid reuse, and involving a droneship is not going to facilitate that. Landing legs and a droneship seems like a lot of work to get some additional performance for the occasional flight. Such a Starship stack would only be used when a customer needs to loft a single object that is more massive than a Starship could normally carry. It seems a niche application when I think they're going to have difficulty finding objects that mass 100, 150 or even 200 tons, depending on the Starship variant.
