Starlab is a joint venture between the US-based Voyager Space and the European-based multinational aerospace corporation Airbus. The venture is building a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and will launch the new station no earlier than 2028.

"SpaceX's history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab," Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, said in a statement. "SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship." //

Starlab will have a diameter of about 26 feet (8 meters). It is perhaps not a coincidence that Starship's payload bay can accommodate vehicles up to 26 feet across in its capacious fairing. However, in an interview, Marshall Smith, the chief technology officer of Voyager Space, said the company looked at a couple of launch options.

"We looked at multiple launches to get Starlab into orbit, and eventually gravitated toward single launch options," he said. "It saves a lot of the cost of development. It saves a lot of the cost of integration. We can get it all built and checked out on the ground, and tested and launch it with payloads and other systems. One of the many lessons we learned from the International Space Station is that building and integrating in space is very expensive." //

phat_tony Ars Centurion
17y
263
Subscriptor
This is exactly what most space companies should be doing now - assuming Starship is going to work, and start planning based on the sea change that's going to create. There are still so many companies trying to duke it out in small launch where clearly the overwhelming majority of them have no chance of making it. Pivot to take advantage of the fact that everything about space launch is about to change. Figure out what we could do with a 120 ton satellite the size of a space station that we can't do now and build that satellite. Figure out what we could do with swarms of micro satellites that isn't cost effective now if they were 1/10 the cost to get to orbit. Space tugs. Commercial refueling depots. Tourism. Space stations. Solar-system wide internet as a service... NASA has a huge bandwidth problem on the Deep Space Network... even if they aren't asking for proposals, it may be a case of "if you build it, they will come."
I don't know, but when there's a two order of magnitude change pending on the most fundamental constraint of a sizable industry, that's when new players make it and old players can't adapt and break. It's like the advent of microchips, or the internet. Trying to compete with the company that's inventing the two order of magnitude improvement is the last business bet you want to make. Capitalizing on the implications is exactly what you want to do. //

pavon Ars Tribunus Militum
16y
2,100
Subscriptor
Very excited about this, finally picking up where Skylab left off. It had 350m3 pressurized volume in a single Saturn V launch, compared to the 1000m3 of ISS with 15 pressurized modules taking over a decade to assemble.

If you ever get a chance to visit Space Center Houston, you can walk through mockups of both an ISS module and Skylab, and the difference was viscerally striking to me. One was a series of hallways, like the corridors of datacenter, while the other was this spacious open area. The ISS design might be more efficient for the experiments they actually do on the ISS, and for moving about in freefall, but I can't help but imagine there were lost opportunities due to being restricted to such narrow tubes.