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1Zach1 Ars Tribunus Militum
7y
2,954
Subscriptor
Thanks for your experience Stephen.
I see a lot of exciting milestones still to come, full orbit and daylight soft landing of Ship, double Starship launch for fuel transfer testing, Ship catching, lunar Ship details/test landing. Plus I don’t expect catching Booster to get less exciting for a while. //
Super3DPC Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
6y
175
Glad to see that I'm not the only one replaying flight 5 launch and catch over and over again. My wife rolled her eyes every time she sees me replaying videos of it although she was also gobsmacked the first time seeing it.
Everyday astronaut has some amazing footage. In that video you can see the exact moment the chines exploded. https://youtu.be/dpxB1S-ohEU?si=PzIO1vQhQe0XBbKn //
msadesign Ars Praetorian
12y
435
Subscriptor
Slightly off topic:
Can anyone explain why so much fuel transfer on orbit is needed for the planned lunar missions? The Starship is already on orbit, after all. But I read that 10+ fuel launches are required to reach the moon. Why is that?
Dtiffster Ars Praefectus
8y
3,321
Subscriptor
msadesign said:
Slightly off topic:Can anyone explain why so much fuel transfer on orbit is needed for the planned lunar missions? The Starship is already on orbit, after all. But I read that 10+ fuel launches are required to reach the moon. Why is that?
With the HLS' profile they likely need north of 12 tonnes of prop for every tonne of ship plus up mass from the lunar surface. We don't know how much HLS will mass, but I can't see it being much less than 70 tonnes all in, and it could be over 100. So at 840-1200+ that's a lot of prop that needs to be transferred. The HLS itself should have a good amount of residual prop (maybe upwards of 200 tonnes) eapecially if it does have full sized tanks, but you are still looking at a depot and 3-5 tankers even if you can get 200+ tonnes out of a tanker.
SpaceX wanting their proposal to be read as conservative though, assumed much less prop per launch and that they would simply brute force it. Comments that have come out of NASA since then have basically said they are carrying that forward until SpaceX proves they can do more. They'll have more performant starships and propellant transfer demonstrations launching next year, should give better certainty on the lower bound. They'll also be iterating on this. I could see an uncrewed demo mission happening in '26 possibly and '27 more probably, so that'll give them a lot of time to dial up the performance and perfect the transfer.
