I don’t think there much chance of fitting 100 crew on board for long durations. Maybe for short trips up to orbit or suborbital flights.
I’m very much not expert, though, so maybe my skepticism is unfounded. But even if the volume matches a jumbo jet, people don’t sit on those for more than 18 hours regularly, and there are refueling stops if it’s much longer. For a trip to Mars I expect the crew size will top out at about 20.
There are a few attempts to design interiors on YouTube already.
Drilling platforms to space ports.
My prediction of SN15 being the first Starship to reach space and land again is either holding up well… or I was far off but SpaceX were also far off with their prediction.
Instead of building Starships SN13 and SN14, SpaceX are skipping right to SN15, where they are consolidating all their design changes. And while SN10 is pretty much built, and SN11 is getting close, they have also scrapped SN12 and aren’t even bothering with it.
https://twitter.com/brendan2908/status/1352784291172737024?s=21
So my updated prediction of SN13 would have been spot on if they hadn’t scrapped SN12…
But first let’s see if they can land SN9 today, or even launch it.
Maybe this time!
Maybe not!
Perseverance is landing in a little over an hour:
Safe and sound!
15 OTHER PLANETS
Maybe this time?
Yes! Stuck the landing!
But it looked like there was a bit too much fire in the wrong place. Surely not a problem though, as SpaceX ended the live stream and it was all fine.
https://twitter.com/ciuffredaluigi2/status/1367259481411878913?s=21
Nothing to see here!
I’m glad there are enough space nerds down in Texas live streaming these tests, or else we wouldn’t have as much explosion footage!
https://twitter.com/aerospaceaif/status/1367256590118772738?s=21
A great break down of what broke down. I love the closeup slow motion of the landing legs dangling after not locking in place, and the very obvious bounce on landing.
The footage being captured of this thing is great. I’m curious about the footage SpaceX has that wasn’t on their livestream.
That said, there’s been mention since SN07 I think that the landing legs on the ships up thru SN10 were early designs and they’ve already moved well past them in the current production pipeline so, while the fact the engine shutdown has some curious properties and the flames were happening on touchdown, the legs seem to have been that final nail.
As I learn more and more each day, prototyping stuff IRL is a real pain and an interesting exercise in working in multiple timelines and headspaces at the same time. It’s very easy to design faster than you can build and test. You end up working on parts that you know are already hopelessly obsolete, knowing that what you are working on is either likely to fail, or at least doesn’t represent the full picture of your system, but it’s important to at least finish and test. Usually what is currently on the drawing board needs some adjustments, or isn’t even relevant anymore. Just today a long-held core element of one of my valve systems is potentially just going away entirely in favor of a completely different type of valve in a different location. All because after multiple tests I couldn’t get a leak to go away in certain conditions. This may result in a number of tools we started on for wax investment castings being obsolete or just useless, unless I can maintain some dimensional relationships that I really don’t want to have to keep.
SpaceX is living thru this quite publicly and I think it’s reassuring to see. Also very exciting. I’m happy the thing made it to the end of its flight plan more-or-less in tact as far as the aviation part is concerned. It gave them a lot of data to examine, reinforced the importance of some changes that they’re going to have to make (most of which I think they knew already) and also probably is reinforcing to some people there that they need to potentially really look into certain aspects of their system.
For as impressive as all this project is, I think back to a data point which is probably incorrect (at least now) that the Starship project costs an extremely low sum of money, relatively, and so I imagine that it’s more of a high-publicity pet project where a few individuals are responsible for each system vs entire teams. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the valves and systems are just taken from other industries and re-applied to cryo fuels, with marginal results.
Which even I am quick to say “they really need to work on the fundamentals of their engine management and ignition reliability and fuel handling.” But it’s maybe not fair to compare the issues with their fuel systems and other tertiary systems to what might go on a sort-of final iteration. Because they’re doing what I and others probably would actually do:
It’s only now I’ve really thought about what they’re doing and realized that to such an extent. They really are just throwing together the minimum viable collection of parts and sending it.
I made the joke that probably isn’t far off the mark, that until they have worked out enough bugs that the resulting Starship isn’t embarrassingly crude, they’re making sure each one blows up after the test because then they don’t have to store a useless hulk somewhere that people can laugh at later. (Plus the explosions are not hurting their publicity)
At the rate they’re going I anticipate they’ll have another 10 ships fly and most of them fail to survive more than 1-2 launches before they have proven the basics to the point that they start worrying about putting the fancy ideal parts into every sub system. Because then each Starship might actually start to cost a bit of real time and money and worth actually holding onto.
Would be a shame if the moon were hit by… anything at any time
It would hold the cryogenically preserved genetic material of all 6.7 million known species of plants, animals and fungi on Earth, which would require at least 250 rocket launches to transport to the moon, according to the researchers.
I hate this bullshit obsession with spending our precious resources crafting our own tombs instead of investing in a sustainable future
NASA selects SpaceX and Starship for their next lunar lander.
To me this seems like a no-brainer choice. The other two proposals seemed very much like cash-grabs for the companies involved. If it weren’t for NASA asking for bids, they wouldn’t be bothered about making human rates landers. SpaceX’s long term goal includes this kind of thing anyway, and they are trying to do it sustainably and profitably.
Some more info and interesting analysis here:
It’s so crazy that Congress wants to use NASA as a jobs program for their states, but then underfund their projects so much that all the money goes to… SpaceX in California and Texas, not Florida and Alabama as was the plan.