ULA employee "critiques" Starship architecture

Every single current effort for a Mars journey is poorly planned PR nonsense.

We’re putting the cart before the horse. We should not be wasting this much resources & effort into human spaceflight beyond the moon. We should be working to capture mineral rich asteroids, bring them into a Lagrange point, and start working on autonomous mining/refining/manufacturing from the asteroids.

This is key to human colonization of the solar system. Trying to launch everything we’ll need from out of the gravity well is stupid. Once we have autonomous space manufacturing perfected, we can have massive spacecraft delivered to earth, and all we need launch is the personnel and their food (with autonomous farming, we could grow the food long before human crew arrival). We can also have bases built at our destination point long before any humans arrive.

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There is no economically viable space mining scenario now. Someday with a large free fall population there might be, with CHON mining first, but even that is completely untested technology built on massive assumptions.

I wish it were different, I really do, since we may run out of easily available resources here and lose the ability to get out there.

Speaking as a metallurgical engineer with experience in mining. There is no resource out there that we can't mine on Earth for a bazillion dollars (approx.) less.

On the Mars side of things, I like Aldrin's cycler idea for a practical pipeline to Mars, but I'm not an expert on that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler

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- ‘The thing we haven’t invented yet isn’t economically viable yet.’ Yeah, no shit.
  
  I guess let’s just keep polluting our planet, because it’s cheaper.
  
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I mean SpaceX is only about 5 years and $5 billion behind in their timeline and budget to go to the moon. So, Starship doesn't seem to be a serious vehicle.

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People love bringing up that Starship was supposed to be doing round trips to the Moon and Mars by now, but when has anything space ever been on budget, in time, and working perfectly on the first try? Every new launch vehicle takes longer and more money than initial optimistic predictions state. Damn near every probe and telescope is years over deadlines and often a significant percentage of first estimates over budget.

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- The problem isn't so much new vehicle takes time, it's the bullshit spacex fanboys spout about every other rocket company for doing the same thing.
  
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i mean...going to the moon be expensive

the u.s. spent about 96 billion on launch vehicles alone so getting stretching those 5 billion as far they did is pretty impressive in comparison!

sure, it's taking longer than musk claimed, but pretty much everyone else said from the very beginning that musk's timeline is unrealistic...

god i hate that idiot....spaceX could be so much better at what it does without him...

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He's being generous by assuming 100% fuel transfer and no boil off.

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I'm sure that leaking methane into the upper atmosphere will have only beneficial affects to our climate.

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- oh they'll be way past the upper atmosphere when transferring fuel
  
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Solid points, the whole in-flight refueling process is still completely untested. Many people are probably still under the impression that Starship could fly around the moon, return and land on just its original fuel load. The rant doesn't elaborate on why rocket reusability in general is a bad idea though - Falcon is a proven reusable vehicle that has reduced launch costs by an order of magnitude. Maybe a better system design for Starship (I hate that name, it's not a fucking "star"ship) would have been as a launch vehicle for something like a VASIMR or other more advanced low-fuel engine for the interplanetary portion of a mission.

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Starship (I hate that name, it’s not a fucking "star"ship)

Same. Mars Colonial Transporter, Interplanetary Transport System, and Big F****n Rocket were more appropriate names.

something like a VASIMR or other more advanced low-fuel engine

I'd love to see some more advanced engines, but I think that the capability to reset the rocket equation in LEO has merit.

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- LEO reset does have merit, it just never gets away from the fundamental problem of lifting fuel into orbit.
  
  I would really prefer a space travel dev approach that doesn't prioritize getting humans somewhere as the immediate goal. We already know we can shoot people to the moon and land them. We can use LEO to study problems of interplanetary travel such as prolonged weightlessness and confinement. I think we should be sending robots to the moon and Mars to mine and refine local material, print permanent structures, pressurize them and grow food in them. Then send people once they can just show up and live in them. Mere survival shouldn't be their main task.
  
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Well, he's not wrong technically, but the context feels like it's obviously missing. We have no Saturn V vehicles anymore, nor can we build them again. Starship might require that many launches to get to TLI, but with reusability, it probably can. Not to mention that the cost will come down a bit. So it can at least do it soon.

I'm sure others have more coherent and thought out rebuttals.

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why can't we build them again? were the blueprints and knowledge lost? deliberately destroyed? genuine question

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- The production lines are shut down and any custom tooling has had its materials reclaimed to make other things. The institutional knowledge, the little bits that never got written down in the blueprints or manufacturing instructions, it's all gone. The people who worked on that rocket and its components are dead or have been working on something else for the last 50 years. How well would you remember some little tidbit of information that you last needed half a lifetime ago?
  
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- Because a lot of "Released Engineering Documents" were just engineering notebooks, and each vehicle was different, even the parts that were supposed to be the same. There was a lot of "repair" versus "rework" disposition, and a "Just make it work; it only needs to work once" culture.
  
  Basically, because it was a race against the Russians, and the Russians were winning.
  
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- Because tech evolved, we could do better now.
  
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- because they were insanely expensive
  
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- Because the nazis America brought in to build them are all dead.
  
  https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/nasa-nazi-history-von-braun.html
  
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- Because it is based on obsolete technology. You wouldn't want to build a flight computer with hard-wired (as in literal wires) software, would you? A lot of it would also have to be reverse engineered, to the point where you might as well build a new vehicle.
  
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No but we have SLS, the modern equivalent

SLS is very expensive, but so was Saturn V. If all goes well we should have multiple providers that can provide SLS-like services more cheaply by on-orbit refueling, but until then we should keep SLS in production. It’s here, development is complete, and it works.

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Ignoring the onvious fact that Starship has been designed from the beginning for going to Mars and SLS only to go to the Moon...

Didn't even the first Starship generation theoretically have a higher payload capacity than the SLS Block 2? And that doesn't even include the further enhancements to the ship design and Raptor updates since.

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Didn't even the first Starship generation theoretically have a higher payload capacity than the SLS Block 2?

No? SLS block 2 is 130 tons to LEO. Starship "block 1" did "about 50 tons" according to one of Musk's update videos with SpaceX, promising Starship 2 would do 100 tons.

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- After years of saying Starship can do 100 tons to LEO... 'Block 1's actual proven payload capacity is 'a banana'... not 50 tons.
  
  Starship has never launched any actual payload to orbit.
  
  Anyway, onto 'Block 2', that'll be able to do what 'Block 1' was aupposed to do, even though none of the contracts Musk's signed to develop Starship have any mention of different Blocks... but its ok because Block 3 will do 150 tons!
  
  Just like how Hyperloop is an idea that makes any sense and will work.
  
  Just like how FSD is will be complete and ready in 2017.
  
  Just like how Solar Roof tiles are totally real and not completely fake.
  
  Just like how Tesla cars will be able to fly with monopropellant thrusters.
  
  Just like how Elon is a free speech absolutist except when people mock or disagree with him.
  
  As with basically all of Musk's promises to shareholders and aspirations presented as facts at publicized events since about 2014... what Musk says is all almost entirely bullshit, and anyone would be a fool to take him at his word.
  
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- And knowing that everything Musk says has turned out to be total BS, who knows what the actual number is. So far no Starship has been to LEO and hasn't carried any payload. Sure the last one carried a banana and technically made it to orbital speeds before plunging back into the atmosphere. That's a long way from actually doing the thing and putting 50 tons into LEO.
  
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Could you explain to us how a vehicle capable of getting payload to Mars would not be capable of putting the same or even a greater payload on the moon? What is the obvious difference in design?

As far as I understand it, getting to Mars is harder, requiring more energy to get there, more energy to slow down and having an atmosphere to content with. Sure aerobraking is a thing, but in the big picture having to deal with an atmosphere makes things harder and not easier.

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- delta v isn't really a issue if you have orbital refueling and frequent+cheap flights figured out (as long as a full tank can complete a trans Martian injection and orbital capture at mars) , so I'd say they're both similarly difficult:
  
  on Mars you have to deal with the atmosphere, higher gravity, etc
  
  on the moon you have to deal with the dusty surface, so you have issues with landing gear and landing engines kicking up dust
  
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- I saw a graph of our local gravity wells, the moon and Mars are surprisingly similar. The moon has many extra challenges that Mars does not. Propulsively landing on a dust pile is trickier than slowing down with aerobraking.
  
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Its current design is very much not designed to go to mars. Right now its designed as a test bed SSTO, thats it.

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it's very goofy to see the difference in attitude for any post involving obviously spacex things between lemmy and normal spaceflight communities lmao

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Some people still think musk has any decision making authority in SpaceX.

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Is it true that starship will have less payload weight to LEO than all other SpaceX rockets?

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I don't think so.

Even Starship v1 (which have already ceased production) had an estimated payload to LEO comparable to a reusable Falcon Heavy (~50 tonnes). Starship v2 (scheduled to launch in January) has a projected payload to LEO around 100 tonnes, and v3 will be higher still.

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- Okay then why did they only launch a banana as cargo? I thought the EV was a standard test payload
  
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I don't get why the other rocket companies are not doing reuse at this point. Its like most car companies now have electric offerings.

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I don't think the legacy launch industry expected Falcon 9 to succeed, and they were caught off guard. ULA have no plans for booster reuse, and Arianespace's timeline stretches into the 2030s.

There are some other companies developing reusable rockets. Blue Origin could launch New Glenn within in the next month, Rocket Lab are testing Neutron hardware, and there are a couple of reusable Chinese rockets in development as well.

Most of these are still only aiming for booster reuse. Stoke Space's Nova is the only other fully reusable rocket design which comes to mind.

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please properly censor their name, you can see their name by just upping the brightness of the image.

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That was Berger's doing, not mine :)

Even if it were properly censored, it would not be difficult to find, and people have already done so.

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