Not a lot new here for people who read Vance’s book (or the more recent ones), except he thinks he could put Starship on the moon in two years. From now.
He also describes how he was inspired by Apollo, so that is one good thing that came of it (besides winning a battle in the Cold War).
I don’t think he can achieve a sufficient Starship flight rate over two years to be ready for a moon landing. The program has to get through the known-unknowns and then the unknown-unknowns, get at least somewhat comfortable with operations, and master orbital refueling first. They might accomplish it all, but it would probably be the most aggressive schedule in the history of space flight. I’m not ruling that out, however.
But it seems to me that the fastest path, considering that not all of the Dragon 2 technology will translate to the Starship’s bridge (it has to have a bridge because of the name), is to combine elements of existing programs. Basically, for deep-space operations and life support, Orion has a head start on them, but is of course hampered by the lack of a flying booster.
So the obvious solution to both problems is to stick the crew in the Orion, stick the Orion in the Starship’s cargo bay, and have the astronauts control the whole lunar mission via Blue Tooth.
*Goes back to writing “Space System Architecture for Dummies*
Apollo/Saturn landed on its 5th manned flight, which was also the 6th flight of Saturn V (but only 4th manned). So assuming nothing big goes wrong, and Starship does do and unmanned orbital flight by the end of 2019, followed by an unmanned lunar loop in 2020, then Dear.Moon somewhere in there (manned lunar loop), what’s to say there won’t be a manned lunar landing as soon as enough tankers are flying? It does seem improbably, but it’s not completely ridiculous to think it can happen that way. Crewed flight 4 out of 6 total? Why not?
I watched the “Apollo 11” documentary Wednesday. It was quite good and included a lot of footage I’ve never seen before. There was a line one of the announcers said that caught my attention. Apollo11 was only the 21st American manned spaceflight. I had to think, is that right?
Mercury 6 flights (2 suborbital).
Gemini 10 manned flights
Apollo 7, 8, 9, and 10
Yep, Apollo was the 21st US manned mission. Pretty remarkable when you consider it. Project Mercury proved that men could survive briefly in space. Project Gemini proved spacewalking, rendezvous & docking, 2 week duration missions, and a host of other essential technologies. The 4 manned Apollo missions tested the CM, SM, and LM in both Earth and lunar orbit. Apollo 11 was the first one to attempt the moon landing and it was a very close thing.
Btw, with a very large weight margin to play with, why would Starship need spacecraft-specific ECLSS? As long as it’s air-tight, there’s no reason you couldn’t just stick in one of those deep-mine rebreather systems, some gas tanks, and a few duct fans.
All true, but I think they have more on their plate than just life support and launches, things that Saturn didn’t really have to deal with.
Apollo got a lot of experience on Saturn 1 and 1B missions. The pre-landing Saturn V launches were mainly about check out of the booster, adding a lunar module (flying two check-out missions with it), and verifying their docking procedures. They also used one mission to fly an Apollo CSM around the moon.
If you count the unmanned Apollo flights of both the Saturn I and V, the lunar landing was on flight 21 or so.
What I think is added on top of that for Starship is all the check-out that their new flat-plate re-entry mode will require, along with the thermal shielding. Basically, they’re adding some of the re-entry complexities of the Shuttle to the complexities of powered landing, and combining those with the complexities of orbital-refueling, deep space endurance, and lunar landing and return.
Having all that going on in one flight vehicle means they can’t break the problem down at convenient points, with a booster doing the boosting, a lander doing the landing, and a capsule handling the re-entry.
It might all go rapidly and smoothly, or they might hit all kinds of things that make them pause for a rethink.
However, all their time constraints would be self-imposed, so even if they don’t meat their ideal schedule, they’ll keep going till they get it right, and they’ll learn a whole lot of things along the way.
One of the great things about SpaceX is that they’re not shy about obsoleting their own equipment and introducing both incremental and radical new upgrades based on what they’ve learned. They could well anticipate that the first several versions of a lunar Starship will each be horribly flawed approaches, sort of quicky test-of-concept prototypes.
One of the problems with the big-government approach is that it’s hard to sell the public or Congress on the idea of building several screw ups on purpose just so you figure out what you should have built in the first place. They tend to want you to build it right the first time and then fly it forever, and cutting edge aerospace just doesn’t work that way.
I’m curious to see if they will be able to continue getting customers paying for testing. With a price competitive with a Falcon 9 launch but a mission that doesn’t max out the launcher’s capabilities, they should have a lot of opportunity for testing all kinds of things.
To the best of my knowledge (google and asking on NSF) the Orion life support system has never been built. Not a test version, not a real version. It certainly never has flown, and won’t fly on EM-1.
So, no, Elon and SpaceX are not “behind” on life support
Orion’s life support system exists in the same way SLS does, as sort of a notional thing. They’ve tested a few components on ISS, but the full-up system won’t fly until the first manned flight – a lunar flight. IMHO, that is incredibly risky.
The life support system for Dragon 2 exists in a different sort of way; it flew on the Dragon 2 test flight, but then, as far as I know, was still in the Dragon when it had its multi-direction unplanned launch from the test stand at the cape.
IMHO, equipping Starship with several Dragon2 life support systems would speed things up, plus provide redundancy.
If all the Saturn 1 flights and Apollo Block 1 tests count toward the flight rate for Apollo/Saturn, then all the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon flights count toward the flight rate for Starship/SuperHeavy. What are they at now, 73 successful launches, 39 successful booster landings, and 19 successful Dragon flights (2 precursor Dragon-1, 16 Dragon-2 operational flights [and not counting CRS-7], and 1 Dragon-2)?
As far as the one true unknown-unknown (reentry of Starship), it only has to work twice, once from LEO and once from a lunar free return. Then it will be shown to work, and you can plan on it working, barring bad workmanship. And hopefully no bad administrative decisions a la STS. (And, yes, I do worry about SpaceX continuing to be tripped up by what I’d say are known-unknowns, such as the titanium ignition issue.)
Well, with at least some of the unmanned Apollo flights, and early manned Saturn IB flights, they were testing the Apollo CSM that was going to fly to the moon. Nothing in the Falcon or Dragon inventory will be used with Starship. So I’d liken those more to Gemini. However, I’d expect most of the core Falcon and Dragon software to migrate over to Starship, updated for differences in the vehicle constants, dynamics, and control particulars, of course.
I’m not expecting any real surprises out of Superheavy because it only has to do the same job as a Falcon 9 first stage.
I think several here have mentioned that it makes a whole lot of sense for SpaceX to debug their new re-entry approach on a downsized (model) Starship launched as a Falcon second stage. They’d get an enormous amount of real-world data on their thermal protection system (and potential hot spots) and aerodynamics. Depending on the fidelity of the model, they could also go a long way towards validating the control system’s basics.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed for Starship is a landing abort system. On a manned flight, if something goes wrong after re-entry, or if they know that the landing isn’t going to work (say an software glitch caused them use up some of the landing fuel in orbit), is there any option to bail out and parachute down? Similarly, does it have any kind of launch abort system?
I’d assume it does, but I haven’t seen it discussed, perhaps because this early in the design stage, details are still up in the air.
I have wondered about both launch escape and landing abort/escape. Obviously, a case for reliability is going to build up with the man unmanned test flights, both suborbital and orbital. It’s easy to imagine initial crews will be small and astronauts may ride in ejection seats (as with STS-1 through -4 and planned for Buran), or maybe FB-111-style ejection cabins. There have been plans suggested for a long time that include ejectable passenger cabins for airliners as a sort of “better than nothing” last resort. If I were in a falling vehicle, I’d choose a 10% chance over a zero percent chance. For flights to Mars, I think the options are limited. Dying on Mars at the point of impact is probably still better than dying from something horrible, in a hospital, with a tube in every orifice, on Earth. Fifty years from now, evolved versions of Starship may wind up as landing craft for evolved versions of NautilusX. I don’t believe Cyclers will happen, but if there are off-Earth cities and industrial cites, then inerplanetary liners are a must.
As far as cislunar space is concerned, ECLSS is a solved problem, and Starship has so much mass/volume margin, it’s open to some solutions used for submarines and deep shaft mining. As far as Mars goes, with ISRU standing in for seawater (which is what allows nuclear subs to stay submerged for so long), ECLSS for trips to and from Mars is also a solved problem (and ignoring GCR, just for the sake of argument). The unknown-unknowns pertain to staying on Mars between alignments.
IMHO, SpaceX does have a shot at landing (unmanned) on the moon in two years, assuming no major setbacks (A huge assumption). I’d give it one on four chance, because that schedule is beyond aggressive.
However, I also think they are far closer to the ability to do so than anyone else. Artemis currently has what in mind for a lander? I don’t think they even have a preliminary design.
I wanted to address the comparison to Apollo one more time:
The only way you can get high flight numbers is by counting any launch that had the name Apollo attached to it. Real spacecraft? There were 5 boilerplate AS-10x launches that shouldn’t be counted, any more than the launch of the Dragon Test Article. That leaves two Block 1 CSM long suborbital flights, an LM only flight (all 3 on Saturn 1B), two Block 2 CSM flights (both on Saturn 5) and then you’re at Apollo 7, the first and for a long time only manned Saturn 1B launch. add Apollos 8-10 and that makes Apollo 11 the 10th flight of an actual spacecraft, 5th manned.
I like to think we can all agree SuperHeavy is basically Falcon-9NT (a little IT humor…) and not something to fret overmuch.
By contrast, Starship is a different kind of program, effective a sort of super-duper-X15. My understanding is, after Starhopper does its thing, the two protypes under contruction will make a series of increasingly ballsy suborbital flights from BC and KSC. It’s even possible we’ll see some very long suborbital flights that are basically an all the way around RTLS, though that’s not strictly necessary. When Starship EDL is proven out, then put one on a SuperHeavy and see what happens. It’s been suggested Dear.Moon (lunar free return) can be done without refueling. I don’t know if that will turn out to be the case. (I see a lot of on-line speculation with what are really no more than WAG numbers, so I plan to sit back and watch with amazement.)