Tuesday, May 3, 2022

NASA Still Doesn't Get How Big A Deal Starship Is

That's an exaggeration.  I'm sure - I know that parts of NASA are seriously looking into Starship - the groups that want to do exploration of the outer planets for one. It's just that this story revolves about a conversation between an engineer from Johnson Spaceflight Center in Texas, the home base of the astronaut corps, and a SpaceX program manager.  The conversation took place last week at the ASCENDxTexas space conference in Houston and is reported by Eric Berger of Ars Technica.  The conversation was between Jeff Michel, an engineer at Johnson Space Center, and Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX.

The story starts simply enough, to quote from the article:

He (Michel) works in the area of in-situ resource utilization, the processing and use of local materials known more colloquially as "living off the land." What role, he asked, should NASA’s technical workforce play in developing these technologies?

In answering the question, Matthews urged Michel and his colleagues and NASA to think bigger about what they could do on the surface of the Moon with a vehicle as capable as Starship. This would be wholly different from any capability NASA has ever had before.

A little over a year ago, NASA announced they had selected SpaceX Starship for the Human Landing System.  I've been reporting on this since before the contract award, and somehow these little mind-blowing facts hadn't imprinted on my memory.  

  1.  NASA's contract was to deliver 865 kg to the moon's surface. 
  2.  Starship can deliver 100 metric tons.  Since 865 kg isn't even 1.0 metric ton, Starship can deliver over 100 times what NASA asked for.  More precisely, 116 times what NASA asked for.   

It's hard to put that concept into easily envisioned things.  As Aarti Matthews said, “And it’s really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It’s 100 Moon rovers. My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants.”  Clearly, nobody wants to put 11 elephants on the moon, nor does anybody think sticking fire trucks or more than a couple of rovers on the moon are a good idea but the number is completely out of proportion to everything NASA has struggled with since the early days.  Back in the Apollo days, there was talk about a cargo-only version of the Lunar Excursion Module.  With the Saturn V lifting it, the most powerful rocket on Earth, that LEM would put about five tons on the moon.  Less than one twentieth of Starship.

Matthews again:

"NASA specified a high-level need, but we, industry, are taking away one of your biggest constraints that you have in designing your payloads and your systems," she said. "It’s significantly higher mass. It’s essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower. I think that our NASA community, our payload community, should really think about this new capability that’s coming online."
...
"We all need to be thinking bigger and better and really inspirationally about what we can do," Matthews said. "Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you’re fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you’re fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do. That’s gone away entirely."

And it gets even more mind-blowing.  According to estimates on Casey Handmer's blog, an expendable Starship, which lands on the Moon and stays, could bring more than 200 tons to the Moon. Twice as much as the option Ms. Matthews was referring to.  

For some reason, this world-changing aspect to Starship and Super Heavy hasn't really sunk in to lots of minds.  Nobody has seen a spacecraft like this.  It's bigger and more powerful than the Saturn V, yet is not just completely reusable but intended for rapid turnaround re-use, even point to point passenger service on Earth.  Yeah, there's that unfortunate fact that it still hasn't flown and isn't fully developed yet.  The problems continue to be worked on as they show up.  Starship/Super Heavy appears closer to flying successfully than being a dead end that'll never fly.

It's more like the beginning of a new age than business-as-usual, just-another-rocket.

A SpaceX montage from my February '21 post reporting that SpaceX had prototyped the elevator shown on the right. You'll note the Starship on the right isn't painted and has fins - more like the prototypes we were seeing back around then than the painted ship on the left. 

 


12 comments:

  1. Simply amazing. We're rapidly getting to the silver rockets that land and take off just as Heinlein intended. I'm starting to feel like my one elderly Uncle when we landed on the Moon. He'd see the Wright Brothers fly as a young child, lived through two world wars and the Great depression, and said in all his wildest dreams, he never thought he'd live to see Man set foot on another planet.
    The immense payload of Starship makes it qualify as a "Disruptive Technology", and many people never saw it coming.

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  2. You know, something that the picture brought to mind -
    Has anyone talked about the physics of a loaded Starship sitting on the lunar surface? We are talking about the mass of Starship + 100 tons of cargo, Here on earth we would want to put that kind of weight on a pretty damn solid surface. Will the average lunar surface support this kind of weight?

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    1. Something to consider, certainly - but others have thought this out and are pretty sure the regolith can support it. Hey, if it sinks (and doesn't fall over) then there's just that much less distance to the surface!

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  3. Paint adds weight. Related: makes need for Lunar Gateway go away . . .

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  4. 100-200 ton payloads, regularly, is the point where colonizing the lunar surface for any number of reasons moves from science fantasy to objective reality.

    So now, where's my jetpack, and a phased plasma rifle in the 40W range?

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  5. As I said a couple days ago, SpaceX has trumped everyone by making a Liberty Ship building line and popping out Liberty Ships in a manufactured way while everyone else is futzing with artisinal handcrafted carefully fettered minimalistic onesies and twosies.

    Literally, SpaceX has made it so that some college or individual can buy a 10' shipping container and make it into their own satellite, as long as they can afford the cost to ship.

    No more space-cigarette boats, meaning, yes, small cargo at high cost, room for 2-3 crew, totally minimalistic. Instead, a Liberty Ship, with full crew (captain, pilot, nav, engineer, a mate or two) and 20-30 passengers and supercargo, and lots of cargo.

    No hand-crafted British sportscar that carries 2 people and you can strap your luggage on the boot. Nope. You've got one one of those Aussie road trains, but this time besides the cab you have a passenger trailer and four cargo trailers.

    No pickup truck equipped with highrailer equipment (that's wheels that fit on railroad track), nope. You're looking at a decent diesel locomotive pulling a passenger coach and a sleeper and 4-6 boxcars.

    Instead of a Cessna 180 carrying 2-4 people including crew and 500lbs of cargo, you've got a C-17 or a C-5 (C-5 has a passenger section above the cargo section, and the stats are pretty much the same if the C-5 passenger section was outfitted as passenger seating and sleeping cabins.)

    It's the difference between a shoebox and the box your refrigerator comes in.

    Even scarier, it's all of the above comparisons, but the huge big large Starship costs as much or less than anything the competitors can do.

    So that's... A cargo ship for the cost of a speedboat. A land-train for the cost of a sportscar. A real train for the cost of a modified pickup truck. A humongous cargo plane for the cost of a Cessna. A huge cardboard box for the cost of a shoebox.

    And so many people out there can't see the difference in scale and capability AND cost.

    Stupid NASA.

    No more does JPL or NASA or JAXA or ESA or NRO or the DOD have to pass on heavier fuel cells or a nuke generator or extra sensors or cameras or or or or or.

    Nope. With Starship, the real limiting factor is... size and mass, but in an awesome way.

    Can you imagine how much more capable and armored and shielded the Juno probe could have been with Starship as a launcher? It was just lucky that someone basically snuck a visible spectrum camera on it. But with Starship, lotsa cameras in all spectrums, more droppable probes, better telemetry, heck, even a secondary outer satellite to serve as a relay. Heck, a whole lotta satellites each for the main moons, the ice rings, the smaller moons, one following...

    Seriously, it's like being given a crate of Legos when you've only had one of those packages that you can get in the checkout line.

    NASA is soo stupid.

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    1. Stupid? Not really - they ARE, however, led by political hacks that see NASA as a jobs program for their constituants (which has been pointed out numerous times), and thusly doesn't dream BIG.

      Commercial Space will change that. I'm sad that Bigelow Aerospace went belly up before Starship, hopefully it will rise from the ashes and we can get reall HABITATS up in orbit!

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    2. Sierra Nevada seems to have taken over the inflatable habitat market. At least their webpage says so.

      And, yes, I am very bummed that Bigelow went away. Killed by the governor of Nevada. Dammit.

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    3. Bigelow Aerospace went out of business solely because of Robert Bigelow.

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  6. I've been mentally kicking myself for the last few years, since I rejected a proposed contract NX designer job with Space X in southern California. Instead of that contract, I took an assignment with a local company that makes cooking equipment for several fast food chains. By the time the assignment at the local company ended, Space X was looking for different skill sets, and I never came close to being hired by them again.

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    1. So, design low/zero-gee cookware for SpaceX!

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  7. Be aware that if Starship starts flying regularly out of Florida, you probably should not expect to be able to fly commerically, SiG:
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/florida-flights-face-worst-delays-134026976.html

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