Elon’s idea of building a thousand Starships per-year to get to Mars seems ill-thought-out.
Starship is very well designed for bringing objects into orbit and down from orbit but not for the interplanetary journey.
For the interplanetary journey, you likely want to have a ring-space-station that’s propelled by ion thrusters.
Having a ring-space-station means that it’s easy to produce artificial gravity and generally have the infrastructure to have a good journey for more people.
I don’t think you can power the ions with current technology. See this article for power limitations-- 6 kW/kg is required for a 1 month journey, but to be any faster than a Hohmann transfer you’ll still need power in the kW/kg range, which we don’t have the technology for, either solar or nuclear. In this design half your mass will be argon and most of the rest will be solar panels, which is likely worse than Starship mass ratios to Mars. Maybe you can match Starship mass ratios if you do aerocapture, but it seems implausible to aerocapture a whole ring station, and why would you use future technology just to match current technology?
Artificial gravity seems possible with two Starships connected by a cable. You do get more space with a ring station, so maybe it could be luxury or second-generation accommodations.
Cole Nielson-cole is working towards designing fiber composit construction stages for space, he has thoughts about this, in short, microwave lasers as energy transmission and rectifying antennas as energy receivers. But he doesn’t get into the topic of lasers and I’m pretty sure we don’t have that today, right?
When you get there how do you get down? You need spacecraft capable of reentry at Mars. There’s no spacecraft factory there, so they all have to be brought from Earth. And if you’re bringing them, you might as well live in them on the way. That way you also get a starter house on Mars.
You need to send some Starships to get down to the surface on Mars but you could likely do that job with a handful of starships. You don’t need to produce 1000 starships per year to do that.
I’m confused. Suppose your ring-shaped space hotel gets to Mars with people and cargo that weighs equal to the cargo capacity of 1000 Starships. How do you get it down? First you have to slow down the hotel, which takes roughly as much fuel as it took to accelerate it. Using Starships you can aerobrake from interplanetary velocity, costing negligible fuel. In the hotel scenario, it’s not efficient to land using a small number of Starships flying up and down, because they will use a lot of fuel to get back up, even empty.
Would you care to specify your scenario more precisely? I suspect you’re neglecting the fuel cost at some stage.
Elon’s idea of building a thousand Starships per-year to get to Mars seems ill-thought-out.
Starship is very well designed for bringing objects into orbit and down from orbit but not for the interplanetary journey.
For the interplanetary journey, you likely want to have a ring-space-station that’s propelled by ion thrusters.
Having a ring-space-station means that it’s easy to produce artificial gravity and generally have the infrastructure to have a good journey for more people.
I don’t think you can power the ions with current technology. See this article for power limitations-- 6 kW/kg is required for a 1 month journey, but to be any faster than a Hohmann transfer you’ll still need power in the kW/kg range, which we don’t have the technology for, either solar or nuclear. In this design half your mass will be argon and most of the rest will be solar panels, which is likely worse than Starship mass ratios to Mars. Maybe you can match Starship mass ratios if you do aerocapture, but it seems implausible to aerocapture a whole ring station, and why would you use future technology just to match current technology?
Artificial gravity seems possible with two Starships connected by a cable. You do get more space with a ring station, so maybe it could be luxury or second-generation accommodations.
Cole Nielson-cole is working towards designing fiber composit construction stages for space, he has thoughts about this, in short, microwave lasers as energy transmission and rectifying antennas as energy receivers. But he doesn’t get into the topic of lasers and I’m pretty sure we don’t have that today, right?
But I thought the whole interview was great.
When you get there how do you get down? You need spacecraft capable of reentry at Mars. There’s no spacecraft factory there, so they all have to be brought from Earth. And if you’re bringing them, you might as well live in them on the way. That way you also get a starter house on Mars.
Anyway, that’s the standard logic.
You need to send some Starships to get down to the surface on Mars but you could likely do that job with a handful of starships. You don’t need to produce 1000 starships per year to do that.
I’m confused. Suppose your ring-shaped space hotel gets to Mars with people and cargo that weighs equal to the cargo capacity of 1000 Starships. How do you get it down? First you have to slow down the hotel, which takes roughly as much fuel as it took to accelerate it. Using Starships you can aerobrake from interplanetary velocity, costing negligible fuel. In the hotel scenario, it’s not efficient to land using a small number of Starships flying up and down, because they will use a lot of fuel to get back up, even empty.
Would you care to specify your scenario more precisely? I suspect you’re neglecting the fuel cost at some stage.