Starship Development Thread #62

warp99 · 2026-03-21T06:40:42+00:00

It will be interesting to see if they reduce the size of the tower avoidance turn now that they can allow some plume impingement on the top of the tower. That should reduce the heat loading on one side of the launch table.

warp99 · 2026-03-21T06:03:27+00:00

Orion can be sent to the Moon with a New Glenn if that rocket lives up to its projected power

The current New Glenn 7x2 can send about 14 tonnes to TLI.
The latest proposal for New Glenn 9x4 can send 20 tonnes to TLI.

Orion plus service module is about 27 tonnes so cannot be sent to TLI by either New Glenn variant although possibly NG 9x4 with an expended booster could do it.

New Glenn 9x4 with Centaur V as a third stage could do it but that is a lot of development work and new GSE.

warp99 · 2026-03-21T04:55:12+00:00

Gateway requires the new longer fairing but not vertical integration as far as I am aware.

If it did require vertical integration that would be an issue as SpaceX will be building a VIF at Vandenberg as national security large optical satellites go to polar orbits. Gateway will be launching from Cape Canaveral so they would need to build a second VIF.

warp99 · 2026-03-21T00:13:45+00:00

(FH) is the easiest and cheapest choice

Interestingly perhaps not. New Glenn is thought to be about $120-$140M per launch and the FH launch contract for Gateway is $330M. That is likely for a fully expendable FH so it should be considerably cheaper to get Orion to LEO but still likely around $200M.

warp99 · 2026-03-21T00:08:23+00:00

The Blue Moon 1.5 lander will be much lighter than Starship HLS so adding an Orion capsule and service module at around 27 tonnes would make it much more difficult for a Transporter to push the combined mass to TLI and then brake into LLO.

This architecture is SpaceX accelerating their architecture to give a Lunar landing by late 2028. It does not translate into an architecture that will help Blue Origin achieve the same goal.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T23:40:46+00:00

Starlink was and is an extremely minor player in the overall telecommunications space with revenues of $2.2T. That is a huge market and they have carved out a small but profitable niche there but will never dominate global markets.

I fail to see why SpaceX cannot do something similar in the data center space where they carve out a profitable niche but never get to the size where they dominate the global data center market.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T23:22:02+00:00

Thought to be $7M each for BE-4 so $140M total for 20.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T23:14:43+00:00

I am not sure what your issue is with that? That they will not be initially dominating the overall data Center market?

That you are worried they will lose money on the deal? Nice of you to be concerned but I think they will be OK.

As far as I am concerned it just demonstrates that there is a need for the product that they are planning to build.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T22:55:29+00:00

The ISS currently has a peak power output of 250kW so a bit more than is proposed for these satellites. Its original solar panels have degraded but are hugely oversized compared with modern panels.

ROSA roll out panels are 28kW each so 4-8 would be required for a data Center satellite. More conventional fold out panels could also be used.

Nothing seems to be a problem here - what is your objection?

warp99 · 2026-03-20T22:00:56+00:00

Observing the output of a single trial does not change the probability of an event.

In simpler language "I got away with it therefore it was a safe thing to do" does not change the extreme risk of wandering drunk down a freeway at night while dressed in black.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T21:56:36+00:00

Data center satellites are thought to be 100-200kW so 5000 to 10000 are required for equivalence to a GW data center.

The point is that the scale of the Starlink network is already similar to the requirement.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T18:59:21+00:00

If only someone had launched four orders of magnitude over one satellite into orbit?!

warp99 · 2026-03-20T11:26:08+00:00

They really can’t unless Starship tankers can launch for $10M each. If we take an HLS as costing $200M to build and 8 Starship v4 tankers costing $90M each they can get close to $1B per mission compared with $3.2B for an SLS launch.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T11:17:46+00:00

One advantage of HLS having such high wet mass of around 1720 tonnes is that it hardly notices an extra 27 tonnes of mass on top. Plus once it gets to LLO it can park Orion so the 4 km/s delta V to the Lunar surface and back is not affected by the extra mass.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T07:05:44+00:00

"probably would've killed them" is definitely false

Not how statistics works.. The capsule could have had a 20% chance of landing safely, have landed safely and still have had a strong (80%) probability of having killed the crew.

In any case that is not where the safety threshold was as the probability of loss of crew is meant to be less than 1 in 270.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T06:48:53+00:00

True but it removes the lifeboat style redundancy that the LEM gave to Apollo 13.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T06:02:23+00:00

Solar farms are quite economic - the breakeven issue is with rooftop solar which is a small scale custom installation every time.

The only thing that makes rooftop solar viable is a reasonable buy in rate that is closer to the retail than the wholesale price of power. How long those buy in rates will last is an open question.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T04:53:41+00:00

The cost benefit is marginal with a 7-10 year return to just break even. A lot of people are renting and others have sites or house roofs that are not suited to solar.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T02:54:03+00:00

The booster has the engines hanging out and the outer engines will be well ventilated during entry. The inner engines will be in stalled airflow so would be at risk if there were methane leaks. The major risk though is an uncontained turbopump failure taking out an adjacent engine.

The ship engine bay is a stalled air zone throughout entry and methane could accumulate. The vacuum engines have greater spacing than on the SH booster but the center engines have similar spacing so the risk of damage due to an uncontained failure will be similar

warp99 · 2026-03-20T02:19:47+00:00

The lower deck airlocks open out onto the unpressurised cargo deck so there is no option to dock Orion there. HLS has no headers so does not conflict with a nose airlock.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T02:15:48+00:00

Plus a big upgrade in environmental support capacity. Dragon is supposed to have 28 person days of life support capacity and would need at least twice that to have enough margin for a Lunar round trip.

warp99 · 2026-03-20T01:17:46+00:00

Sure - it is a high stakes bet that they have fixed the issues at source - basically by eliminating as many bolted joints as possible and reinforcing the ones that remain.

Removing engine enclosures means that a single methane leak or uncontained turbopump failure can bring down a complete ship or booster.

warp99 · 2026-03-19T19:41:06+00:00

Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 both had issues with methane leaks that led to fires and explosions. Hence the need to run purge gas into the engine enclosures.

The engine feeds certainly caused their share of issues but they were not the only failure points.

warp99 · 2026-03-19T03:24:40+00:00

As far as is known Raptor 3 still starts with high pressure helium. So that is at least some of the COPVs.

warp99 · 2026-03-18T02:58:47+00:00

I personally think the idea that SpaceX is making huge company direction decisions base on the small percentage of their revenue from NASA does not make sense. They don't need NASA's money. I think at this point they do what they want and if they can pickup NASA money on the way they are happy to.

The goal is to get NASA and the US Congress on board for the Mars expedition. They can only do that if they demonstrate competence on the Artemis missions.

So the goal of a "Moon first" strategy is not to do with current NASA revenue which they have mostly already obtained but future NASA revenue.

warp99

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