klier
Premium
Hahah, actually quite random imo, but yeah, food for thought.
STEM SPACE stuff
- Thread starter hoffmeister_fan
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Hahah, actually quite random imo, but yeah, food for thought.
klier
Premium
I suppose the low density compared to solid fuel makes that impossible. It would require like 4/5 times the size just for the liquid hydrogen. And with that comes extra weight, requiring even more fuel, etc.
Sunny
Premium
1.53 miles (assuming all the Tesla drivers are smug, virtue signaling Elon worshippers and they charge using a renewable source).
The math - From what I could google, between the booster and the starship, the starship holds 1000 tons of methane (CH4) as fuel.
Now when 1 mole of methane is oxidized, it produces 1 mole of CO2 (and 2 moles of H2O). 1 mole of CO2 weighs 2.75 times CH4.
So if the Starship burns the whole 1000 tons of CH4, it should emit 2750 tons of CO2.
Now an average car emits 400g of CO2/mile (source). So the average car has to drive 6,875,000 miles to emit same amount of CO2 as one Starship launch.
So far Tesla has sold ~5 million vehicles. Assuming at least 90% (4.5 mil) of them are still operational. Each would have to drive 6,875,000/45000000 => 1.53 miles to offset the 2750 tons of CO2 emission from a Starship launch.
WBarnes
Subscriber
Starship is not solid propellants, it's liquid methane (CH4), otherwise is would be impossible to shutdown the engines and then restart them for landing the stages afterwards. But methane is still denser than H2.
WBarnes
Subscriber
How so?
They've yet to actually get a Starship into orbit... that's barely the first milestone, and arguably the simplest (SpaceX is already doing it with Falcon 9). NASA's timeline called for an uncrewed landing on the Moon last quarter... they've barely landed one Starship from high altitude (nevermind orbit), and the Booster is currently closer to a rod from God than a reusable launch stage.
... and Musk's talking about refuelling on Mars using local resources?
Talking aspirational bollocks whilst dramatically underperforming to the cheering admiration of cultists who favour 'Failure=Success' over 'Failure is not an option'... It's ****ing ridiculous - I can only imagine there's another funding round coming up.
WBarnes
Subscriber
Only the reususability part failed in the last test, the ascent phase was successful. Landing them is by far the hardest task.
klier
Premium
They are way over schedule and this machine is supposed to take people to orbit, which is a long ways off.
The ascent part obviously is the easiest part of the whole endeavor. And they did that once with a machine that was absolutely not ready.
NASA can pretty much scrap Artemis, it's not going to happen anytime soon with SpaceX absolutely lagging.
Starship didn't achieve orbit, and the wonky 'kinda-almost' orbit it did achieve was massively out of control, and it was out of control even before the descent stage - it failed to re-enter with the heat shield facing the right way - it didn't even get the chance to fail at a soft landing. I'd also suggest that failure of the stages to land doesn't directly affect the mission, failure to achieve stable orbit to dock with the orbital re-fueller is massively mission critical, and it has to do that about 10-20 times perfectly because of the ridiculous mission profile.
There's also little evidence the internal propellant transfer worked, and the unrelated-to-Artemis Pez dispenser cargo door appeared to fail once opened too, on top of repeatedly substandard telemetry performance that persists despite SpaceX having more than 5,000 of their own satellites in orbit.
It does look awesome on lift-off, I'll give it that.
It was conceptually unproven from the outset and SpaceX winning the contract at all appears to be the result of shenanigans by somebody that helped SpaceX fudge their submission, before awarding them billions, and then quitting NASA to go and work for them (hence Bezos suing NASA).
Thing is, this is all stuff that probably is worth doing. NASA should have taken one single objective look at Musk's track record and put him on a 10 year results based grant for developing Mars transit technology. If between spanking the ketamine and doing Putin favours Musk manages to make any actual progress with the technology that will actually be required for any Human mission to Mars, all the better.
Indeed.
Possibly something that a competent adult should have made Space Karen aware of sooner in the process.
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