Comment by JumpCrisscross
4 days ago
> insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit
What's wrong with this? Lots of launches is fine until we build the scale required to make a proper depot worthwhile. (Which, by the way, is part of Artemis's plans. Though currently it looks like a bunch of glued-together Starship tankers.)
People act like with Falcon, they basically just get it off the drone ship, fill er up, and she is good to go again. There is a shitload of repairs/maintenance that has to be done to Falcon vehicles after every launch.
In space, you can't do that kind of repair/maintenance, you have to make sure the refueling is PERFECT. And this is with deep cryogenic propellants that very much like to boil off and cause pressure increases in the tanks they are contained.
That problem hasn't even been touched yet. In order to make Spaceship X happen, they need to figure one refueling out, which is difficult given the fact that Raptors run on cryogenic propellant that likes to boil off, then they need to figure out how to do 10 in a row without any issues, which is exponentially difficult.
And then there is the whole thing about everything working well for trip to Mars, and back.
And if there is a configuration that exists that can do all of that, its very unlikely that a company under the leadership of someone as Musk can ever figure this out.
For interplanetary travel, things need to start from either orbit or the moon. This has been known for quite some time.
Also all those missions can be unmanned. If you want to get good at something then you do it a lot.
The only question is whether the cost of flying all those missions would be prohibitive: by the stated goals, starship should be able to do the refueling missions cheaper then an SLS launch.
Obviously if it can't then it's failed, but the point of it is cheap heavy lift to LEO which is very obviously quite valuable.
Building a big specialty rocket to get to the moon is waste.