The Space Review: Starships are meant to fly
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Submitted October 01, 2019 at 04:19AM by kitmatthews
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IFA booster moving from Hawthorne to Cape Canaveral, pic from Perry FL
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Submitted October 01, 2019 at 12:57PM by SuPrBuGmAn
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Everyday Astronaut: A conversation with Elon Musk about Starship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg

Submitted October 01, 2019 at 04:04PM by Dragon029
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Benji Reed interview about Crew Dragon on "Houston we have a Podcast"
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Submitted October 01, 2019 at 04:58PM by Bananas_on_Mars
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Musk: Raptor cost is tracking to well under $1M for V1.0. Goal is <$250k for V2.0 is a 250 ton thrust-optimized engine, ie <$1000/ton
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179107539352313856

Submitted October 01, 2019 at 09:04PM by izybit
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Interview with Bridenstine: How NASA Works With Elon Musk
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Submitted October 01, 2019 at 09:42PM by Kang_54
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<b>[OC]: The potential advantages of a detachable passenger module for Earth to Mars transportation</b>
Hi all! I was thinking through the Starship architecture and it seems inefficient to me to have the majority of the mass and expense that is being transported between Earth and Mars tied up in hardware that is only needed at the ends of the trip, namely the huge Raptor engines, fuel tanks and heat shield equipment. It seems to me that the weight of those structures is conservatively about 90% of the total mass of Starship, and probably about the same proportion of the total expense, and it's completely unnecessary and potentially even harmful for the interplanetary journey. If instead, you had a dockable passenger module which attaches inside the Starship aeroshell for takeoff and landing, but is free during the trip to and from Mars, you can keep your expensive specialized rocket around a gravity well while sending only the cargo you actually care about on the months long journey. Basically, the architecture I propose can be summarized in 3 points:1. Keep the specialized hardware for entering and exiting an atmosphere as close to an atmosphere as possible.As Elon said in his presentation, they expect Super Heavy to be able to launch essentially at will, as much as 24 times a day. Starship should be able to launch 4 times a day. That means that while these ships are close to Earth (or Mars) you have enormous payload to orbit capabilities, at essentially the cost of fuel. If you send Starship to Mars, you're losing that capability for months, at an enormous opportunity cost and for really no benefit.2. Use one starship for multiple lauches <em>and landings</em> at each planetNot only is your expensive hardware located where it's useful, but it costs absolutely negligible DV to stagger the arrival time of a crew pod to Mars, so you could in theory launch and land at a defined interval, say two pods every day, using just ion engines on the crew modules (which would be far more effective with the far lower dry mass of the pods - more on this in the next point). That means that with lets say 4 starships on Mars, you could handle conservatively 4 passenger landings per day for the duration of the window, instead of needing a single starship per window. This would be <em>huge</em> for passenger throughput to Mars, and the same is true on launch. Throw passengers on their way, bring the ship back, repeat. The whole system could be 8 cargo starships <em>total</em> and a supporting fleet of tankers on the Earth side, for an essentially uncapped throughput of passengers, and the only hardware lost to deep space would be the relatively cheap and light passenger module itself.3. Have as much propulsion hardware as possible on the passenger module, rather than coming from the very heavy, EDL specialized starship.This is a little tricky because it gets into how much you actually want to engineer into the passenger stage, and therefore its dry mass (for example, adding a chemical rocket versus ion engines would make it more capable and have huge DV advantages for the entire system, but you have to figure out if you can fit that all in the Starship cargo bay, can it aerobrake, etc.) However, the more propulsion that is done on the low mass passenger vehicle, versus the very high dry mass Starship, the more efficient the overall architecture is, just like how GEO satellites that have their own fuel and propulsion much more efficiently use F9s capabilities than a direct second stage insertion to GEO, and that's the direction that the satellite industry has explored.Basically, as low dry mass as possible cycling between Earth and Mars means less propellant usage, higher utilization of the expensive parts of the system itself (namely Starship). The passenger module could also be more specialized for deep space, including ideally an inflatable component instead of the punitive space constraints of Starship itself. Finally, first and foremost this…

Cameron County weighs in on SpaceX plans
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Submitted October 01, 2019 at 09:29PM by shaldag_x
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r/SpaceX Discusses [October 2019, #61]
If you have a short question or spaceflight news...You may ask short, spaceflight-related questions and post news here, even if it is not about SpaceX. Be sure to check the FAQ and Wiki first to ensure you aren't submitting duplicate questions.If you have a long question...If your question is in-depth or an open-ended discussion, you can submit it to the subreddit as a post.If you'd like to discuss slightly relevant SpaceX content in greater detail...Please post to r/SpaceXLounge and create a thread there!This thread is not for...Questions answered in the FAQ. Browse there or use the search functionality first.Non-spaceflight related questions or news.You can read and browse past Discussion threads in the Wiki.

Submitted October 02, 2019 at 02:16PM by ElongatedMuskrat
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Intuitive Machines selects SpaceX to launch Nova-C to the Moon in 2021 on a Falcon 9 rocket.
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Submitted October 02, 2019 at 08:50PM by ethan829
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NASA Commercial Crew on Twitter: "The @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and #CrewDragon spacecraft that will be used for the In-Flight Abort test have arrived at SpaceX facilities in Cape Canaveral, Fla. for preparation ahead of the test!"
https://twitter.com/Commercial_Crew/status/1179748212963528705

Submitted October 03, 2019 at 03:26PM by ethan829
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@Elonmusk: [What tests will MK1 do after 20km hop?] If 20km works, then orbit.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179159128708538370?s=17

Submitted October 03, 2019 at 03:58PM by DLRXplorer
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A fan of SpaceX was arrested after walking up to rocket prototype
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Submitted October 03, 2019 at 09:08PM by remote12
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Jim Bridenstine on Twitter - "I had a great phone call with @elonmusk this week, and I’m looking forward to visiting @SpaceX in Hawthorne next Thursday. More to come soon!"
https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1179853879418052608

Submitted October 03, 2019 at 10:43PM by jclishman
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Elon Musk on Twitter: Super Heavy grid fins will be made of welded steel
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179799146464628736?s=19

Submitted October 03, 2019 at 11:57PM by thomastaitai
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NASA Mulls Soyuz Needs As Commercial Crew Schedule Remains Fluid
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Submitted October 05, 2019 at 07:24AM by rustybeancake
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Starships should stay on Mars
There is an ever-recurring idea that Starships have to return to Earth to make colonization of Mars viable. Since Elon has announced the switch from carbon fiber to plain stainless steel I'm wondering whether it will be necessary to fly back such "low-tech" hardware. (By "low-tech" I mean relatively low-tech: no expensive materials and fancy manufacturing techniques.) In the early phase of colonization, most ships will be cargo-only variants. For me, a Starship on Mars is a 15-story tall airtight building, that could be easily converted into a living quarter for dozens of settlers, or into a vertical farm, or into a miniature factory ... too worthy to launch back to Earth. These ships should to stay and form the core of the first settlement on Mars.Refueling these ships with precious Martian LOX & LCH4 and launching them back to Earth would be unnecessary and risky. As Elon stated "undesigning is the best thing" and "the best process is no process". Using these cargo ships as buildings would come with several advantages: 1. It would be cheaper. It might sound absurd at first, but building a structure of comparable size and capabilities on Mars - where mining ore, harvesting energy and assembling anything is everything but easy - comes with a hefty price tag. By using Starships on the spot, SpaceX could save all the effort, energy, equipment to build shelters, vertical farms, factory buildings, storage facilities, etc. And of course, the energy needed to produce 1100 tonnes of propellant per launch. We're talking about terawatt-hours of energy that could be spent on things like manufacturing solar panels using in situ resources. As Elon said: "The best process is no process." "It costs nothing." 2. It would be safer. Launching them back would mean +1 launch from Mars, +3-6 months space travel, +1 Earth-EDL, +~10 in-orbit refuelings + 1 launch from Earth, + 1 Mars-EDL, Again, "the best process is no process". "It can't go wrong." 3. It would make manufacturing cheaper. Leaving Starships on Mars would boost the demand for them and increased manufacturing would drive costs down. 4. It would favor the latest technology. Instead of reusing years-old technology, flying brand-new Starships would pave the way for the most up-to-date technology.

Submitted October 05, 2019 at 04:52PM by Col_Kurtz_
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The Fairing Catcher fleet photographed in Port Canaveral. GO Ms Chief on left, GO Ms Tree on the right. Credit: theresacross on Twitter
https://twitter.com/THERESA35906612/status/1180498280658149376?s=19

Submitted October 05, 2019 at 07:22PM by retiringonmars
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Interesting data on 301 stainless at cryogenic temperatures.
Found a pretty good paper on the strength of various stainless steels at cryogenic temperatures.Page four has a good graph of the data on 301, but other grades are discussed. The increase in strength is pretty dramatic. Temps are also keyed to the boiling point of methane and oxygen (along with other common cryo fluids). The strength increase is more dramatic than I anticipated.

Submitted October 05, 2019 at 11:39PM by Drop_Tables_Username
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Elon Musk’s future Starship updates could use more details on human survival
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Submitted October 06, 2019 at 05:08PM by EricFromOuterSpace
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