Starship is Go...

louis · 2019-10-31 09:14:22

You're saying "assumptions" but water has been found on Mars...I think Curiosity found 1.5-3% at its location in the surface regolith. Surely NASA and Space X will correlate findings on the ground with signals picked up by satellite observations, so as to confirm or otherwise the accuracy of satellite observations.

If I were planning the mission, I think I'd a have a three way split in any case: (a) I'd have the rovers and drill equipment available for water ice mining at the presumed resource location. (b) I'd have equipment that can process the regolith (landing sites being looked at are probably in the 4-6% range by mass) and (c) I'd have dehumidifier equipment that can extract water from the atmosphere. Robot rovers could be designed to be adaptable in various way to all three roles. If process (a) failed for some reason (unlikely though that is) then you would move on to the other two processes.

With 3D printers and material resources on board (in the tons) it would also be possible for instance to produce more dehumidifiers if necessary.

kbd512 wrote:

Does this mean an engineer might actually get to test all the assumptions about the water on Mars before we arrive there and discover that we didn't bring enough pipe to extract the hundreds of tons of water that Starship requires to send anyone back to Earth?

louis · 2019-10-31 13:33:18

Latest video from Felix with a detailed discussion of the landing legs on the Mk 1 - something that we have all been wondering about I think...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ybf1c4VgsA

He also addresses the movement of the lower section to the landing pad and the thruster holes.

Felix is definitely the best Starship video-maker from a technical point of view!

Shotwell: Starship to be fully orbital by end of next year and land on Moon before 2022! Space X to deliver 150 tons' cargo to the Moon.

SpaceNut · 2019-10-31 18:27:20

Oldfart1939 wrote:

One acre of land is 43,560 square feet of area, and if we simply for ease of calculations, assume 1 foot deep soil, that's 43,560 cubic feet of dirt. Divided by 27 cubic feet per cubic yard, that yields 1613 cubic yards of Mars dirt needing processed. Taking the density of 90 pounds per cubic foot x 27, we arrive at 2430 pounds.

The level of water in the mars soils are in the 1 to 5% or for a cubic foot of Mars soil, you can harvest around two pints of water give or take.
The fact that we need water for making fuel shows that if we must rely on this source we will be processing a larger amount of soil with very little in comparison going into a greenhouse.

One acre is 43,560 cubic ft at 2 pt. a ft cube = 87,120 Pt. possible water yield
70 ton is 150,647 pints ouch we are moving a huge amount of soil to get the water.....
Amount of fuel in quest for full is 1200 tonnes
Seems we will process 35 acres....

We can only hope that we do not need a full fuel loading to go home....

kbd512 · 2019-10-31 20:19:37

Louis,

What are the dimensions of this well and what kind of equipment will be required?

Saying you know exactly what you'll need when nobody has ever done it before seems to smack of the same type of hubris that spit out InSight's "drill", or whatever that goofy little thing was supposed to be. Since NASA's rheological knowledge of the subsurface material is nearly non-existent and nobody else has even attempted to obtain that info for a single point on Mars, where are you getting your data from?

What will your TVD be and what sort of formations do you expect to encounter?

Will you be doing any directional drilling?

If the field for your exploratory well is mostly loose fines, that's an entirely different type of problem than going through limestone / shale / granite / chunks of Nickel-Iron asteroids.

How will you remove the cuttings and do you know what your solids removal efficiency will be?

If you're not going to use some kind of fluid system to remove the cuttings, then your ROP could be very slow and you could end up destroying lots of impossible to replace bits. If you can't get rid of enough of the cuttings, then you're going to end up grinding them up, slowing ROP which risks losing more mud if you loose circulation in the well (a very distinct possibility), or you're going to drill at a snail's pace, which means you'll need more power to make propellant faster to make up for lost time.

What kinds of screens and shakers do you figure you'll need (because that would depend heavily on the size of your cuttings)?

If you do intend to use a fluid system and have a loss of circulation inside the well, where are you getting more mud from?

What temperatures and pressures will be involved if this well ends up being deeper than you initially anticipated?

Do you have sufficient weighting agent or spike mud on the Rig to contain kickbacks if there are significant trapped volatiles (like CH4 or CO2 or H2S)?

If you have a stuck pipe, do you have a way to remove it and retrieve the rest of your pipe?

If not, then how much pipe are you taking?

How do you intend to case the well (because it will likely collapse without a casing)?

If it turns out that the water is mixed with volcanic ash or is trapped inside a porous formation (something akin to limestone or perhaps gravel) and you need to fracture it, what kind of proppants will you take with you to keep the formation open for production?

Generally speaking, a couple months of planning and review of the geology of the area also go into drilling one of these wells. How does this fit into your drill program?

Are you equipped to do batch drilling if you can't get all of the water you need from a single well?

If it turns out that you don't get enough pressure for the water to flow on its own, will you have equipment to provide artificial lift?

Needless to say, none of this stuff is lightweight and many of the operations involved require a significant amount of power, in the range of hundreds of kilowatts.

I'd really like an overview of your drill program to undergird your beliefs about how this would work. Some of us don't want a repeat of the Mars InSight nonsense when lives are at stake. Strangely enough, some of us would like to see follow-on missions and a colony after we know where the resources are and how to extract them in a reasonably efficient manner.

louis · 2019-11-01 02:14:59

My understanding is this: that in the Amazonis/Arcadia border area, which is where Space X is looking for landing sites (potential sites having been id'd by NASA/JPL), there are ice filled craters where the ice is essentially pressed into the crater walls. These "walls" are actually fairly loose regolith and cover the ice to a width of only a 1-3 metres in part. That was what I was referencing. There are other types of ice deposits as well...glaciers covered in a few metres of rock debris.

So, what I envisage is that the water ice mining will take place through, firstly, use of a small bulldozer to clear regolith to the ice level. After that powerful ice drills mounted on robot rovers will be used to break off chunks of water ice, which will be loaded on to robot transport rovers for transfer to the propellant production facility. The whole operation will be overseen by humans in a pressurised human-rated rover.

I don't see the need for a drill rig to drill down a long distance.

Here are some links:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex- … ?r=US&IR=T

"That strip of Mars is thought to hide massive, rapidly buried glaciers that remain mostly preserved after millions of years.

Some evidence for this is in the shape of nearby craters, which appear to sink after a meteorite impact because they expose ice to Martian air, which is about 1% as thick as Earth's."

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starsh … sa-photos/

Actually the original Robert Zimmerman article has the best write up of the prevalence of water ice in the area:

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-b … s-on-mars/

He specifically references "lobate debris aprons" -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobate_debris_apron

and "concentric crater glaciers".

Clearly NASA/JPL/Space X will also be correlating all this with other surveillance info like ground radar and chemical signature analysis - but geologists can also determine a hell of a lot from the topography.

Yes, I don't doubt there is some small possibility that they could be totally wrong but it is a v. slim possibility I think. Furthermore the robot Starship cargo landers will be able to undertake more accurate tests.

This is a 500 ton mission, which makes all the difference I think. The allocation for water sourcing/propellant production will be generous...So I would expect several robot rovers (diggers, bulldozers, drillers, transport) and a couple of human passenger rovers at the least. Maybe there will be 100 drill pieces or 1000 drill pieces...whatever it takes to get the job done. We might use lasers as well to help dislodge the ice. But I don't think there will be a conventional drill rig, drilling down.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
What are the dimensions of this well and what kind of equipment will be required?
Saying you know exactly what you'll need when nobody has ever done it before seems to smack of the same type of hubris that spit out InSight's "drill", or whatever that goofy little thing was supposed to be. Since NASA's rheological knowledge of the subsurface material is nearly non-existent and nobody else has even attempted to obtain that info for a single point on Mars, where are you getting your data from?
What will your TVD be and what sort of formations do you expect to encounter?
Will you be doing any directional drilling?
If the field for your exploratory well is mostly loose fines, that's an entirely different type of problem than going through limestone / shale / granite / chunks of Nickel-Iron asteroids.
How will you remove the cuttings and do you know what your solids removal efficiency will be?
If you're not going to use some kind of fluid system to remove the cuttings, then your ROP could be very slow and you could end up destroying lots of impossible to replace bits. If you can't get rid of enough of the cuttings, then you're going to end up grinding them up, slowing ROP which risks losing more mud if you loose circulation in the well (a very distinct possibility), or you're going to drill at a snail's pace, which means you'll need more power to make propellant faster to make up for lost time.
What kinds of screens and shakers do you figure you'll need (because that would depend heavily on the size of your cuttings)?
If you do intend to use a fluid system and have a loss of circulation inside the well, where are you getting more mud from?
What temperatures and pressures will be involved if this well ends up being deeper than you initially anticipated?
Do you have sufficient weighting agent or spike mud on the Rig to contain kickbacks if there are significant trapped volatiles (like CH4 or CO2 or H2S)?
If you have a stuck pipe, do you have a way to remove it and retrieve the rest of your pipe?
If not, then how much pipe are you taking?
How do you intend to case the well (because it will likely collapse without a casing)?
If it turns out that the water is mixed with volcanic ash or is trapped inside a porous formation (something akin to limestone or perhaps gravel) and you need to fracture it, what kind of proppants will you take with you to keep the formation open for production?
Generally speaking, a couple months of planning and review of the geology of the area also go into drilling one of these wells. How does this fit into your drill program?
Are you equipped to do batch drilling if you can't get all of the water you need from a single well?
If it turns out that you don't get enough pressure for the water to flow on its own, will you have equipment to provide artificial lift?
Needless to say, none of this stuff is lightweight and many of the operations involved require a significant amount of power, in the range of hundreds of kilowatts.
I'd really like an overview of your drill program to undergird your beliefs about how this would work. Some of us don't want a repeat of the Mars InSight nonsense when lives are at stake. Strangely enough, some of us would like to see follow-on missions and a colony after we know where the resources are and how to extract them in a reasonably efficient manner.

tahanson43206 · 2019-11-01 04:36:49

This post is offered with a Tip of the Hat to Louis and the several other UK members of this forum.

The link below reports on the (to me somewhat surprising) extent of mining of copper in what became the British Isles thousands of years ago on Earth.

The lesson I draw from this report is that it need not be surprising to see modern residents of the British Isles taking a lead in mining off Earth.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bronze-age-d … 03426.html

So we now have increasing evidence that Britain’s trade with continental Europe – although currently turbulent – has deep roots that go back several thousand years.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Conversation
Alan Williams received analytical funding from NERC - lead isotope analyses, Gwynedd Archaeological Trust, Historical Metallurgy Society and the Ancient Mining Research Foundation at Great Orme Mines.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2019-11-01 19:46:09

Ground in the shade which will have the most water content will be hard and will make it difficult for a bull dozer to move. Ground in the sunlight will be softer for the bulldozer to move until it gets down to the forst line or bed rock which ever comes first. A bulldozer will also need to be made heavier by moving soil onto a basket to add to the mass to offset the lower gravity for the machine so that it can push more effectively.

kbd512 · 2019-11-01 22:40:07

Louis,

Given the endless stream of assertions that have yet to be subjected to the rigor of one silly little test, I'm not sure there's any primary plan, much less a backup plan. In one of the threads about nuclear power, you stated that you didn't think those advocating for it have thought through it. Since you didn't answer any of the questions I asked, I don't think you've thought this through. Those are questions any engineer would require answers to before drilling a well.

The water extraction effort is something we're betting the lives of at least a half dozen irreplaceable astronauts on, so let's subject this water extraction plan to at least as much rigor as any sort of nuclear power plan. If they actually have to drill to obtain usable water, as we've been required to do so many times here on Earth, then we need a real plan.

If using a bulldozer to put a small berm up in front of a fission reactor smaller than a trash can was too much effort, then it didn't suddenly become easier to excavate an unknown quantity of regolith to expose what's likely to be some type of permafrost or frozen mud.

In an effort to steer this topic towards discussion of the actual issues, I'll go first. I'm just barely scratching the surface of this topic at that.

Top 3 "must have's" for drilling operations:

1. Understanding of the geology of the area and the rheology of the materials he or she is planning to drill through (we could easily send a geologist to mud school)
2. Well dimensions (likely dictated by the mass constraints for our equipment and our ability to pump) and equipment suitable for the program (minimally, we'll be drilling, casing, and extracting)
3. Mud program

If the regolith is mixed with brine, as it's likely to be (yes this requires real testing), then that's typically what we use to drill the first interval of a deeper well here on Earth. This would be another example of ISRU. Assuming the same issues with drilling wells still applies on Mars, then we're going to need a fluid system to remove cuttings, remove heat from the drill bit, and contain pressure in the well. If we fail to do those things, the results could range from incredibly expensive to life threatening. We need screens and shakers to separate the cuttings from our fluid system. We need a mud pit / tank to transport and store the mud and mix chemicals, as required. We could use insulation and solar thermal power to keep it liquid, but some form of thermal regulation is required or we'll just have a tank full of permafrost. We may require some kind of weighting agent. Finely ground Iron Oxide may have to suffice, which means we need a grinder to turn the weighting agent into something with the consistency of talc or flour. We need downhole tools for inspections, removal of stuck pipe, and characterizing the formation we're drilling through (so we can do a better job next time, if required). We need tools for completion and extraction, meaning heat sources, pumps, filters, and caps for our wells if we have to drill multiple wells. Basically, production equipment.

I think we really need a robotic or crewed exploratory mission to characterize the subsurface rock formations and water, along with potential sources of materials just laying around on the surface, so that we know what we can readily obtain and use.

louis · 2019-11-02 06:52:25

I do agree the "plan" for water mining needs to be rigorously tested in various ways.

Putting a berm up in front of a nuclear reactor (but 100 times probably) I did consider a waste of labour power. But let's leave that to one side.

Regarding your three points, I don't really accept your second point, the premise that a well will be required. Of course we haven't heard Space X's plans, but the way I see it, drilling down through what is essentially permafrost is a lot more difficult than shifting fairly loose regolith with a (smallish) bull dozer. We are talking about removing regolith maybe 1-5 metres thick from the side of an incline until we hit the ice proper. I would then envisage the robot rovers using mounted ice drills to break off chunks of ice which will be collected by a separate robot rover using a scoop and depositing either in its own hold or the hold of a transport rover. This will be overseen by humans in a human passenger rover. The process of removing the ice might be aided by lasers being used to create entry points for the drills.

Obviously while we are familiar with all sorts of ice drills on Earth, there will need to be extensive testing of the proposed equipment in Mars simulation landscape on Earth. It might be that something like a four drill mechanism mounted on a rover with four lasers to provide entry points might work well...so once the rover has drilled in, say, 50 cms, it can pull back and dislodge a chunk of ice.

Regarding mud management, that might be an issue on a hot summer's sol on Mars, but shouldn't be a problem most sols. I would envisage the human passenger rover maybe directing the scoop rover to remove mud while the drilling takes place.

This is the closest image I could find to the sort of landcape we might be talking about:

https://thevarsity.ca/wp-content/upload … 80x720.jpg

NASA has been funding some development of robot miners for Mars - only just found this:

https://www.philipmetzger.com/challenge-of-mars-mining/

Those machines, especially tracked versions were much more in line with the sort of thing I was envisaging - not drilling down but digging out...couldn't see any evidence of drills. Maybe drills wouldn't be necessary with sufficient force from a digger...I don't know but for the moment I assume drills are required.

While a "robotic or crewed exploratory mission to characterize the subsurface rock formations and water" might have been nice in the past, if NASA had invested in a Mars Mission, it is unlikley to happen now. There may be scope for having robot rover exit one of the cargo Starships and have a look around - I suppose we shouldn't rule that out, but as yet no such plans have been announced.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Given the endless stream of assertions that have yet to be subjected to the rigor of one silly little test, I'm not sure there's any primary plan, much less a backup plan. In one of the threads about nuclear power, you stated that you didn't think those advocating for it have thought through it. Since you didn't answer any of the questions I asked, I don't think you've thought this through. Those are questions any engineer would require answers to before drilling a well.
The water extraction effort is something we're betting the lives of at least a half dozen irreplaceable astronauts on, so let's subject this water extraction plan to at least as much rigor as any sort of nuclear power plan. If they actually have to drill to obtain usable water, as we've been required to do so many times here on Earth, then we need a real plan.
If using a bulldozer to put a small berm up in front of a fission reactor smaller than a trash can was too much effort, then it didn't suddenly become easier to excavate an unknown quantity of regolith to expose what's likely to be some type of permafrost or frozen mud.
In an effort to steer this topic towards discussion of the actual issues, I'll go first. I'm just barely scratching the surface of this topic at that.
Top 3 "must have's" for drilling operations:
1. Understanding of the geology of the area and the rheology of the materials he or she is planning to drill through (we could easily send a geologist to mud school)
2. Well dimensions (likely dictated by the mass constraints for our equipment and our ability to pump) and equipment suitable for the program (minimally, we'll be drilling, casing, and extracting)
3. Mud program
If the regolith is mixed with brine, as it's likely to be (yes this requires real testing), then that's typically what we use to drill the first interval of a deeper well here on Earth. This would be another example of ISRU. Assuming the same issues with drilling wells still applies on Mars, then we're going to need a fluid system to remove cuttings, remove heat from the drill bit, and contain pressure in the well. If we fail to do those things, the results could range from incredibly expensive to life threatening. We need screens and shakers to separate the cuttings from our fluid system. We need a mud pit / tank to transport and store the mud and mix chemicals, as required. We could use insulation and solar thermal power to keep it liquid, but some form of thermal regulation is required or we'll just have a tank full of permafrost. We may require some kind of weighting agent. Finely ground Iron Oxide may have to suffice, which means we need a grinder to turn the weighting agent into something with the consistency of talc or flour. We need downhole tools for inspections, removal of stuck pipe, and characterizing the formation we're drilling through (so we can do a better job next time, if required). We need tools for completion and extraction, meaning heat sources, pumps, filters, and caps for our wells if we have to drill multiple wells. Basically, production equipment.
I think we really need a robotic or crewed exploratory mission to characterize the subsurface rock formations and water, along with potential sources of materials just laying around on the surface, so that we know what we can readily obtain and use.

Last edited by louis (2019-11-02 06:54:50)

SpaceNut · 2019-11-02 09:08:41

The ground water wells on earth require large diameter which go as deep as the water table but on mars that not only needs to be lined to the depth but capped to keep the water from boiling off as its exposed by the digging. This holds true for the drilled small diameter well also. It also assumes a ground water table. It also assumes underground water pockets as found on earth that fill caverns. These occur from subduction of the crust which does not happen on mars.

Digging into ice coverd by regolith will cause heating as the drill goes to depth in which the water must be captured as before from its uncovering and obsortion of heat from the operation. All situations would require at a minimum some sort of dome over the drilling operations to aid in capture but also for pressurization to slow vapor change.

Post #428 estimated ground soil water provided it stays in the same concentration throughout for just a 1 ft depth and nothing so far shows that it stays constant as depth increase for testing thus far.

GW Johnson · 2019-11-02 10:28:13

It's hard to figure out what all you must take, when you do not really understand what is actually there beneath the surface. Ain't it?

Did it ever occur to anybody that not doing an exploratory robot drill mission is one way to put off ever sending people there?

As for alternatives to buried glaciers, bear in mind that processing large volumes or masses will be a very energy-hungry effort.

If the regolith really is 1-5% water content by mass, then each kg (liter) of water means you process 20-100 kg of regolith. The energy to scoop that up must come from somewhere. The energy to cart it over to the processing equipment must come from somewhere. The energy to process it (usually by heating the regolith in a confined space) must come from somewhere. The energy to liquify it might be the cheapest, because of the cold. But to separate out salts and perchlorates will require energy.

And just how many liters will you need? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? So you process hundreds to thousands of tons of regolith to get a few thousand liters of water? Doesn't sound very attractive to me.

It's worse for extracting water from the near-vacuum of an atmosphere. It's not so much the tonnages as the volumes you must process. Cold air holds very little water. Low pressure makes that even worse. 6-7 mbar "air" at 10-100 C below zero holds a very minute moisture content. As a wild guess 0.001% by volume. That's 1 part in 100-thousand. That means I process something like 100,000 cubic meters of Martian air to get 1 cubic meter of water VAPOR, AT 6-7 mbar! Not much mass there, only around half a kg. Now condense that liquid phase so you can actually use it. It's way less than a liter for all that near-vacuum air you have to process for it.

If you compress first, that's seemingly better, except that an air compressor on Mars will NOT look like an Earthly compressor, but more like an Earthly vacuum pump. Lots of machinery mass and energy consumption, for a very tiny mass throughput.

You're way better off mining ice from some buried glacier. Whether you dig it out, or drill and steam extract it, you get a lot more mass for the least expenditure. But, you need to know it really is there before you commit to staking lives on it.

The Mars Polar Observer probe dug a few centimeters down, in a region where they expected massive permafrost. What it found was a few ice-cube-sized lozenges scattered in the otherwise-dry regolith. NEAR THE POLE! They figured out it really was ice, because it sublimed away in about a day after being unburied. My point: ground truth vastly at variance with what they expected based on remote observation. Vastly at variance indeed!

Mining ice by digging it up risks that same sublimation loss mechanism. Unless the ice is truly massive, not just scattered small lozenges.

But you won't know that until you get there and dig or drill.

And THAT ugly place is where we are.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2019-11-02 10:32:37)

louis · 2019-11-02 11:01:00

Well that's not what I am proposing. I am proposing that you drill out chunks of ice using drills mounted on rovers.

How quickly does ice sublimate? Does it really matter as long as you can grab a big enough chunk? This video would suggest that the water ice does not sublimate that quickly even in a vaccuum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6XrAtp9WvM

Some interesting stuff in this NASA paper re ice drilling and melting to obtain water.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/file … elease.pdf

But I would prefer the method of surface digging out rather than drilling down - NASA appears to be following both lines.

SpaceNut wrote:

The ground water wells on earth require large diameter which go as deep as the water table but on mars that not only needs to be lined to the depth but capped to keep the water from boiling off as its exposed by the digging. This holds true for the drilled small diameter well also. It also assumes a ground water table. It also assumes underground water pockets as found on earth that fill caverns. These occur from subduction of the crust which does not happen on mars.
Digging into ice coverd by regolith will cause heating as the drill goes to depth in which the water must be captured as before from its uncovering and obsortion of heat from the operation. All situations would require at a minimum some sort of dome over the drilling operations to aid in capture but also for pressurization to slow vapor change.
Post #428 estimated ground soil water provided it stays in the same concentration throughout for just a 1 ft depth and nothing so far shows that it stays constant as depth increase for testing thus far.

louis · 2019-11-04 12:42:24

Latest from Felix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e74qVwj0D5g

He suggests that Starships are now being built at three separate locations.

louis · 2019-11-05 09:20:03

Second canard installation on Mk 1 Starship! Fascinating stuff!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7E3GpYWC_k

louis · 2019-11-06 01:44:05

Latest SpaceXcentric video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lJec-azw30

Piping being flight-insulated. Seems like we are getting close to a launch.

Oldfart1939 · 2019-11-07 15:01:16

Louis-
I'm guesstimating near end of November or early December; still a lot of ground testing to accomplish: Fuel loading and off-loading; pressurization and leak testing; possible a static fire with hold-downs (?); servomechanism testing; avionics tests. A LOT to do before this bird flies.

louis · 2019-11-07 15:39:28

Going by the road closure schedule some are suggesting cone section to be moved and fitted to the lower section in mid November (12th onwards I think), meaning a launch likely in early December.

Did you know they are trying a new approach to fuelling with the Starship, or so I heard on a video? Loading from below, rather than from a side tower...how would that work on Mars? - you're going to be flat on the ground!

Oldfart1939 wrote:

Louis-
I'm guesstimating near end of November or early December; still a lot of ground testing to accomplish: Fuel loading and off-loading; pressurization and leak testing; possible a static fire with hold-downs (?); servomechanism testing; avionics tests. A LOT to do before this bird flies.

louis · 2019-11-08 16:27:38

SpaceXCentric

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UMW2P0XWQg

Musk revealing more about his vision for Mars...

Looking to transfer a million tons to Mars over 20 years, using 100 Starships! A Mars City would require 1000 Starships.

Very interesting...think I'll start a separate thread on that.

SpaceNut · 2019-11-10 21:38:02

Slides & animations from Starship 2019 update presentation by Elon Musk

SpaceX Starship interior concept for 100 passengers

All%2BDecks%2Bof%2BSpaceX%2B100-passenger%2BStarship%2Bdesign%2Bby%2BAce%2B%2526%2BMichel%2BLamontagne.jpg

SpaceNut · 2019-11-13 22:29:23

https://en.mogaznews.com/collection/136 … d-by-.html

louis · 2019-11-14 04:52:43

Thanks for those links, Spacenut. The Starship design is produced by spacefans rather than Space X and is for a "mature" coloniser transporter. There was a link in the article to this more sophisticated design for the pioneer Starship (also by a spacefan) - very detailed.

https://www.humanmars.net/2019/08/specu … pacex.html

SpaceNut wrote:

Slides & animations from Starship 2019 update presentation by Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship interior concept for 100 passengers

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ogEMH9hCozk/ … ntagne.jpg

louis · 2019-11-14 04:59:33

Spat Wars continues!

My feeling is that Zubrin's proposals, while very valid for their day, are no longer relevant. Also that NASA is not serious about getting humans to Mars. That leaves only Space X and possibly Blue Origin as potential players. China also has a Mars focus...so they might have plans.

Large scale propellant production on Mars is of course the major weakness in Space X's plans, but with a 500 ton cargo load, there are lots of ways of delivering on that.

SpaceNut wrote:

https://en.mogaznews.com/collection/136 … d-by-.html

louis · 2019-11-20 17:04:47

Whoops...cryo test failure...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BakNGBpLSYU

Hope this isn't a major set-back.

louis · 2019-11-20 17:12:51

Re the cryo failure, seems like Space X are thinking in terms of moving to a focus on the Mk 3 design...

Not sure what that means for Mk 2...

See Everyday Astronaut's twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/stat … 1527985153

louis · 2019-11-20 18:06:58

SpaceXcentric's take on the cyro-crisis...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ee-xPdxfFc

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#426 2019-10-31 09:14:22

Re: Starship is Go...

#427 2019-10-31 13:33:18

Re: Starship is Go...

#428 2019-10-31 18:27:20

Re: Starship is Go...

#429 2019-10-31 20:19:37

Re: Starship is Go...

#430 2019-11-01 02:14:59

Re: Starship is Go...

#431 2019-11-01 04:36:49

Re: Starship is Go...

#432 2019-11-01 19:46:09

Re: Starship is Go...

#433 2019-11-01 22:40:07

Re: Starship is Go...

#434 2019-11-02 06:52:25

Re: Starship is Go...

#435 2019-11-02 09:08:41

Re: Starship is Go...

#436 2019-11-02 10:28:13

Re: Starship is Go...

#437 2019-11-02 11:01:00

Re: Starship is Go...

#438 2019-11-04 12:42:24

Re: Starship is Go...

#439 2019-11-05 09:20:03

Re: Starship is Go...

#440 2019-11-06 01:44:05

Re: Starship is Go...

#441 2019-11-07 15:01:16

Re: Starship is Go...

#442 2019-11-07 15:39:28

Re: Starship is Go...

#443 2019-11-08 16:27:38

Re: Starship is Go...

#444 2019-11-10 21:38:02

Re: Starship is Go...

#445 2019-11-13 22:29:23

Re: Starship is Go...

#446 2019-11-14 04:52:43

Re: Starship is Go...

#447 2019-11-14 04:59:33

Re: Starship is Go...

#448 2019-11-20 17:04:47

Re: Starship is Go...

#449 2019-11-20 17:12:51

Re: Starship is Go...

#450 2019-11-20 18:06:58

Re: Starship is Go...

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