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The key to build a ship on orbit is a need for shelter...
tahanson43206,
You don't need that many Starships for a 1 hour wait and 8 minute flight to orbit. A single Starship can feasibly accommodate 500 pax for a brief flight. Starship has about as much pressurized volume as an Airbus A380. An A380 can seat 500 pax, so this vehicle should also be able to do that. Putting that many people in a single vehicle for a Mars reentry is a serious risk and they still have to have some place to live when they arrive on the surface, which is why I suggested the Cygnus PCM as both an escape vehicle, one-time reentry vehicle, and a new "Mars home" following successful touchdown to accommodate couples or families after attachment to a larger base and burial to provide radiation protection. New Martians need a standardized "home" that maintenance crews know how to service. We already know that an Aluminum cylinder is a long term viable orbital home from our experience with ISS, so the Cygnus design should be durable enough to assure a 20+ year service life. It might take 20+ years to construct very large subsurface pressurized habitats and we're starting from nothing, so temporary housing is required. Maybe there's a better way to do that using local materials and landing lots of colonists in Starships, but pressurized volume is at a premium and Starships will have to remain at Mars and conduct many up/down ferry flights to pay for themselves.
Of course the amount of radiation exposure why doing the construction will need to be monitored closely.
For kbd512 re #65
First, thanks for contributing to this new topic, which is itself a branch from RobertDyck's "Large Ship" topic.
As a reminder, it was your vision of a rotating habitat in your Large Ship design that led to RobertDyck's presentation of the Gyroscope Video that led to the Big Wheel concept.
Your observation about the capability of Starships to deliver 500 passengers to orbit is (to me for sure) breath taking << grin >>
My understanding is that Mr. Musk is thinking about sending 100 passengers in a Starship to Mars. That seems ambitious to me, but people have survived being packed together in long ocean voyages for centuries.
Your thoughts about the accommodations for passengers who arrive at Mars are interesting and thought provoking.
While I am concentrating on trying to work out what a Big Wheel would look like, I appreciate having other NewMars members taking on other aspects of the total experience that await a prospective passenger a few (Earth) years from now.
SpaceNut has been talking about his concept for a "Toehold" settlement in past posts, including in My Hacienda. It seems to me there is some correlation between your thoughts about temporary housing on Mars for new arrivals and whatever SpaceNut has in mind.
For SpaceNut ... if you have a topic in mind where discussion of temporary housing for new Mars arrivals would fit, please let us know. The topic will become increasingly urgent as the capability to deliver thousands of passengers to Mars becomes viable.
One option ** is ** to lay a landing Starship on its side. In that case, the passengers would have purchased a share in the venture along with their transportation, and their initial home will be the same structure they just experienced for six to eight months of flight.
As a reminder for forum readers who are not familiar with the contents of ** this ** topic, it is anticipated that Starships would lie horizontally in their cradles inside the Big Wheel rotor. The Starships in cradles in the outer perimeter would experience 1 g of simulated gravity. Those inboard would experience proportionally less simulated gravity. I am currently working on the second version of a model of what a cross section of the Big Wheel rotor would look like. The first attempt used a generated 36 tooth Spur Gear, overlaid on a circular pattern representing the cross section of a Big Wheel rotor. However, I've learned that Fusion 360 can generate a polygon of 36 sides, so I'm going to try that in hopes if provides better control for placement of circles representing Starship cradles.
(th)
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The main issues for temporary structures is not just payload mass, longevity but cost and easy of use for the building blocks.
Te ISS is basically built with the Cygnus modules for its docking and attaching of parts and pieces.
When more that an end was needed the structure was modified to have as many posts as was required to make the system grown.
Each unit is sort of a custom functional and fit for where its used in the overall scheme of the building for a fancy hotel for the crew to make use of it orbiting in circles around earth as the many parts and piece are sent up to construct a big wheel or other large ships to take us beyond the local neighborhood.....
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The US can now perform ISS reboosts without Russia's help, thanks to Cygnus spacecraft
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At least it looks like Cygnus could be modified to serve. My guess is that it needs more propellant capacity to do the job effectively. It wasn't designed to do this job. It was only designed to reach the ISS with cargo, and then depart for a targeted burnup (which really is less of a burn-up and more of a crash, despite what is still falsely claimed).
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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All of the current commercial cargo vehicles have been testing this function to ensure that once the Russian modules are gone that we can still maintain the ship.
What we really need is a starship diameter unit to replace and upgrade the existing modules so we can turn it into a temporary housing while building the transfer ship for earth to mars transports.
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