Global future space architecture thread

[enroger]

There is no reason why the Falcon 9 could not have been improved instead to further reduce turnaround time. Or at least a rocket around that size.

A better idea is to develop a reusable upper stage on F9 and see if upper stage reusability is worthwhile, and even if it shave 50% off payload capacity they can still get plenty of contract with it.

I think full reusability is definitely worth it, just not starship size and probably not built with stainless steel.

 

[gelgoog]

Allegedly they tried designing a reusable upper stage for Falcon 9 and figured out the payload was really low.

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[madhusudan.tim]

Allegedly they tried designing a reusable upper stage for Falcon 9 and figured out the payload was really low.

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Wishcasting……..Why not build neutron style launchers? Consider a 5 meter diameter stainless 1st stage, common bulkhead, autogenous pressurization with gaseous methane, and 9 powerful 120 tonne class engines. Carbon fibre based fairing which opens like space shuttle at around 100 km altitude and 3 kmph speed. You would require a significantly smaller second stage given the smaller delta V requirement for the LEO, removal of fairing, and lighter weight of the second stage structure, and higher isp of methalox based second stage engine.

The problems, higher thermal load on the landing stage. But, I think the strakes or fins like that on the ZQ-3 can come to play; prolong the reentry angle and reduce the speed more gradually reducing the peak thermal load. Also if the frontal area can be made higher without significantly increasing the weight, it should be doable. Falcon heavy center core was recovered in 2019 after reaching similar speeds.

Only thing expendable would be the tiny second stage and second stage engine. Mass produced stainless tank should lower the cost to thousands of dollars, 3d printing should reduce the cost of the second stage engine to thousands. A 5m diameter frontal area of a rocket should give more aerobraking so that reentry burn might not be needed as well.

 

[Jason_]

The fundamental concept behind Starship is flawed (as evidenced by its v3->v4->vX… iterative cycle), and Elon Musk’s aerospace capabilities and understanding are deficient.

His paradigm is, in fact, a regression for the aerospace industry—a throwback to an older era—and is meaningless from a macro-level perspective.

The current Starship follows a specialized-purpose rocket philosophy, whereas the industry has long since adopted a general-purpose rocket design approach. Starship’s second stage is directly integrated with the function of its space application. In essence, this means custom-building a rocket’s second stage for a specific space application. Anyone with a deep understanding of engineering research will naturally recognize the dreadful implications of such a customized rocket approach.

China suffered from this problem for decades (the CZ-2 and CZ-3 series were, frankly, specialized-purpose rockets; only with the CZ-5, CZ-6, CZ-7, and CZ-8 did China enter the era of general-purpose rockets). The United States, on the other hand, largely moved away from the custom-rocket mindset starting in the 1980s, which is why it achieved such a high degree of standardization.

Today, Musk’s Starship is essentially a bespoke, in-house system (unlike Falcon 9) that forces payloads to adapt to its design, completely integrating the payload with the Starship second stage. It is evident that he has not yet solved the problem of deploying individual, independent payloads, as Starship cannot deliver oversized or exceptionally large payloads.

The maximum standard payload Starship can deploy in a single go is, at best, four bundled 5-6 ton class satellites (limited by its 6x8 meter payload bay door). A single mission could deploy two batches of these, totaling eight satellites (approximately 50 tons, which would fully utilize the payload bay’s volume), and only to Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

This vehicle is less practical than even the Falcon 9. Let SpaceX continue down this path. In 10 to 15 years, when Americans look back, they will regret it, much like the current situation with China’s electric vehicle industry.

Are you serious?

Starship's 9m diameter fairing is the largest in the world by far. It is better at delivering oversized or exceptionally large payload than any rocket developed to date. And so what if payloads are forced to adapt to its design when a fully reusable Starship has two orders of magnitude lower cost per kg to orbit? (And as if payload today are not already forced to be adapted to much less capable launch vehicles.) Currently, SpaceX delivers >90% of all payloads to orbit. Whatever SpaceX does IS THE SPACE LAUNCH INDUSTRY STANDARD.
Dismissing Starship and SpaceX is like Jai Hinds dismissing J-20. Stop this cringe nonsense.

 

[iewgnem]

Are you fking serious?

Starship's 9m diameter fairing is the largest in the world by far. It is better at delivering oversized or exceptionally large payload than any rocket developed to date. And so what if payloads are forced to adapt to its design when a fully reusable Starship has two orders of magnitude lower cost per kg to orbit? (And as if payload today are not already forced to be adapted to much less capable launch vehicles.) Currently, SpaceX delivers >90% of all payloads to orbit. Whatever SpaceX does IS THE SPACE LAUNCH INDUSTRY STANDARD.
View attachment 163241Dismissing Starship and SpaceX is like Jai Hinds dismissing J-20. Stop this cringe nonsense.

You might want to hold off on Starship payload volume, because the only way to fix its inability to reach orbit is to shrink payload bay volume in exchange for fuel, whuch they are already doing with v2 and v3

Remember, Starship's fairing is steel...

 

[nativechicken]

Are you fking serious?

Starship's 9m diameter fairing is the largest in the world by far. It is better at delivering oversized or exceptionally large payload than any rocket developed to date. And so what if payloads are forced to adapt to its design when a fully reusable Starship has two orders of magnitude lower cost per kg to orbit? (And as if payload today are not already forced to be adapted to much less capable launch vehicles.) Currently, SpaceX delivers >90% of all payloads to orbit. Whatever SpaceX does IS THE SPACE LAUNCH INDUSTRY STANDARD.
View attachment 163241Dismissing Starship and SpaceX is like Jai Hinds dismissing J-20. Stop this cringe nonsense.

You are fundamentally ignorant of the technology. Starship’s payload bay is an enclosed design (and what you call a fairing is actually the internal volume of the spacecraft itself). The larger the volume, the more constrained the payload deployment is, as this is limited by the dimensions of the payload bay door.

The real problem with Starship right now is that this storage space is integrated with and inseparable from the second stage. For any payload to be deployed, it must exit through a door. Considering the need for reusability, the current design for the door has a maximum area of approximately 8x6 meters or 8x7 meters. An 8-meter height is roughly the minimum length required to deploy a heavy geosynchronous satellite (which are >6m long).

Furthermore, as a heavy-lift launch vehicle, Starship’s payload bay volume is actually the smallest in its class.

The SLS Block 2 (130t to LEO) has a payload bay volume of 1,800 m³.
The CZ-9 (150t to LEO) is projected to have a payload bay volume of 2,100-2,400 m³, and could even reach 2,800-3,000 m³ for LEO missions.
Let me also tell you this: even the improved Starship, the original v3 version with a height of over 150 meters, would only have a payload bay volume of 1,200-1,400 m³. The latest v4, with a height of only 142 meters, will likely have a volume of just 1,100-1,200 m³. Other variants have even smaller payload bays than the v1/v2 versions.

In my eyes, Starship is essentially the worst heavy-lift rocket design ever conceived. You don’t understand the requirements of rocket design, which is why you can’t see that Starship is a deformed piece of junk with grotesquely imbalanced metrics. But most of the professionals in China and the U.S. who truly understand aerospace design get it. It’s just that these experts are routinely attacked (by Musk’s fans who use Falcon 9 as a weapon), so they mostly keep quiet now.

If you truly understood spacecraft, you would know that a good design is a synthesis of multiple parameters. Starship only excels in one metric: one-time payload capacity. It also has a good metric for reusability (low cost). All other spacecraft metrics are abysmal to an absurd degree. For example, if there were a metric for payload deployment capability, all currently visible versions of Starship are inferior to Falcon 9. And that is frankly ridiculous.

This is why I say it’s a specialized-purpose rocket, not a general-purpose one. You clearly don’t understand the problems China encountered with the CZ-2/CZ-3 series, where adapting one type of rocket for one class of payload was incredibly inefficient. Just look at Starship now: isn’t it a case where one class of payload requires a specific variant of the rocket?

If you still don’t understand this, I don’t care to elaborate further. I’ll just say that Western de-industrialization has gone on for so long that you’ve forgotten how to evaluate engineering and assess risk. Meanwhile, those of us in China can only chuckle to ourselves while reading the Chinese translations of various Western textbooks from the industrial peak of the 1960s-90s that fill our libraries.

 

[nativechicken]

Are you fking serious?

Starship's 9m diameter fairing is the largest in the world by far. It is better at delivering oversized or exceptionally large payload than any rocket developed to date. And so what if payloads are forced to adapt to its design when a fully reusable Starship has two orders of magnitude lower cost per kg to orbit? (And as if payload today are not already forced to be adapted to much less capable launch vehicles.) Currently, SpaceX delivers >90% of all payloads to orbit. Whatever SpaceX does IS THE SPACE LAUNCH INDUSTRY STANDARD.
View attachment 163241Dismissing Starship and SpaceX is like Jai Hinds dismissing J-20. Stop this cringe nonsense.

Let me add one more thing: the data in that image is wildly inaccurate. For instance, the larger Falcon Heavy fairing—that was never actually built. The current Falcon Heavy fairing is 10 meters tall, exactly the same as the one on Falcon 9. They’ve been trying to develop a 15-20 meter fairing for years but have never been able to solve the associated problems.

In reality, the issue isn’t the size of the fairing itself. It’s that the rocket’s length-to-diameter ratio (the ratio of its length to its diameter) has already reached its limit on the Falcon 9 platform. Its length cannot be increased.

Why? You would need a thorough understanding of rocket structural mechanics to grasp the reason.

Also, the Starship payload bay height in that image is complete nonsense. The usable height inside Starship’s payload bay is 18 meters, with the total external height at most 21 meters (due to a fuel tank in the nose section).

Furthermore, the volume for SLS Block 2 is also wrong. If you check the news, you’ll find that the maximum payload bay volume for SLS Block 2 is 1,800 m³.

 

[nativechicken]

You might want to hold off on Starship payload volume, because the only way to fix its inability to reach orbit is to shrink payload bay volume in exchange for fuel, whuch they are already doing with v2 and v3

Remember, Starship's fairing is steel...

You should tell him that Starship’s payload bay is a permanently sealed, structurally integrated unit. The only payload release mechanism it has now is a slit-like opening—I’ve forgotten the exact dimensions, but it’s approximately 7 meters wide by over 1 meter high. This mechanism has already malfunctioned twice just during the act of opening.

This door can only deploy flat-panel payloads, maybe 2-3 tons at a time. It can handle smaller satellites, like 200-300kg CubeSats, but it can’t even deploy a standard payload for Falcon 9.

Have him ever considered why Starship is pursuing an in-space refueling model? It’s because that model doesn’t require a large payload bay door.

The Starship HLS (Human Landing System) variant is a case in point. Because it’s essentially an expendable vehicle for the lunar mission and doesn’t need to re-enter the atmosphere, the HLS version can afford to have a large, clamshell door (we’ve only seen concept art; the final design isn’t settled). Of course, even that door isn’t particularly large.


I cannot imagine any benefit to this Starship vehicle beyond Low Earth Orbit.

This is because in about 15 years, around 2040, the Sino-American nuclear thermal and nuclear electric hybrid space propulsion systems will mature. Most people don’t truly understand deep space propulsion systems. They fail to realize that the Starship model, both economically and in terms of technical risk, is far inferior to the dual-mode nuclear thermal/nuclear electric deep space propulsion architecture.

Starship’s current direction is a complete detour. To deploy such a massive chemical-based deep space system for a mere 15-year window is, frankly, a case of a company recklessly gambling with its own longevity.

The Mars colonization fantasy is a joke you can just laugh off. In this world, the only country with the genuine capability for large-scale civil engineering and city-building is China. Musk’s Mars colonization plan only has the launch vehicle; it completely lacks a detailed plan for how to actually build the city. Are the Americans planning to launch robots to Mars to tighten screws and assemble materials? Have they never considered that the details of Musk’s Martian city would require a workforce of 100,000+ specialized professionals to spend 10-20 years on planning, design, logistical support, and testing before it could even be executed? Every single detail needs to be tested; you can’t just issue purchase orders from Earth.

Most people in this world have watched too many Hollywood sci-fi shows… they have no idea how large-scale, complex engineering projects are actually executed.

China now has a discipline called “Mega-Engineering.”(国内术语是巨工程) The manned lunar landing is one example of a Mega-Project. What is a Mega-Project(国内术语是巨工程)? It is a project that mobilizes a national-level professional and technical workforce on the order of 100,000 people. The core of a Mega-Project is the management of over 100,000 professionals to complete a goal efficiently within a set timeframe.

SpaceX has only around 10,000 employees. For an independent aerospace company, to have produced a junk-grade heavy-lift rocket is actually quite an impressive feat.

This is my point: Starship is a point of pride in human history for a private aerospace company. But when compared to a true aerospace superpower (China), its existence actually reflects the tragedy of the American space program. (For example, designing such a lousy piece of hardware as Starship, and being unable to fix it—if Musk disagrees, no one can do anything about it).

 

[nativechicken]

There is not much stopping SpaceX from developing a more conventional, expendable second stage -- i.e.: to aim for reusability only for the first stage of Starship (Super Heavy), which in turn will enhance the useful payload to orbit in terms of mass and volume.

Putting it another way, the excess focus and critique of Starship (second stage) should not obscure the more real and significant potential in the first stage/Super Heavy, and the current course of development allows the US and SpaceX significant ability to pivot and integrate a more conventional second stage to Super Heavy.

I’m aware of all the points you’ve made, and so are the authorities in the United States. In fact, there have been people consistently offering relevant suggestions to Musk and SpaceX all along.

The question is, from 2020 to the present, has Musk taken any action to prepare for these issues?

There are now rumors that NASA is looking to buy out some of Starship’s designs, paying SpaceX to customize an expendable upper stage. There’s even talk of a shortened Starship HLS variant—essentially, one without the large second-stage propellant tanks. But for now, these are all just rumors; it’s even uncertain whether NASA will remain involved.

As for the idea of that shortened Starship HLS variant, it was actually something a Russian aerospace scientist had been advocating for years. Then, when he posted about it on NSF (Nasaspaceflight.com), his post was instantly deleted, preventing any discussion from even starting.

 

[Jason_]

You are fundamentally ignorant of the technology. Starship’s payload bay is an enclosed design (and what you call a fairing is actually the internal volume of the spacecraft itself). The larger the volume, the more constrained the payload deployment is, as this is limited by the dimensions of the payload bay door.

Wait, did you actually say "the larger the volume, the more constrained the payload deployment is"? Can you hear what you are saying?

The real problem with Starship right now is that this storage space is integrated with and inseparable from the second stage. For any payload to be deployed, it must exit through a door. Considering the need for reusability, the current design for the door has a maximum area of approximately 8x6 meters or 8x7 meters. An 8-meter height is roughly the minimum length required to deploy a heavy geosynchronous satellite (which are >6m long).

8*6/7m is huge and sufficient for at least 95% of all payload to orbit. Satellites can also be designed to fit this constraint if necessary.

Furthermore, as a heavy-lift launch vehicle, Starship’s payload bay volume is actually the smallest in its class.

Starship and the SLS block 1 are the only heavy-lift launch vehicles in existence and Starship>>>SLS block 1.

The SLS Block 2 (130t to LEO) has a payload bay volume of 1,800 m³.

SLS Block 2 doesn't exist and probably never will.

The CZ-9 (150t to LEO) is projected to have a payload bay volume of 2,100-2,400 m³, and could even reach 2,800-3,000 m³ for LEO missions.

CZ-9 doesn't exist now and when it is developed its going to look a lot like Starship.

Let me also tell you this: even the improved Starship, the original v3 version with a height of over 150 meters, would only have a payload bay volume of 1,200-1,400 m³. The latest v4, with a height of only 142 meters, will likely have a volume of just 1,100-1,200 m³. Other variants have even smaller payload bays than the v1/v2 versions.

In other words, literally the largest volume in the world.

In my eyes, Starship is essentially the worst heavy-lift rocket design ever conceived. You don’t understand the requirements of rocket design, which is why you can’t see that Starship is a deformed piece of junk with grotesquely imbalanced metrics. But most of the professionals in China and the U.S. who truly understand aerospace design get it. It’s just that these experts are routinely attacked (by Musk’s fans who use Falcon 9 as a weapon), so they mostly keep quiet now.

Is that why every time CZ-9 gets an update, it looks more and more like the Starship? Is that why the frontrunners of Chinese space launch industry are all aiming for methalox full-flow staged combustion engines and fully reusable first and second stages in their future plan?

If you truly understood spacecraft, you would know that a good design is a synthesis of multiple parameters. Starship only excels in one metric: one-time payload capacity. It also has a good metric for reusability (low cost). All other spacecraft metrics are abysmal to an absurd degree. For example, if there were a metric for payload deployment capability, all currently visible versions of Starship are inferior to Falcon 9. And that is frankly ridiculous.

If you truly understood spacecraft, you would know that multiple parameters are not equally important. Cost per kg to orbit/reusability>everything else. This is why Falcon 9 launches 90% of all payload into orbit and single-handedly saves the US space industry.

This is why I say it’s a specialized-purpose rocket, not a general-purpose one. You clearly don’t understand the problems China encountered with the CZ-2/CZ-3 series, where adapting one type of rocket for one class of payload was incredibly inefficient.

You are the only person to say this because it is ret*rded.

Just look at Starship now: isn’t it a case where one class of payload requires a specific variant of the rocket?

No, its very clear that once Starship becomes operational, it can launch almost any class of payload, and likely more types of payloads than any other singular class of rocket by virtual of its size, lift capacity and availability.

If you still don’t understand this, I don’t care to elaborate further.

You didn't elaborate at all. In fact, you provided literally zero evidence to back up your argument other than inventing fake metrics like "specialized-purpose vs general-purpose rocket." Perhaps that is because by actually relevant metrics like cost per kg to orbit, turn-around time, max payload to LEO, max payload dimension, etc, the Starship is truly revolutionary (once fully developed).

I’ll just say that Western de-industrialization has gone on for so long that you’ve forgotten how to evaluate engineering and assess risk. Meanwhile, those of us in China can only chuckle to ourselves while reading the Chinese translations of various Western textbooks from the industrial peak of the 1960s-90s that fill our libraries.

I'm sure I understand everything much better than you. And who the f*ck are you to "evaluate engineering and assess risk" anyway? Recognized Chinese authorities on aerospace like Cute Orca very much see Starship as a game changer.