New answers tagged reuse
13
The first Falcon 9 re-flights they were made to look white and clean. Using Wikipedia's Falcon launch history and Google Images SES-10, BulgariaSat-1, and SES-11/EchoStar 105 all look spotless. CRS-13 ("internal" customer) is dirty, but not as dirty as nowadays. The Falcon Heavy side boosters (for the first test launch) were re-flown but probably ...
31
It's easy to see by just looking at photos and videos of launches of re-used boosters that they don't. There are only a very few very small white lines, probably where engineers inspected some weld lines or other specific points on the vehicle.
Here is an example of B1061.2 launching the Crew-2 mission. Note that this is only the second launch of this ...
8
Building a sustainable settlement on Mars will need hundreds of flights. Building tens of Starships and reusing them vs. building hundreds of Starships and throwing them away, is going to be much cheaper.
Given the fact that the Starship lunar edition lacks ailerons and therefore cannot reenter Earth's atmosphere (and survive, that is), a one-way-only ...
4
Reusability is important because of the vast number of tanker Starships that will need to be flown into orbit. It is essential that these tankers can be used over and over again to ensure sufficient propellent is put into orbit to supply the cargo ships and the crewed ships that will be traveling to the Moon and to Mars. And to ensure this happens cheaply.
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1
The key thing is, Starship is really not comparable with STS in terms of reusability. Or with anything existing so far, actually.
The shuttle wasn't really reusable, it was refurbishable, but that was a huge cost and turnaround was several months at best. More importantly, the main tank was not reusable, and refurbishing SRBs was actually more costly than ...
4
Another factor:
By making the price per pound to orbit a lot cheaper you can make satellites cheaper, also. In the space business you bend over backwards to shave off every bit of weight you can because it's so expensive to lift it. All that weight-shaving costs money, lots of it. Lets call the per-launch price $5 million--that cuts the price per pound ...
4
Starship will not be launching many satellites at \$2 million a launch. I don't think there will ever be enough of a market to justify that. Let's just assume that Starship reliability can get to the point where the cost to launch will be \$2 million/ launch, something on the order of 1000 launches per Starship. The launch market would have to be 1000 ...
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The reason why SpaceX exists is to Make humanity a multiplanetary species.
https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/index.html
And unlike the mission statements of other companies which are often just sound bites, this really is what SpaceX is all about and why they do things the way they do. For most companies the primary goal is to make money. But for ...
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The purpose of Starship is not merely to put satellites into orbit for cheap. If that were its purpose then you'd be correct; it's way overbuilt for that.
Starship wasn't created to put satellites into orbit though, it was created to construct a self-sustaining city on Mars. Achieving that goal will likely require lifting hundreds of megatons of mass to ...
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The size is mostly based around missions to Mars as opposed to satellite launch. Where satellite launch is almost a side mission.
Refueling missions for Mars missions will require 7 launches (1 payload, 6 fueling missions) for each vehicle going to Mars.
Lunar missions will need 2 or more (not clear this number is settled) refueling launches.
As noted in the ...
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