2035 is pretty long time, giving 10+ years of advantage to USA of having super heavy super cheap carrier rocket available to lift off a lot of satellites at once, very frequently...
China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
Call me cynical but I am quite suspicious of the whole concept behind the Starship. I am not an expert, but as far as I see:
- Very few applications require a lifting capacity of 50+ tons to LEO. Only manned moon and Mars missions need it.
- Tanker rockets and in-space refueling is a weird concept that is only needed when you need to send heavy and indivisible payloads. Otherwise, you would just launch more spacecraft. The only scenario that makes sense here is a manned Mars mission.
- The steel construction, tank pressurization and planned hot gas RCS thrusters of the second stage only make sense for manned Mars missions.
- Do you really need reusability in the second stage unless you are going to return people from Mars? You don't. Reusability is not very beneficial for upper stages which are small but generate most of the delta V. A very complex second stage like the Starship's decreases useful payload a lot.
- You shouldn't sacrifice performance in the second stage by using Methalox instead of Hydrolox. Methalox only makes sense for a manned Mars mission scenario.
- Earth-to-Earth suborbital transportation is a bad idea. I don't think we should even discuss this.
So most of the features of the Starship are for a potential Mars mission. But will it be enough for such a mission or even sending humans to Mars makes sense? I am hopefully wrong but the answer to both might be no.
Elon Musk has made no secret of his ambition to put humans on Mars.
broadsword
Brigadier
He dreamed of dying on Mars.
True but that means the Starship would be an overcomplicated machine for everything else. His Mars ambitions will likely fail unless he spends a good chunk of his wealth on it too. There are no reasons why we would send humans to such an unknown with no way to return them back. The Starship will need a refuel on Mars which means until they could produce the fuel on Mars, the first pioneers are trapped. There are no commercial or scientific reasons either. Such a mission would be more symbolic than the Apollo landings.
Space tourism will make 100% reusability an absolute necessity. Once the , or something analogous to it is built, I think their successors will be akin to what happened in the early days of commercial air travel.
Probably too expensive to ever get to justifiable cost down volume.
Also, that thing looks hellish, you may as well open up a dedicated portion of the space station to the public to achieve the same effect.
Ok guys, can we not use obvious scams like this as a point of reference?
Can't say I'm a huge fan of 2035 first launch.
I still think the 24 x 240t kerolox first stage configuration should be lower risk and faster to first launch. Unless they are pursuing both designs using different engines for the same rocket, in which case that would be reasonable.
There's also the CZ-5DY (or whatever it's called now) to plug the gap until then. Not an ideal solution but China's not wholly up the creek even if the CZ-9's first launch is in 2035 for any configuration.
It would be useful if that rocket (and the standard CZ-5) were retrofitted with YF-130 engines instead of the YF-100 they're using now.
It would be useful if that rocket (and the standard CZ-5) were retrofitted with YF-130 engines instead of the YF-100 they're using now.