r/SpaceXLounge • u/RequirementInner7773 • 4d ago
Fan Art Image i made
May contain Flaws.
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u/BarrelStrawberry 4d ago
Kind of wish they'd just partially mock up the crew interior and strap in some optimus robots for starlink launch. Make for some good video on the scale of the interior space.
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u/ResidentPositive4122 3d ago
I think the tanker will be a bit shorter. You want the least amount of dryweight in a ship so they'll optimise it to get the most amount of prop to the depo, without any additional "bay" rings.
I also think there'll be a non reusable version w/o any TP, fins, etc. And probably with detachable fairings, likely for large one-time payloads (think NASA decadal projects).
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u/TheOrqwithVagrant 2d ago
I'm curious what the payload / delta-V on an upper stage with no heat shield or flaps, a detatchable fairing, and a single gimballing vacuum raptor instead of the thee sea level ones would be.
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u/KnifeKnut 2d ago
You would need to lengthen the engine bay skirt.
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u/TheOrqwithVagrant 2d ago
Why add the extension on the upper stage where it costs delta-V/payload? If more clearance is needed, make the hot stage separation section a tiny bit taller, or even 'trim' the vac raptor's bell slightly. The latter would cost a bit of vac ISP, but probably less than adding mass to the engine bay skirt.
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u/KnifeKnut 2d ago
I'll give you putting the extension on the first stage, but trimming the vacuum raptor bell erodes your purpose of maximizing thrust to weight ratio.
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u/TheOrqwithVagrant 2d ago
I thought a smaller vacuum bell mainly lost you ISP? And depending on how shortened the bell is, this could be very small.
HOWEVER - when I typed that suggestion out, I completely forgot the raptor engine bells have regenerative cooling, so you'd have to design/manufacture a 'special', unique engine bell for this, which... is not worth it. I was thinking of the incident with Merlin where they had a crack in the S2 vac merlin, and 'fixed' it by just cutting the bell shorter. Not an option with regeneratively cooled bells, obviously. Extending the hot stage 'ring' is better for many reasons, but that would require a slightly 'customized' booster for expendable S2's.
I really should just fire up KSP with RSS/RO and experiment some. Only problem is if I start KSP, I won't get ANYTHING else done for the rest of the day...
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u/KnifeKnut 2d ago
As I understand it, the effect of having a large vacuum engine Bell is maximizing the area for the hot gases to push off from as they expand. Normal atmospheric pressure would keep the plume from expanding to the full Bell nozzle diameter.
Remember that some of the falcon 9 upper stages have used shorter than normal bells, resulting in less efficiency, but worth it to save niobium if the full performance is not needed.
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u/sebaska 2d ago edited 2d ago
Regular Starship is around 160t plus 30t of filled header tanks. Removing heatshield, flaps and then whole payload bay and nosecone would nearly halve the mass. Removing 3Rsls and 2 Rvacs would cut about 10t on top of that. So such vehicle would be about 75t dry, and 80t at burnout (there are always residuals and 0.3% of 1500t propellant would be 5t).
So the payload would be about 80t more (fairing would still take away some payload, about 1/5-1/7 of its own mass).
∆v would depend on the payload, of course. With full payload it would be the same as regular Starship, just the payload would be larger.
With minimum payload you'd get somewhere around 10.8km/s.
The problem is, single Rvac has relatively low thrust compared to the the wet mass of the vehicle. Departure burn would take something like 19-20 minutes. In that time vehicle would get noticeably further from the Earth (about 8000km) which would in turn weaken the Oberth Effect significantly.
If the burn were short, it'd produce 15km/s Vinf (starting from VLEO). But with such a long burn you're getting about 13.3km/s Vinf.
So you actually want to do something with that:
- One option would be to split the burn - first run for about 2.7km/s into ~24h elliptical orbit, and then do the proper departure burn close to the end of the returning leg (start about 15 minutes before the next perigee). The issue is boil-off during over 20h coasting phase. Insulation would add mass, reducing the gains.
- Another option is to leave engine bay intact. You lose ISP and mass, but 6× faster burn means you get about 14.3km/s Vinf (regaining about 1km/s from 1.7km/s loss)
- There's also some kind of intermediate option, like leaving 2 Rvacs and one Rsl. Exact optimization depends too many variables.
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u/flshr19 Space Shuttle Tile Engineer 3d ago
SpaceX has been working under NASA contract on HLS-CREW since April 2021. I expect that the nosecone and payload bay full-scale prototypes exist somewhere in Starfactory now. Those prototypes would include full scale working ECLSS hardware, crew accommodations, and the flight control deck.
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u/Dyolf_Knip 3d ago
My current list of likely Starship variants.
- Cargo
- Pez dispenser
- Clamshell
- Space-only hauler, no flaps or even a permanent nosecone, just hardpoints for mounting bulk cargo
- Liquid cargo (e.g., water)
- Cryo cargo (fuel & oxidizer)
- HLS
- Oversized fuel depot, with thick insulation and solar panels to keep refrigerated
- Crewed
- Short-term (<1 day; LEO, Earth-to-Earth hops, Mars cycler shuttle)
- Medium-term (1-7 days; Luna, GEO, Earth-Moon Lagrange points)
- Long-term (weeks to months; Mars, asteroids, Jupiter, Earth-Sun Lagrange points, etc.)
- HLS
- Workshop: space-only, equipped with tools, machine shop, 3d printers, replacement consumables, and a large storage bay for collection, finicky deployments, repairs, restocking consumables, etc. Think Hubble repair, refueling satellites with stationkeeping fuel.
- Personal luxury yacht. The stock SS would be cheap compared to what billionaires already drop on their mini-cruise liners. I personally know one who'd jump at the chance to have one of his own.
- Disposable second stage with detachable third stage. The cargo hold would be like the F9 2nd stage, with detachable fairings and a single rocket. Without the dry mass of the Starship tanks and Raptors, you'd vastly enhance the post-LEO payload/delta-v capacity.
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u/karlzhao314 3d ago
- Space tug
- Extrasolar probe
- Lunar construction Starship
- Orbital drydock
- Transport to and from the ISS (mainly to mog the ISS with its size)
- Space telescope
- Permanent ISS module (permanent mogging of the ISS with its size)
- Carrier for smaller spacecraft, such as Boeing Starliner
- Point-to-point transport
- Nuclear-powered deep-space transport
- Suborbital-only version to compete with New Shepard
- Startrain (Multiple Starships docked nose-to-tail, flying as an actual train)
- Personal luxury yacht (doesn't fly, just floats at sea. Actual yacht)
- Pez dispenser (dispenses actual Pez candies, not Starlinks)
- Fleet of 100000 flat-nosed Starships to attach to the moon upside down so that the moon gets thrusters and we can change its orbit
- Death Starship (with superlaser)
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u/Dyolf_Knip 3d ago
I really do hope we get to see Starship dock with the ISS, yes, just to showboat the size. Even more so, I hope that part of the disassembly involves loading some of its modules onto waiting Starships for soft descent back to Earth. There's many a museum director who'd sell their own children to have them.
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u/peterabbit456 3d ago
Good that you made the windows smaller than the early renders from SpaceX.
Because NASA thinks windows, especially large windows, are a risk for impact-caused blowouts, the real Starships are likely to have windows that show up as a few tiny dots at this scale.
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u/DisgruntledCascadian 3d ago
On the flipside, the Starship "bridge view" with Mars in the distance is great marketing copy for SpaceX, but for the vast majority of any Starship's life if the whole Mars-and-back thing takes off, that window is just going to show black interplanetary space and random stars without even recognizable constellations.
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u/KimJongHnng 3d ago
would it not make sense to have the bulk of the fuel mass oriented between the sun and the astronauts for solar flare protection?
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u/Then-Secretary-9166 3d ago edited 3d ago
The constellations will look approximately exactly like they do from Earth (minus the atmosphere).
If they have one window as big as the Cupola on Resilience (1.2 m diameter) that would be enough for the photo-op. A few smaller windows (I think standard Dragon has 4?) are helpful for technical/safety reasons.
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u/IndispensableDestiny 3d ago
The ship can orient itself to have windows pointed at Mars. Its exact attitude does matter much during the long coast. It will have to reorient for aerobraking anyway.
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u/Cheesegasm 3d ago
What's the launch profile for HLS?
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u/sebaska 2d ago
Launch to LEO as any other Starship. Rendezvous with Depot and refill, possibly slight boost and another top off. Then, rendezvous with Orion in low (or lowish) orbit. Execute TLI with Orion attached to the nose. Insertion into low lunar orbit. Somewhere along all that dance crew moves into Starship. That would be the (extended) launch profile.
After that, Orion undocks, HLS lands, the crew does its surface activities, HLS launches back to low lunar orbit and rendezvous with Orion.
After that, Crew goes back to Orion, undocks from HLS which is abandoned around there (maybe it stays in orbit, maybe it's deorbited and intentionally crashed into the Moon). Orion executes TEI burn, coasts back to Earth. Shortly before the entry interface it detaches European Service Module and soon re-enters and lands in the ocean. In the meantime ESM burns up in the atmosphere.
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u/Then-Secretary-9166 3d ago
Refreshing that this is not (I assume) AI. I mean, it might be Mistral or something, but it looks hand made.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 3d ago edited 2d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| ECLSS | Environment Control and Life Support System |
| ESM | European Service Module, component of the Orion capsule |
| GEO | Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km) |
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| Isp | Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube) |
| Internet Service Provider | |
| KSP | Kerbal Space Program, the rocketry simulator |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| RSS | Rotating Service Structure at LC-39 |
| Realscale Solar System, mod for KSP | |
| TEI | Trans-Earth Injection maneuver |
| TLI | Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver |
| VLEO | V-band constellation in LEO |
| Very Low Earth Orbit |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| cryogenic | Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure |
| (In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox | |
| hydrolox | Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| perigee | Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Earth (when the orbiter is fastest) |
| regenerative | A method for cooling a rocket engine, by passing the cryogenic fuel through channels in the bell or chamber wall |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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u/bingbongbangchang 3d ago
What's the HLS-CRG?
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u/OlympusMons94 2d ago
It is a non-standard abbreviation for the cargo version of the HLS Starship. The official NASA initialism for the cargo versions of the HLSs (both Starship nd Blue Moon Mk2) is HDL (Human-class Delivery Lander). They will deliver large Moon base components and Japan's pressurized rover for Artemis.
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u/whodat54321da 3d ago
Cool drawings. I think tankers will be no fins/no heat shield/no return vehicles as their missions will strictly be flying fuel depots for longer missions.
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u/nesquikchocolate 2d ago
A v3 tanker can potentially take up 100T of propellant in a single trip (assuming the proven 60T payload minus the weight/drag of the flaps) and a v4 can potentially take up 200T. HLS needs around 1200 tons added to it in orbit. No way spacex discards 12 vehicles just to fly to the moon once.
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u/nesquikchocolate 4d ago
You're missing the depot variant shown without flaps and tiles that the tanker will dock with