what would ultra-low cost space flight look like? say someone was building a station and stopped caring about lives, failsafes, high quality communications, etc. would it be possible to still make a habitable vessel?

>>16695902 (OP)

Inflatables I would guess. Perhaps covered with some kinda foamed material against micrometeorites and debris strikes.

>>16695902 (OP)
Unironically, Starship.

If new engine and airframe design can enable SSTO from conventional airports. But we likely need more advanced materials science. My hunch is that theres a hybrid methalox airbreather engine design that can do it, it just needs to be discovered.

The brute force method would use nuclear SMR powered engines, but good luck getting that certd for use at conventional airports.
>>16696332
Starships "suicide burn" reentry is its biggest problem. Human rating it for reentry will be difficult. Theyre probably going to have to have a human rated reentry vehicle inside Starship.

>>16696434
>>16696434
Theres basically zero safety margin on starships reentry profile. For bulk transport, sure. But humans? One software glitch or mechanical failure, they all die.

>>16695902 (OP)
>would it be possible to still make a habitable vessel?
you're living on one

>>16695902 (OP)
>what would ultra-low cost space flight look like?

The most expensive part is getting it into orbit, so >>16697115
Has the right idea, railgun paper plane type thing you know? Probably could get it to a couple thousand mph at a reasonable distance and speed while still on the ground.

>>16697115
Finally a solution for the Female Menace.
>>16696434
>>16696437
>inside Starship
Starship re-enters with small modules inside that can survive Starship failing? Or Starship loads up with re-entry modules that are delivered to a depot in orbit where those Earth bound enter one for the ride to the ground?

>>16696437
Mate it doesn’t even have an eject rocket

Same unhinged death trap as the space shuttle, you could literally have the command pod detachable with a small rocket to make it completely safe on ascent for 1% less fuel efficiency

NASA decided they had to die just like when they told them to do reentry even though they know the shuttle wouldn’t survive the wing damage
They could just have sent a small pod to rescue them but no

>>16697240
>NASA
It ok anon, you can write Linda Ham.

>>16696437
Still safer than flying.

>>16697115
Also still safer than flying.

>>16696434
>>16696437
>>16697247
The plan for Starship is to test failure modes with several hundred unmanned Starlink launches. They won't launch people until the second or third Mars window after it becomes an operational vehicle, meaning several years worth of launches to learn where it breaks.
It will need an eject button as much as your car does.

>>16695902 (OP)
That sounds essentially like the specs for space station Mir. It was so low tech that there were few things that could fail catastrophically but there were a lot of smaller issues towards the end. Still, it took a lot of effort to deorbit that old workhorse.

Nothing beats a space elevator.

>>16697115
the slingshot maneuver

>>16695927
literally beercans covered in sintered regolith

>>16698534
fucking got me

>>16695902 (OP)
space elevator or belt

>>16695902 (OP)
>what would ultra-low cost space flight look like?
Cubesats.
>say someone was building a station and stopped caring about lives, failsafes, high quality communications, etc. would it be possible to still make a habitable vessel?
Maybe, but why bother? Only reason to send humans to space is dickwaving. They're not doing anything up there that machines can't do with less mass and overhead.

>what would ultra-low cost space flight look like?

>>16695902 (OP)
5000 satellites into space to provide global high speed low latency internet.

Thats just with Falcon 9 being reusable. With Starship, expect it to scale 10X.

>>16698395
Starship probably does beat a space elevator. Spacex already has like 90% of the launch market, with starship they’ll have >99%. Space elevators literally cannot compete with a cheap rapidly reusable rocket (on earth). On other planets/moons space elevators are much more feasible than on earth but even with shallower gravity wells reusable rockets will be very hard to beat.

Cheap space stuff means spaceships are built like (seagoing) cargo ships, not airplanes. They’ll be welded together in space. They’ll be massive. All of the lessons nasa has been wasting their time with on the ISS won’t apply to the new paradigm. Want radiation shielding? Use an inch of lead. Want gravity? Spin it. Want to get somewhere quickly? Use fuckhuge propulsion. Want your systems to work? Build in redundancy, bring a full spare system. Have a dozen technicians on staff to fix it. All the weight weenie shit that nasa and jpl do like building single vehicles out of gossamer for a billion dollars will be obsolete. Cheap massive vehicles will reign. We will never go back to those bad old days.

>>16699738
This is a very unhinged take, sorry. I'm not sure if you're in that sociopath musk's cult, but anyway chemical rockets are a hundred year old solution and are in no way financially reliable, reusable or not.
I said space elevator because the cost of trips to low earth orbit would become practically free.

Also, spacex is completely reliant on usa taxpayer money. I'd say it was a HUGE blunder from NASA's part to outsource its rockets to spacex and give this company unlimited budget to waste. They could have put that money to design new ways to reach sapce.