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6/19/2025, 8:40:28 AM
>>507951960
The reason Spacex is doing it with starship is because they're going for rapid reusability and they're planning on using the ships to land on undeveloped surfaces. For many celestial bodies, Mars included you've got limited periods of time called transfer windows where travel from one to the other is significantly shorter than any other time, and if you're trying to move a lot of hardware from here to Mars for example how are you going to get all that shit up into orbit, then into a transfer to Mars? With traditional let it fall into the ocean and make another one, the project could take decades as the logistics of storage, movement of booster stages to their launchsites and refurbishment of the tower would mean either you need thousands of towers and rockets all launching in that window, or you'd have to spread it over years or decades. The idea with Starship is the booster stages early, lower in the atmosphere so it can direct itself back to the tower, and be almost immediately refueled while another payload stage is stacked ontop of it, and it takes off again possibly as soon as an hour after landing. This means if you were running launches around the clock, and had the methane and oxygen transport/storage capabilities, you could push 20 payload stages to orbit per day per tower. Multiply that by a dozen or more towers and you could be pushing a colossal amount of tonnage to another planet within the optimal transfer window, which may only be a week or two long.
As for the issue of vertical landing, that's just the easiest way to manage landing, especially on planets with significantly thinner atmospheres. Mars's atmosphere is thin so parachutes won't work for that massive of a ship/payload and vertical loading is already the default load for the ship so landing legs attached to the bottom won't require additional reinforcement which means less weight and more payload capacity.
The reason Spacex is doing it with starship is because they're going for rapid reusability and they're planning on using the ships to land on undeveloped surfaces. For many celestial bodies, Mars included you've got limited periods of time called transfer windows where travel from one to the other is significantly shorter than any other time, and if you're trying to move a lot of hardware from here to Mars for example how are you going to get all that shit up into orbit, then into a transfer to Mars? With traditional let it fall into the ocean and make another one, the project could take decades as the logistics of storage, movement of booster stages to their launchsites and refurbishment of the tower would mean either you need thousands of towers and rockets all launching in that window, or you'd have to spread it over years or decades. The idea with Starship is the booster stages early, lower in the atmosphere so it can direct itself back to the tower, and be almost immediately refueled while another payload stage is stacked ontop of it, and it takes off again possibly as soon as an hour after landing. This means if you were running launches around the clock, and had the methane and oxygen transport/storage capabilities, you could push 20 payload stages to orbit per day per tower. Multiply that by a dozen or more towers and you could be pushing a colossal amount of tonnage to another planet within the optimal transfer window, which may only be a week or two long.
As for the issue of vertical landing, that's just the easiest way to manage landing, especially on planets with significantly thinner atmospheres. Mars's atmosphere is thin so parachutes won't work for that massive of a ship/payload and vertical loading is already the default load for the ship so landing legs attached to the bottom won't require additional reinforcement which means less weight and more payload capacity.
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