Posted on 03/30/2024 6:45:00 PM PDT by Libloather
The moon has no liquid or solid hydrocarbons even if it did there is no atmospheric oxygen to burn them with. You have to use solar panels on the moon or nuclear power be it fission or fusion that’s it no other choices.
SpaceX already has a NASA contract to land starship on the moon that beast of a ship can carry 50 tonnes or more to the lunar surface once fueled in low earth orbit by tanker starship versions. The lunar poles specifically the southern one has water ice with solar power or nukes you can split th at into LOX and LH2 aka rocket fuel. The Russians have rocket engines that burn liquid methane and liquid hydrogen in the same engine at different times and mix ratios so it has been proven to work. Running vacuum Raptors on LH2 is certainly in SpaceX technical wheel house.
“What do they mean “infinite energy.”
Helium 3 is the perfect fusion fuel. He3 plus deuterium when you fuse it you get He4 as the only product no radioactive neutrons are produced. That alpha particle is carrying millions of election volts of energy you can use electrostatic force collectors to directly turn that into millions of volts DC current perfect for HVDC long distance transport then locally use HVDC TO HVAC inverters already in commercial use to make 60hz AC distribution voltages.
“1 tonne of He-3 can produce 10,000 MWe-y of electrical energy. 1 tonne of He-3 can produce 10,000 MWe-y of electrical energy.”
https://fti.neep.wisc.edu/fti.neep.wisc.edu/presentations/glk_isdc.pdf
The earth’s oceans contain unlimited amounts of deuterium billions of years worth.
MWe-y is a unit if nuclear power measurement it means one megawatt of power for 24 hours a day over 365 days.
One metric tonne of He3 yields 10000 megawatts of power 24/7/365 or put another way the output of ten one gigawatt sized nuclear reactors running flat out 24/7 for a while year. Starship could with lunar refuel bring back 100 tonnes per each return flight let that number sink in. 100*10000= one million MWe-y per return flight.
There is 61320 hours in a year so one MWe-y is 61320 megawatts hours and one tonne of He3 yields 10000 or those so 613,200,000 megawatt hours. Large power is measured in terawatt hours trillions of watt hours. One tonne equals 613.2 TWh. And one starship brings home 100 of those or 61320 TWh
In “1900, world electricity generation totaled about 66.4 terawatt-hours (TWh). This grew to 29,165 TWh in 2022, a rate of growth that far exceeded overall energy use. As a result, electricity grew from 0.1% to 22% of global primary energy use over this period.1”
Compare those two numbers one starship brings home THREE times the global 2022 energy consumption this is why it’s infinite energy. The moon has been for 4 billion years showered with solar wind loaded with He3 the top meters of regolith are saturated with it billion if not trillions of tonnes worth you can see how the math works out humans could never ever use all of it up even with 10 billion souls on earth or more.
“China has yet to design and build a rocket that does what Starship does...
What Starship is hoped to do. They’re not there...yet.”
Got to love test to failure design cycle. SpaceX has done in a year what would have taken decade or more with NASA and never in the case of landing and reusing boosters.
Third flight and they got starship to orbit and most of the way to through reentry they lost RCS control before the flaps had aerodynamic control and starship rolled and flipped to its aerodynamic neutral position of base first the engines are the heaviest part of the empty vehicle. Without the heat shield on that end it broke up in the mach 15 plasma heating. They have four more gen 1 stat
Ships before gen 2 those four are already built or nearly finished. Starship four has already done its full duration test burn of all 6 raptors and a single engine restart for deorbital burn. It’s ready to fly.
It’s likley the dreaded stuck open valve fault that haunts spaceflight killed the RCS system before starships aerodynamic flaps could control it. They have to design it to be base first neutral that’s how it lands in the dense part of the atmosphere using its engines to hover then land softly not a suicide burn like falcon 9. Its also possible that the cold jet RCS system was just not strong enough for the beast of starship it is easily the largest object humans have every put in space. They probably will have to have hot gas spark ignition meth/lox feed from the header tanks those thrusters have already been designed and tested but add mass and are more expensive then simple cold gas pifft pifft jets.
I expect Starship flight 4 to make it down to spashdown all the way through reentry the videos live from starlink were a world first well into the plasma phase of reentry up and back through the plasma wake no one has ever done that and not with HD video to boot.
Your last two posts! A lot of information to absorb.
Will NASA ever land and reuse as does Space X? Probably not, they have the federal budget to waste.
Those two Falcon 1st stages soft-landing was a sight to behold.
Was there not what seemed like an impossibly long checklist of launch items for fed gov to sign off on before they would sanction another Starship launch?
Thanks.
The middle of this decade is one year away.🤨
See my tag line.😏🤪
“Apollo went and landed on the first trip.”
Uh no it didn’t, Apollo 11 was the first to land on the moon.🤨
Yah beat me to it.🤪
After the first Starship launch and its destruction of the launch pad flinging chunks of concrete miles away the febs out the slow walk on it that and both vehicles blew up not self destructed. The second launch also had RUDs and again fedzilla said wait we wanna know why.
The third launch only the booster after its successful boost back burn didn’t light off enough engines to softly splashdown but it was at all times on a safe flight path so no hold there. Starship itself made the climb to orbit and main engine cut off their primary goal.
Somewhere just after MEO you could see in the HD video stream venting and the start of rolling of the ship. This means they lost their reaction control system RCS. The large amounts of gas seen venting is most likely the dreaded stuck open valve fault that plagued American space rockets all through the development phases of virtually every rocket system. Still Starship managed to get deep into the plasma sheath phase of reentry with it’s flaps valiantly trying to save the ship you could see full over flap movements as they desperately tried to get a grip on the thin air to save the ship. The fact that they had not only video of a tumbling ship in mach 20 plasma but HD video is nothing short of a breakthrough they used multiple starlink sats and antennas to shoot a microwave beam back out the tail of the plasma wake. That alone is a major accomplishment.
None of those issues would cause another ground hold since the booster did its job in disposable mode it’s already a go for those kinds of launches. They want to catch the booster in a hover with giant “chopsticks” as Elon calls them. Evil genius that he is, as only a evil genius would try to fly back a 40 story building sized rocket hover it and then grab it Mr. Miyagi style with chopsticks.
The RCS problem is fixable with fail safe valves as in fail closed by default on your vent and purge lines you can always vent in an emergency via the thrusters themselves using two at a time to cancel out any pitch roll or yaw. If they need more RCS control than cold gas thrusters can provide they already tested bifuel gas/gas methane/oxygen spark ignition thrusters with ten to 100 times the thrust of ppfft off gas bleed RCS. Hot gas RCS has never been done with methane O2 but it has been done with H2/O2 or they could go old school and use N2O4+MMH nasty stuff but every time you pulse those two liquids together they ignite on contact every single time no matter how short burst ignition delay is microseconds.
SpaceX knows why they lost RCS they have starship 4 tested and ready to fly in short order it already did its main engine full length test burn and its single engine deorbit burn test. I expect that S4 will make it to soft splashdown they probably will hover it proving it’s not a suicide burn on landing.
Sounds very encouraging, doesn’t it. Bravo
NASA could brobably salvage their boosters but they don’t dare to try, seeing it not as a goal but as another way to fail.
Private industry strives to be great by finding a way to do what can’t be done.
NASA also has the fed govs printer press go burrrrrr money stream they don’t have to worry about profit or even breaking even. They can throw a 2 billion dollar rocket away everytime they launch ares why because it’s a job welfare program for dozens of states it was never meant to be anything other than pork spending.
Starship will out lift ares and do it for millions not billions per launch. You don’t even need to get Starship all the way to the moon just to low earth orbit with a meth/lox third stage you can send 50+ tonnes to lunar transfer orbit. No need for tanker Starship or any other exotic tech.
Put a 100 tonne third stage powered by two or three RL10 sized methlox engines those weight a couple hundred kg each. Use balloon common bulkhead tanks like centaur those have a 100:1 mass to prop ratio or better. Get Starship to put it into a 180mi orbit from there it’s 3800ms delta V to TLI the rocket equation shows that with a 100:1 tank ratio, 600kg of engines and 400kg of support structure and electronics you have 4000 ms of delta V with 50 tonnes up top. With a methlox lander stage proven to hold prop at cryo temps for the days coast already with the recent private moon landing. It takes 1.72kms delta V to land on or take off from the moon back to low lunar orbit. A 25tonne lander stage could land 25tonnes and take 25 tonnes back up. This is technology we have today as soon Starship RCS issue is fixed disposable mode is then ready to go with big D energy sized payloads. All the reuse stuff is icing on the cake you already have a huge disposable rocket at a fraction of the cost of any NASA pork boondoggle that’s this year months really.
I don’t think people can grasp how much SpaceX is a paradigm shift from NASA and their boondoggle. The current gen of raptor 2 engines already have more thrust than the RS25 that NASA is using for SLS that two billion per launch nightmare. They have four RS25 engines on that turd.
“A total of 46 reusable RS-25 engines, each costing around US$40 million, were flown during the Space Shuttle program, “
These ^^^^^ are used engines....
“NASA announced May 1 it had awarded a contract to Aerojet valued at $1.79 billion to produce 18 RS-25 engines. “
This is $100 million EACH new it should be criminal.
Four Raptor 2 engines have more thrust than 4 RS25 were it not for the H2 vs CH4 you could just buy Raptors
“SpaceX’s Raptors cost about $250k each according to some leaked sources”
Even at $1 million each you can get 100 for the cost of a single RS25.
Even in disposable mode with 31 engines on BFB aka superheavy I’m like Big F*** Booster and BFR that Elon originally wanted to call them. Even at a million dollars each 31 is one third the cost of just one SLS engine add six to nine more for Starship is still only 40 million in engine costs tanks are cheap compared to engines even cheaper if you plan to throw them away. BRB is rumored to cost under ten million without the engines and a throwaway Starship would be under ten million it’s only stainless steel tanks for most of its mass. Forget the chopper payload door, forget the heat shields and the flap mechanisms. Tanks, engine supports, payload support, a huge split faring and explosive bolts bang and it’s off chunk it. Now you have all this extra mass that you are not taking yo orbital delta V 150 tonnes becomes 50% more. All for a fraction of the cost of even a single RS25 that is nothing but a Congress welfare project for their pet districts.
It dawned on me that the SLS external tank is built for each mission so changing the common dome position from where the LOX up front to accommodate the bulk density and mix ratios difference would allow for a massive increase in payload vs H2LOX why...
“Their bulk density (800 kg/m3) is much higher than LOX/LH2 (360kg/m3). The boiling temperatures, 90K for LOX, 110K for CH4, compared to only 20K for hydrogen, simplifies the tanks thermal protection. Another main merit for Methane, it does not require Helium, an expensive and scarce fossil gas to drain and pressurize.”
800kg per cubic meter vs 360 using the same sized tanks you have 2.2 times the mass of fuel and similar sea level ISP only in hard vacuum do RS25 And their 450+ isp pull ahead. This is only in the last few min of flight those engines have been boosting since the launch pad all the way through the atmosphere.
So you need at least 8 raptor 2 not 4 to lift twice as much mass of fuel the two SRB also won’t cut it anymore you would need 4 since each SRB makes 39 MN and each raptor 3 has made 2.64MN 14 would replace one SRB. So keep the two SRB and put 38 raptor on the base of the SLS tank its now a monster of a booster with 200+ tonnes to LEO. 38 raptor 3 which are expected to be $200k each in mass production is 7.6 million is throw away engines that alone would justify the autocad work to move the common tank times since you build a tank each time no sunk capital in tanks. Cheap and powerful it would be twice the lift of Saturn V. The other choice is ask very nicely if SpaceX can modify Raptor 3 to burn a 6 to 1 H2 to LOX ratio keep all the pressures the same or would blow the RS25 out of the water in a smaller package for a fraction of the cost.
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