If SpaceX pulls this off, it’s going to be pretty embarrassing for NASA (and Congress).
67 thoughts on “Moon By 2022”
I mean yeah, I can understand skepticism of SpaceX timelines, but even if you tack on another couple years to that, this seems like a better horse to hitch the cart to — at least for someone who actually wants to get to the moon.
NASA: “You need to make your Dragon capsule meet our safety requirements that none of other vehicles actually ever met.”
SpaceX: “But I wanted to go to the moon with my new Starship by 2022.”
NASA: “You can waste time with your friends when your chores are done.”
What everyone is conveniently forgetting in the recent fuss about Commercial Crew delays is the NASA OIG several years ago saying that, in addition to early funding shortfalls, there was a major ongoing problem with delays in NASA evaluation of contractor safety and hazard reviews and reports. GAO said something very similar around that time. In essence, Commercial crew involved a massive rewrite and reorganization of NASA certification requirements for crew safety, and as the contractors came up with new questions, NASA was providing answers months to years later than required.
SpaceX refocusing its primary human spaceflight effort on Starship in response makes perfect sense. As for Bridenstine’s recent kvetch about that, it’s not clear to me that wasn’t more a matter of wanting more SpaceX public CC program acknowledgement than of any real neglect of Dragon 2 by SpaceX.
Though the SpaceX Dragon 2 engineers who spend months waiting for NASA to make up its mind while their friends on Starship sprint ahead do have my sympathy.
Shotwell has also mentioned a possible *crewed* landing on the moon in 2022. I’m very dubious, but I think 2023 might be possible.
Even just uncrewed landing cargo (100 tons of it!) and bringing back tons of lunar regolith, would be earth-shaking.
I wonder… might SpaceX be landing both cargo and crew to do some site setup for Artimis landing astronauts on the moon for the first time in 50 years (set up habs, etc)? Could those historic first steps by the astronauts be recorded by a SpaceX camera crew already on-site?
With as much payload capacity as that thing has, life support would be trivial.
A brute-force life support option would be doable. Commercial oxygen candles and CO2 Scrubbers.
What we need now are lunar-capable EVA suits ASAP.
Just landing on the moon with people, even without EVA, would still be a huge blow to Shelby.
I wonder how long it will be until the EVA suit SpaceX is developing will be ready? They seem to have done a pretty good job in their IVA suit, so hopefully the development of the EVA suit won’t be too fraught with problems.
The moon, though, is a challenge for an EVA suit, due to the incredibly abrasive dust. My hunch; they’ll go with some sort of space EVA suit, and add disposable covers for lunar use.
However, just having a crew in a Starship, landing it on the moon, and doing an EVA lunar surface stroll does NOT equal putting an astronaut on the moon. At least, that’s the exuse I expect to be used. The SpaceX lunar EVA crews will merely be “support infrastructure”, there to prepare for the arrival of astronauts.
If I recall, an official astronaut (not counting the silver-pin NASA qualified but unflown) has to be either NASA, military, or an civilian employee of NASA, and have completed a space mission. SpaceX crew on the moon won’t qualify, officially, so NASA might still claim to have landed “the first astronauts since Apollo” on the moon, even if SpaceX has a crew on the moon well before that. Sure, it’d be a little silly, but nowhere near as silly as SLS.
As I’ve written here before, politicians like Shelby use different metrics than we do to determine whether a government program is successful. We mere taxpayers look at metrics such as cost to benefit ratio, meeting schedules and budgets, and accomplishing the stated objectives. Politicians look at spending in their district, votes bought, campaign contributions raised, and family members and cronies enriched. For cost plus projects like the SLS, delays are a feature, not a bug. It’s being funded over $2 billion a year, so every year of delay just pads the political metrics even more. By political metrics, the SLS is a successful program even if it never flies and ultimately gets canceled.
The SpaceX lunar EVA crews will merely be “support infrastructure”, there to prepare for the arrival of astronauts.
How about a Starbucks to welcome Artemis 3? That’s only “support infrastructure.”
@ Larry J
I find your summary of the SLS real situation depressing and cynical. I also think you are 100% right, and saying something that needs repeating, loudly and often.
@ Richard M;
SpaceX crew setting up a Starbucks to welcome the first astronauts to set foot on the moon in over 50 years… I like it! Perhaps they could put it in the lobby of the SpaceX hotel they’ll probably have running (and hosting tourists) by the time NASA does get to the moon? (I’m currently guessing SLS might achieve a launch date sometime in the 2040s)
I think just launching and orbiting the Earth would be a huge blow to Shelby. Landing on the moon would be a blow to various federal institutions.
ACJ: it probably won’t be a SpaceX hotel. Motel 6 on the other hand…
Keep in mind that Starship payloads are likely as aspirational as Starship schedules. Early production examples are likely to mass more than ultimately planned, thus to have less payload.
S’allright. 25 tons to Lunar surface via resuable rocket would still be revolutionary. I’d settle for ten… People forget that an entire major WW2 battle campaign in a part of New Guinea with no sea access was fought with 2.5 ton DC-3 payloads. The SWPac troops on the spot did things like slicing bulldozers into sections with acetylene torches, then welding them back together onsite. Where there’s a will… SpaceX demonstrably does not lack will.
Maybe the can carry up, as ballast, a boilerplate CEV used for parachute drop tests and just deposit it on the moon.
I put my Money on 2025. I thought they claimed they will be doing high altitude Starship hops by now from what was obviously a Dog and Pony show in September. But now scheduled first hop in December and I bet will be in January.
Heck I bet late 2021/ early 2022 for Starship in orbit unless I missed something and it can do SSTO.
Have they even started construction of super heavy? Have they even constructed enough Raptors for a super heavy?
Starship can technically do SSTO, with pretty much zero payload. They’ve talked about maybe doing that just to test the heat shield.
Super-Heavy has not begun construction yet, and no, they don’t have three dozen Raptors ready to go. I suspect that construction on it won’t start until Starship is well along, since a) Starship is the tent pole in the schedule, and b) whatever they learn regarding the steel structure can be applied directly to SH for big-time weight savings.
@A.Nonymous;
Musk shot down the SSTO myth a while ago, by pointing out that while a massively stripped-down Starship (no fins, no heat shield, etc) could, barely, do SSTO, there would be no point.
Even if they get dry mass down to 89 tons, they can’t do SSTO.
Starship has been designed to have a delta/v of 6.9kps, per Musk, and to get to orbit you need (it varies a bit depending on the launch profile) 9.4kps. So, it’s well short, unless stripped way down.
I think you’re right on SH. One reason additional I believe (and cannot prove, so it’s just speculation) is that if Starship turns out to be heavier than expected, it’d be a heck of a lot faster, cheaper, and easier to make SH a bit bigger than try to shave off every possible ounce from Starship. Their construction methods make this a very viable option.
Good point. The simplest way to do that would be to stretch the tankage of Super Heavy by 1/6 or 1/3 and widen the 6 leg fairings to cover either two or three Raptors instead of the one that is currently planned. That would boost SH engine count to 43 or 49, respectively. The current design is good for 16.28 Mlbf. 43 engines = 18.92 Mlbf. 49 engines = 21.56 Mlbf.
Well essentially reinforce my point that the time line is Bunk. We won’t be seeing Starship in orbit in the next 12 months.
Good Point CJ on the SH could pick up any technical risks or bumps they find with Starship and be holding off SH Mk1 till their further down the road. Though seen some stuff about a Super Heavy “light config” with 20 engines for facilitating the testing.
I check my old Starship to the moon numbers (which were based on early design figures) and they might need a new, smaller methalox engine for landing. With enough fuel on board for ascent, TEI, and landing, it will probably hover in lunar gravity on about 75,000 to 100,000 lbsf of thrust, which means they’d need use a single Raptor throttled down to about 15% to 20%. That might be a little tricky.
With full-flow dual-preburner staged combustion, both propellants are injected as gases. Injector delta-P scales directly with Mdot in that case and the throttling turndown should be nearly unlimited.
Musk has already said (on Twitter) the 3 upper stage sea-level engines will normally operate at 15-20% throttle, with most of the impulse go through the 3 non-throttleable, non-gimballed vacuum engines. The SLEs are mainly to be there for steering and roll control, and will only power up all the way for Earth landings. Maybe Mars ascent too?
15% was what I came up with for a single-engine lunar landing with the lightweight (initial target weight) design of 85 tonnes, with fuel for return and landing. I don’t see a need to drop much below that. Hopefully the Raptor purrs like a kitten even at very low idle “food warmer” settings, because relighting a non-hypergolic engine above the lunar surface, when seconds count, is something they’d want to avoid, kind of like driving a clunker with a bad idle mixture.
What kind of landing is assumed for that 15%? Suicide burn / hoverslam?
George, what kind of numbers are you using for Starship’s landing mass?
I’m guessing Starship empty dry mass will be at least 100 tons. It will need about 250 tons of fuel to get from the lunar surface back to earth, then land. It will be carrying cargo or a crew section, or a mix, which will likely mass about 100 tons – though probably half that for early missions.
So, we get an approximate (very approximate) lunar touchdown mass of at least 400 tons. That’s mass, not weight, due to lunar G. The weight would be 66.67 tons, but, it’s still got the inertia of 400 tons. When it’s slowing down for landing, the inertia of that mass is the biggest factor.
Wouldn’t a raptor throttling down to 30% be plenty for this?
My big worry; how well with the lunar regolith stand up to a Raptor’s blast? I recall that Starhopper’s landing blew big chunks out of concrete. It would not be good if the resulting crater on the moon undermines Starship’s legs.
I think that early run had a mass of 205 tonnes (landing without a significant payload) with a reserve mass ratio of 2.05 for a 2,700 m/sec delta V to return on. So that’s about 450,000 lbm, and a vacuum Raptor should be capable of about 500,000 lbsf. That’s enough to hover on in Earth’s gravity.
It wouldn’t matter for a hover slam, but if a final translation is needed (go Neil!), it’s going to need to throttle way down. Of course if it lands with a heavy payload the deep throttling requirement goes away.
I see your point on needing a lateral translation, George.
If Raptor can’t throttle deep enough, a significant payload might not be merely useful, but required, for landing on the Moon.
Successfully landing the huge, uncrewed Starship even with significantly less than 100 tonnes of payload would still be very difficult for NASA and the decision-makers to argue against. There would be so many space advocates and citizens and experts and journalists and non-NASA-center congressmen openly wondering why we should continue with SLS. I believe that the tipping point is not far off. Someone needs to photoshop the Blue Moon lander next to the Starship on the Moon to show how irrelevant NASA’s plans are if (when) Starship succeeds.
My estimate is that the Starship would be about 6.3 X the height of the Blue Moon.
If SpaceX lands Starship on the lu at surface, how long would it take for NASA to catch up. They couldn’t. The only way to partially save face and remain relevant is, as the old adage says, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. It would be a public-private partnership.
The only way to partially save face and remain relevant is, as the old adage says, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. It would be a public-private partnership.
I think it would happen very fast and everyone would pretend like everything before never happened. Twenty years after, people who point it out would be viewed as cranks.
That’s how I see things working out. NASA will arrange for some sort of presence on Crew Starship’s first lunar surface excursion so it can claim Mission Accomplished for Artemis.
Starship making orbit and returning will be the first body blow to SLS but probably won’t be enough to kill it outright. Once on-orbit refueling is worked out and a freight-only payload is landed on the Moon, though, I think it’s Game Over for SLS if both these events precede the notional Artemis-1 mission – which, in such a case, may never actually occur. If not, SLS may hang on – by its fingernails, with its supporters pointing out that it’s designed to carry crew, not just freight – until Crew Starship follows one or more Freight Starships to the lunar surface with people aboard in advance of the notional Artemis-3 mission. One hopes NASA decides, Shelby or no Shelby, to throw in with SpaceX by that time in order not to appear completely ridiculous along with its big, useless rocket and all of its equally useless ancillaries, notably Orion and Gateway.
Maybe the old joke “NASA will return to the moon, and when they do they’ll stay at the Moon Hilton” isn’t too far off after all…
It’ll be one of Bigelow’s “Budget Suites” inflatables…
All of this is very beguiling. If it looks like SpaceX is going to land a Starship on the moon, NASA will buy seats for some of its astronauts. Elon will be glad of the money.
In a rational world, you’d be right – NASA would just buy seats and services (cargo capacity, etc) if Starship was ready in time. However, in our world, I do not think so – that would be the death knell of SLS/Orion, spelling the end to a lot of congressional pork, plus making a lot of congressional porkers look very bad.
With or without NASA participating a Starship lunar landing would do that.
Only after Starship is finally man-rated to NASA standards in 2050.
It’s a darned good thing that NSF is not responsible for designing and operating the ships necessary to get people and supplies to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Instead they can just call up Maersk and arrive for transfers. Though I’m sure if Congresscritters thought it was to their benefit to change the system, they would.
They’re still dependent on a 40+ ice breaker that seems to suffer major problems every austral summer.
Not dependent. NSF has previously leased icebreaker services from Russian and Sweden when the Coast Guard was unable to support. Chuck Hill’s blog is a great place to keep up with the CGs icebreaker saga.
Given the current SpaceX experience with NASA oversight on Commercial Crew, I might expect SpaceX would be very very reluctant to bring NASA on board Starship.
In any role other than as paying passengers on a 100% commercial basis, that is. Something which NASA demonstrably still isn’t near ready for. For better or worse, if their astronauts will ride on it, they insist on massively detailed insight & control of the system.
Unless of course the system is provided by a sovereign entity with the clout to deny NASA detail control. EG, Russia and Soyuz.
Heh. Perhaps Elon will wait to sell NASA Starship rides until after the Lunar Free State has officially applied for UN membership…
Yes, SpaceX’s attitude if NASA wants a ride should be, “Fine, but you’ll have to take your chances on informed consent, just like our commercial customers. No more jumping through your certification hoops. This is too important to our business plans.”
Yes. Elon will happily allow NASA to sit in the back seat and wave to the crowds, but he’s not about to let them drive.
Maybe Musk will have his Starships registered in Panama like everyone else’s ships…
I think you are right because NASA will want a share of the glory, even if they are only passengers, and Musk will want the gravitas of having NASA astronauts as passengers.
How could you embarrass NASA? They need Russian help to get astronauts off the ground. If that doesn’t cause it, nothing will.
I’m not sure you can. I thought the 50 year celebration of Apollo was embarrassing considering that NASA needed Russian help to fly Astronauts now. It sure wasn’t a sign that we won the space race.
Embarrassment requires some vestige of a sense of shame. Something the SLS/Orion wing of NASA left behind long ago, yes.
Echoing the comments above. Just landing an uncrewed Starship on the Moon would be a horrible PR blow to NASA. Landing and returning actual humans would be a profound embarrassment to pretty much every national government seeking to move into Space.
Go, Elon!
Elon Time is slowly contracting, too. People applying Original Elon Time are behind the times. So to speak.
It does have to all go more or less right for this to happen. If Mk1 flight to 20km (and back) works out, then Mk2 goes to orbit (and back? no one has said). Then an unmanned lunar free return with Mk3? (No refueling necessary). After that, they can think of Dear.Moon (also no refueling necessary). I’d bet on more testing, though. So after Mk3, they have to start making the tankers work. Once they do, then the way to the Moon landing is open.
I’m always skeptical of SpaceX timelines, “Elon time”, etc. Even with just Starship, there have been slips – Starhopper took longer than they thought, and now Mk 1, which they hoped to fly this month, looks like December.
I’m going to discount crew dragon, because of NASA red tape, but Falcon Heavy was years late, and so too was propulsive landing for F9, reuse, deep cryo, etc etc.
Contra all these delays (the infamous Elon Time), you have the shining example of other organizations, such as Boeing, which has completed and ais flying their Starliner capsule.. oh, wait. Okay, they’ve got SLS flying… oh, um, okay… then NASA itself, which is never overdue on a program, like the James Webb telescope… er….
Jokes aside, “Elon Time” is a real thing – Musk is notoriously prone to being over optimistic on timelines. And, yes, that’s bad. But, compared to the rest of the industry, he’s the least bad of the lot when it comes to timelines.
Delays are common in the industry. It is funny to see Musk get knocked for it when the pros still can’t put people in space.
The key difference is that Musk has learned a lot from Elon time. Why did the project take longer than anticipated? Which materials require too much precision tooling? What non-critical systems are so complicated that they suck up endless engineering hours? How can we simplify and streamline the process? Can we build that in a completely different way so it doesn’t take as long?
The industries normal route is just to stretch the schedule out and let the complex development cycle run its course, perhaps because they get paid more money for longer by doing that, as they do with so many US defense projects. Most probably don’t even know how to develop and innovate faster, except perhaps by adding more shifts. Part of that might be that they’ve never had the freedom to just drop subsystems or radically altering requirements so they could hurry up and build something that was “good enough.”
Then there’s that other thing. If SpaceX can shave Starship dry mass down enough, Chomper could boost maybe 44t through TLI. So one might drop off an Artemis/Blue Moon stack and then make a free return. Pretty much a reusable Saturn V, if nothing else.
Exciting times! Almost 48 years with no human flying beyond LEO. It’s starting to look like things will finally change. I’m as excited about this as everyone in the thread.
However, SLS won’t be killed by comparison to SS. Was the Shuttle killed by comparison to Atlas or Delta? Was Atlas or Delta killed by comparison to Ariane, or Falcon ? Answer: No.
As alluded to by others in this thread, political programs have different rules. SLS may end at some point, but it will have to do with changes in the executive branch and a senator from Alabama — not the state of private space flight. You can quote me on that.
Also, consider this: Even if Artemis flies astronauts the surface of the Moon, would this fulfill our space flight ambitions? I don’t think so … it’s flags and footprints again, at a high cost, with more complexity. There is serious discussion about not being able to return as much mass of lunar rocks as tiny amount Apollo did … that’s beyond ludicrous for a program that will require something like 4 launches, (maybe 3 billion, marginal) for a mission.
Artemis is the emperor’s non-existent Moon program.
Artemis has elements from the old school and the new school. As long as the new school stuff isn’t kneecapped, then things will continue to progress on a dual track system even if the SLS track is stuck going in circles between Florida and Alabama.
A fusion program of SLS/Orion plus SH/Starship might work.
First, replace SLS core stage and boosters with SpaceX superheavy. The latter is reusable, and probably closer to flight. Superheavy stages too low for SLSs upper stage, so replace the SLS upper stage, Orion and SM, and whatever lander they come up with, with Starship.
To preserve SLS/Orion’s role, rename Superheavy to “Superheavy Launch System” (SLS) and name the first lunar starship “Orion”. Paint NASA logos, and SLS/Orion logos, on the sides.
NASA can provide the astronaut van, and maybe EVA suits, assuming that the later SpaceX is working on aren’t ready in time. NASA can provide the deep space tracking network, and also one piece of tech we’ve seen NASA use but, so far as we know, SpaceX has yet to develop; a twitter hashtag.
Shelby, Congress, et al. are incapable of feeling embarrassment. Once Starship lands on the moon, ask him why we still need SLS. I’m sure he’ll have an answer .
They already said why, redundancy.
A quibble here – but an important one. Landing even just an uncrewed Starship on the Moon would be a horrible PR blow to *the parts of NASA that are primarily Congressional pretend-to-do-space pork*. Even within NASA Human Spaceflight, that’s not the whole (though it has become the tail that wags the HSF dog, as witness the recent MSFC lander-management win), plus NASA does a lot of other things that aren’t human spaceflight at all. Due respect to NASA’s competent bits…
Starlink L1 is back on the schedule for Nov. 11 (next Monday), so it was only a brief delay, whatever the cause, hardly an augenblick in Original Elon Time.
I think it’s unfair to describe Falcon Heavy as “years behind schedule.” That’s like complaining Falcon 5 and Magic Dragon behind schedule (instead of canceled long ago.) Fact is, Merlin 1D and the octaweb Falcon 9 were so much of an improvement over original Falcon 9 that its expendable payload exceeded the anticipated payload of what was once called Falcon 9S9 (Falcon Heavy to come). I think Musk probably wanted to cancel Heavy, since Starship was already in the wings, but had to go ahead with the prototype kludge of leftover parts due to politics. Had Starman’s ride exploded (remeber he gave it 50/50), that would have been the end of Heavy. As it is, Heavy has few customers, because Falcon 9 can handle most payloads. It’s a dead end now, just like SLS.
It’s also unfair to descrive the first stage landing as years behind just because Musk let us watch development in realtime. We aren’t accustomed to seeing aerospace trial and error!
Finally, I think speculating about fun SpaceX kludges is only that, fun. Musk already thought of everything. I keep reminding people not to forget about Starkicker. Put Starkicker on 39A annex. Roll the SLS over on the crawler from 39B, and lift the Orion stack from one rocket to the other with the SpaceX crane. Launch. Take SLS to the Rocket Garden.
Going back to something I said up thread about how Elon has learned to avoid features that suck up engineering hours and wreck schedules, I wonder how much of Falcon Heavy’s engineering hours were spent on propellant cross-feed?
At first they were going to have it built-in from the start, then they were going to add it as a later enhancement, with Musk saying that it turned out to be harder than anticipated. Now I think the idea is mostly dead.
I can venture some guesses as to why they let it die. For one, the upgrades to Falcon 9 Full Thrust probably meant the standard F9H could handle the existing GTO payloads, so cross-feed wasn’t needed. The cross-feed would necessarily impart far more delta-V to the core stage, putting it outside the financially viable recovery envelope. (It would either get toasted on re-entry, or the extra deceleration fuel ate up too much of the performance enhancement.) Starship rendered it moot.
I’m still interested in cross-feed because Starship could deliver enormously more fuel to orbit, with fewer total Super Heavy stages launched, if it was configured along the lines of Falcon 9 Heavy, and the stainless Super Heavy can withstand much higher re-entry speeds than a Falcon 9H core.
I’d imagine you could do much the same with a Starship Super Heavy Heavy without the need for crossfeed. It’s a difficult problem which doesn’t gain you that much if you can build a bigger launcher instead.
I think the trimaran paradigm is going to die out. Look at it this way: it will almost certainly be cheaper to develop, fabricate, and launch an 18 meter “HyperHeavy” than to do a Triple-SuperHeavy. HyperHeavy would use the same software as SuperHeavy, and most of the same hardware/GSE. As an added bonus, HyperTanker would deliver one-third more fuel than Triple-SuperTanker. And, ultimately, since Musk has stated he definitely plans on 18m Starship next, we know HyperTanker will exist. The question is whether or not it will be used to fuel an ongoing 9m Starship.
I don’t see why the Starship should land on the Moon. Or starship seems to designed to land worlds with atmosphere- like Venus:)
It seems Starship could drop off a more payload in the Venus sky as it could land on Mars or the Moon. And get to Venus in say 5 months.
Though putting something in Venus orbit could more related to going to Mars.
From Venus you get to Mars more often and faster than from Earth.
I assume Starship can do an aerocapture. Is suppose to be able to do an aerocapture with Mars? Wouldn’t an aerocapture with Venus be easier than with Mars?
I mean yeah, I can understand skepticism of SpaceX timelines, but even if you tack on another couple years to that, this seems like a better horse to hitch the cart to — at least for someone who actually wants to get to the moon.
NASA: “You need to make your Dragon capsule meet our safety requirements that none of other vehicles actually ever met.”
SpaceX: “But I wanted to go to the moon with my new Starship by 2022.”
NASA: “You can waste time with your friends when your chores are done.”
What everyone is conveniently forgetting in the recent fuss about Commercial Crew delays is the NASA OIG several years ago saying that, in addition to early funding shortfalls, there was a major ongoing problem with delays in NASA evaluation of contractor safety and hazard reviews and reports. GAO said something very similar around that time. In essence, Commercial crew involved a massive rewrite and reorganization of NASA certification requirements for crew safety, and as the contractors came up with new questions, NASA was providing answers months to years later than required.
SpaceX refocusing its primary human spaceflight effort on Starship in response makes perfect sense. As for Bridenstine’s recent kvetch about that, it’s not clear to me that wasn’t more a matter of wanting more SpaceX public CC program acknowledgement than of any real neglect of Dragon 2 by SpaceX.
Though the SpaceX Dragon 2 engineers who spend months waiting for NASA to make up its mind while their friends on Starship sprint ahead do have my sympathy.
Shotwell has also mentioned a possible *crewed* landing on the moon in 2022. I’m very dubious, but I think 2023 might be possible.
Even just uncrewed landing cargo (100 tons of it!) and bringing back tons of lunar regolith, would be earth-shaking.
I wonder… might SpaceX be landing both cargo and crew to do some site setup for Artimis landing astronauts on the moon for the first time in 50 years (set up habs, etc)? Could those historic first steps by the astronauts be recorded by a SpaceX camera crew already on-site?
With as much payload capacity as that thing has, life support would be trivial.
A brute-force life support option would be doable. Commercial oxygen candles and CO2 Scrubbers.
What we need now are lunar-capable EVA suits ASAP.
Just landing on the moon with people, even without EVA, would still be a huge blow to Shelby.
I wonder how long it will be until the EVA suit SpaceX is developing will be ready? They seem to have done a pretty good job in their IVA suit, so hopefully the development of the EVA suit won’t be too fraught with problems.
The moon, though, is a challenge for an EVA suit, due to the incredibly abrasive dust. My hunch; they’ll go with some sort of space EVA suit, and add disposable covers for lunar use.
However, just having a crew in a Starship, landing it on the moon, and doing an EVA lunar surface stroll does NOT equal putting an astronaut on the moon. At least, that’s the exuse I expect to be used. The SpaceX lunar EVA crews will merely be “support infrastructure”, there to prepare for the arrival of astronauts.
If I recall, an official astronaut (not counting the silver-pin NASA qualified but unflown) has to be either NASA, military, or an civilian employee of NASA, and have completed a space mission. SpaceX crew on the moon won’t qualify, officially, so NASA might still claim to have landed “the first astronauts since Apollo” on the moon, even if SpaceX has a crew on the moon well before that. Sure, it’d be a little silly, but nowhere near as silly as SLS.
As I’ve written here before, politicians like Shelby use different metrics than we do to determine whether a government program is successful. We mere taxpayers look at metrics such as cost to benefit ratio, meeting schedules and budgets, and accomplishing the stated objectives. Politicians look at spending in their district, votes bought, campaign contributions raised, and family members and cronies enriched. For cost plus projects like the SLS, delays are a feature, not a bug. It’s being funded over $2 billion a year, so every year of delay just pads the political metrics even more. By political metrics, the SLS is a successful program even if it never flies and ultimately gets canceled.
The SpaceX lunar EVA crews will merely be “support infrastructure”, there to prepare for the arrival of astronauts.
How about a Starbucks to welcome Artemis 3? That’s only “support infrastructure.”
@ Larry J
I find your summary of the SLS real situation depressing and cynical. I also think you are 100% right, and saying something that needs repeating, loudly and often.
@ Richard M;
SpaceX crew setting up a Starbucks to welcome the first astronauts to set foot on the moon in over 50 years… I like it! Perhaps they could put it in the lobby of the SpaceX hotel they’ll probably have running (and hosting tourists) by the time NASA does get to the moon? (I’m currently guessing SLS might achieve a launch date sometime in the 2040s)
I think just launching and orbiting the Earth would be a huge blow to Shelby. Landing on the moon would be a blow to various federal institutions.
ACJ: it probably won’t be a SpaceX hotel. Motel 6 on the other hand…
Keep in mind that Starship payloads are likely as aspirational as Starship schedules. Early production examples are likely to mass more than ultimately planned, thus to have less payload.
S’allright. 25 tons to Lunar surface via resuable rocket would still be revolutionary. I’d settle for ten… People forget that an entire major WW2 battle campaign in a part of New Guinea with no sea access was fought with 2.5 ton DC-3 payloads. The SWPac troops on the spot did things like slicing bulldozers into sections with acetylene torches, then welding them back together onsite. Where there’s a will… SpaceX demonstrably does not lack will.
Maybe the can carry up, as ballast, a boilerplate CEV used for parachute drop tests and just deposit it on the moon.
I put my Money on 2025. I thought they claimed they will be doing high altitude Starship hops by now from what was obviously a Dog and Pony show in September. But now scheduled first hop in December and I bet will be in January.
Heck I bet late 2021/ early 2022 for Starship in orbit unless I missed something and it can do SSTO.
Have they even started construction of super heavy? Have they even constructed enough Raptors for a super heavy?
Starship can technically do SSTO, with pretty much zero payload. They’ve talked about maybe doing that just to test the heat shield.
Super-Heavy has not begun construction yet, and no, they don’t have three dozen Raptors ready to go. I suspect that construction on it won’t start until Starship is well along, since a) Starship is the tent pole in the schedule, and b) whatever they learn regarding the steel structure can be applied directly to SH for big-time weight savings.
@A.Nonymous;
Musk shot down the SSTO myth a while ago, by pointing out that while a massively stripped-down Starship (no fins, no heat shield, etc) could, barely, do SSTO, there would be no point.
Even if they get dry mass down to 89 tons, they can’t do SSTO.
Starship has been designed to have a delta/v of 6.9kps, per Musk, and to get to orbit you need (it varies a bit depending on the launch profile) 9.4kps. So, it’s well short, unless stripped way down.
I think you’re right on SH. One reason additional I believe (and cannot prove, so it’s just speculation) is that if Starship turns out to be heavier than expected, it’d be a heck of a lot faster, cheaper, and easier to make SH a bit bigger than try to shave off every possible ounce from Starship. Their construction methods make this a very viable option.
Good point. The simplest way to do that would be to stretch the tankage of Super Heavy by 1/6 or 1/3 and widen the 6 leg fairings to cover either two or three Raptors instead of the one that is currently planned. That would boost SH engine count to 43 or 49, respectively. The current design is good for 16.28 Mlbf. 43 engines = 18.92 Mlbf. 49 engines = 21.56 Mlbf.
Well essentially reinforce my point that the time line is Bunk. We won’t be seeing Starship in orbit in the next 12 months.
Good Point CJ on the SH could pick up any technical risks or bumps they find with Starship and be holding off SH Mk1 till their further down the road. Though seen some stuff about a Super Heavy “light config” with 20 engines for facilitating the testing.
I check my old Starship to the moon numbers (which were based on early design figures) and they might need a new, smaller methalox engine for landing. With enough fuel on board for ascent, TEI, and landing, it will probably hover in lunar gravity on about 75,000 to 100,000 lbsf of thrust, which means they’d need use a single Raptor throttled down to about 15% to 20%. That might be a little tricky.
With full-flow dual-preburner staged combustion, both propellants are injected as gases. Injector delta-P scales directly with Mdot in that case and the throttling turndown should be nearly unlimited.
Musk has already said (on Twitter) the 3 upper stage sea-level engines will normally operate at 15-20% throttle, with most of the impulse go through the 3 non-throttleable, non-gimballed vacuum engines. The SLEs are mainly to be there for steering and roll control, and will only power up all the way for Earth landings. Maybe Mars ascent too?
15% was what I came up with for a single-engine lunar landing with the lightweight (initial target weight) design of 85 tonnes, with fuel for return and landing. I don’t see a need to drop much below that. Hopefully the Raptor purrs like a kitten even at very low idle “food warmer” settings, because relighting a non-hypergolic engine above the lunar surface, when seconds count, is something they’d want to avoid, kind of like driving a clunker with a bad idle mixture.
What kind of landing is assumed for that 15%? Suicide burn / hoverslam?
George, what kind of numbers are you using for Starship’s landing mass?
I’m guessing Starship empty dry mass will be at least 100 tons. It will need about 250 tons of fuel to get from the lunar surface back to earth, then land. It will be carrying cargo or a crew section, or a mix, which will likely mass about 100 tons – though probably half that for early missions.
So, we get an approximate (very approximate) lunar touchdown mass of at least 400 tons. That’s mass, not weight, due to lunar G. The weight would be 66.67 tons, but, it’s still got the inertia of 400 tons. When it’s slowing down for landing, the inertia of that mass is the biggest factor.
Wouldn’t a raptor throttling down to 30% be plenty for this?
My big worry; how well with the lunar regolith stand up to a Raptor’s blast? I recall that Starhopper’s landing blew big chunks out of concrete. It would not be good if the resulting crater on the moon undermines Starship’s legs.
I think that early run had a mass of 205 tonnes (landing without a significant payload) with a reserve mass ratio of 2.05 for a 2,700 m/sec delta V to return on. So that’s about 450,000 lbm, and a vacuum Raptor should be capable of about 500,000 lbsf. That’s enough to hover on in Earth’s gravity.
It wouldn’t matter for a hover slam, but if a final translation is needed (go Neil!), it’s going to need to throttle way down. Of course if it lands with a heavy payload the deep throttling requirement goes away.
I see your point on needing a lateral translation, George.
If Raptor can’t throttle deep enough, a significant payload might not be merely useful, but required, for landing on the Moon.
Successfully landing the huge, uncrewed Starship even with significantly less than 100 tonnes of payload would still be very difficult for NASA and the decision-makers to argue against. There would be so many space advocates and citizens and experts and journalists and non-NASA-center congressmen openly wondering why we should continue with SLS. I believe that the tipping point is not far off. Someone needs to photoshop the Blue Moon lander next to the Starship on the Moon to show how irrelevant NASA’s plans are if (when) Starship succeeds.
My estimate is that the Starship would be about 6.3 X the height of the Blue Moon.
If SpaceX lands Starship on the lu at surface, how long would it take for NASA to catch up. They couldn’t. The only way to partially save face and remain relevant is, as the old adage says, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. It would be a public-private partnership.
I think it would happen very fast and everyone would pretend like everything before never happened. Twenty years after, people who point it out would be viewed as cranks.
That’s how I see things working out. NASA will arrange for some sort of presence on Crew Starship’s first lunar surface excursion so it can claim Mission Accomplished for Artemis.
Starship making orbit and returning will be the first body blow to SLS but probably won’t be enough to kill it outright. Once on-orbit refueling is worked out and a freight-only payload is landed on the Moon, though, I think it’s Game Over for SLS if both these events precede the notional Artemis-1 mission – which, in such a case, may never actually occur. If not, SLS may hang on – by its fingernails, with its supporters pointing out that it’s designed to carry crew, not just freight – until Crew Starship follows one or more Freight Starships to the lunar surface with people aboard in advance of the notional Artemis-3 mission. One hopes NASA decides, Shelby or no Shelby, to throw in with SpaceX by that time in order not to appear completely ridiculous along with its big, useless rocket and all of its equally useless ancillaries, notably Orion and Gateway.
Maybe the old joke “NASA will return to the moon, and when they do they’ll stay at the Moon Hilton” isn’t too far off after all…
It’ll be one of Bigelow’s “Budget Suites” inflatables…
All of this is very beguiling. If it looks like SpaceX is going to land a Starship on the moon, NASA will buy seats for some of its astronauts. Elon will be glad of the money.
In a rational world, you’d be right – NASA would just buy seats and services (cargo capacity, etc) if Starship was ready in time. However, in our world, I do not think so – that would be the death knell of SLS/Orion, spelling the end to a lot of congressional pork, plus making a lot of congressional porkers look very bad.
With or without NASA participating a Starship lunar landing would do that.
Only after Starship is finally man-rated to NASA standards in 2050.
It’s a darned good thing that NSF is not responsible for designing and operating the ships necessary to get people and supplies to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Instead they can just call up Maersk and arrive for transfers. Though I’m sure if Congresscritters thought it was to their benefit to change the system, they would.
They’re still dependent on a 40+ ice breaker that seems to suffer major problems every austral summer.
Not dependent. NSF has previously leased icebreaker services from Russian and Sweden when the Coast Guard was unable to support. Chuck Hill’s blog is a great place to keep up with the CGs icebreaker saga.
Given the current SpaceX experience with NASA oversight on Commercial Crew, I might expect SpaceX would be very very reluctant to bring NASA on board Starship.
In any role other than as paying passengers on a 100% commercial basis, that is. Something which NASA demonstrably still isn’t near ready for. For better or worse, if their astronauts will ride on it, they insist on massively detailed insight & control of the system.
Unless of course the system is provided by a sovereign entity with the clout to deny NASA detail control. EG, Russia and Soyuz.
Heh. Perhaps Elon will wait to sell NASA Starship rides until after the Lunar Free State has officially applied for UN membership…
Yes, SpaceX’s attitude if NASA wants a ride should be, “Fine, but you’ll have to take your chances on informed consent, just like our commercial customers. No more jumping through your certification hoops. This is too important to our business plans.”
Yes. Elon will happily allow NASA to sit in the back seat and wave to the crowds, but he’s not about to let them drive.
Maybe Musk will have his Starships registered in Panama like everyone else’s ships…
I think you are right because NASA will want a share of the glory, even if they are only passengers, and Musk will want the gravitas of having NASA astronauts as passengers.
How could you embarrass NASA? They need Russian help to get astronauts off the ground. If that doesn’t cause it, nothing will.
I’m not sure you can. I thought the 50 year celebration of Apollo was embarrassing considering that NASA needed Russian help to fly Astronauts now. It sure wasn’t a sign that we won the space race.
Embarrassment requires some vestige of a sense of shame. Something the SLS/Orion wing of NASA left behind long ago, yes.
Echoing the comments above. Just landing an uncrewed Starship on the Moon would be a horrible PR blow to NASA. Landing and returning actual humans would be a profound embarrassment to pretty much every national government seeking to move into Space.
Go, Elon!
Elon Time is slowly contracting, too. People applying Original Elon Time are behind the times. So to speak.
It does have to all go more or less right for this to happen. If Mk1 flight to 20km (and back) works out, then Mk2 goes to orbit (and back? no one has said). Then an unmanned lunar free return with Mk3? (No refueling necessary). After that, they can think of Dear.Moon (also no refueling necessary). I’d bet on more testing, though. So after Mk3, they have to start making the tankers work. Once they do, then the way to the Moon landing is open.
I’m always skeptical of SpaceX timelines, “Elon time”, etc. Even with just Starship, there have been slips – Starhopper took longer than they thought, and now Mk 1, which they hoped to fly this month, looks like December.
I’m going to discount crew dragon, because of NASA red tape, but Falcon Heavy was years late, and so too was propulsive landing for F9, reuse, deep cryo, etc etc.
Contra all these delays (the infamous Elon Time), you have the shining example of other organizations, such as Boeing, which has completed and ais flying their Starliner capsule.. oh, wait. Okay, they’ve got SLS flying… oh, um, okay… then NASA itself, which is never overdue on a program, like the James Webb telescope… er….
Jokes aside, “Elon Time” is a real thing – Musk is notoriously prone to being over optimistic on timelines. And, yes, that’s bad. But, compared to the rest of the industry, he’s the least bad of the lot when it comes to timelines.
Delays are common in the industry. It is funny to see Musk get knocked for it when the pros still can’t put people in space.
The key difference is that Musk has learned a lot from Elon time. Why did the project take longer than anticipated? Which materials require too much precision tooling? What non-critical systems are so complicated that they suck up endless engineering hours? How can we simplify and streamline the process? Can we build that in a completely different way so it doesn’t take as long?
The industries normal route is just to stretch the schedule out and let the complex development cycle run its course, perhaps because they get paid more money for longer by doing that, as they do with so many US defense projects. Most probably don’t even know how to develop and innovate faster, except perhaps by adding more shifts. Part of that might be that they’ve never had the freedom to just drop subsystems or radically altering requirements so they could hurry up and build something that was “good enough.”
Then there’s that other thing. If SpaceX can shave Starship dry mass down enough, Chomper could boost maybe 44t through TLI. So one might drop off an Artemis/Blue Moon stack and then make a free return. Pretty much a reusable Saturn V, if nothing else.
Exciting times! Almost 48 years with no human flying beyond LEO. It’s starting to look like things will finally change. I’m as excited about this as everyone in the thread.
However, SLS won’t be killed by comparison to SS. Was the Shuttle killed by comparison to Atlas or Delta? Was Atlas or Delta killed by comparison to Ariane, or Falcon ? Answer: No.
As alluded to by others in this thread, political programs have different rules. SLS may end at some point, but it will have to do with changes in the executive branch and a senator from Alabama — not the state of private space flight. You can quote me on that.
Also, consider this: Even if Artemis flies astronauts the surface of the Moon, would this fulfill our space flight ambitions? I don’t think so … it’s flags and footprints again, at a high cost, with more complexity. There is serious discussion about not being able to return as much mass of lunar rocks as tiny amount Apollo did … that’s beyond ludicrous for a program that will require something like 4 launches, (maybe 3 billion, marginal) for a mission.
Artemis is the emperor’s non-existent Moon program.
Artemis has elements from the old school and the new school. As long as the new school stuff isn’t kneecapped, then things will continue to progress on a dual track system even if the SLS track is stuck going in circles between Florida and Alabama.
A fusion program of SLS/Orion plus SH/Starship might work.
First, replace SLS core stage and boosters with SpaceX superheavy. The latter is reusable, and probably closer to flight. Superheavy stages too low for SLSs upper stage, so replace the SLS upper stage, Orion and SM, and whatever lander they come up with, with Starship.
To preserve SLS/Orion’s role, rename Superheavy to “Superheavy Launch System” (SLS) and name the first lunar starship “Orion”. Paint NASA logos, and SLS/Orion logos, on the sides.
NASA can provide the astronaut van, and maybe EVA suits, assuming that the later SpaceX is working on aren’t ready in time. NASA can provide the deep space tracking network, and also one piece of tech we’ve seen NASA use but, so far as we know, SpaceX has yet to develop; a twitter hashtag.
Shelby, Congress, et al. are incapable of feeling embarrassment. Once Starship lands on the moon, ask him why we still need SLS. I’m sure he’ll have an answer .
They already said why, redundancy.
A quibble here – but an important one. Landing even just an uncrewed Starship on the Moon would be a horrible PR blow to *the parts of NASA that are primarily Congressional pretend-to-do-space pork*. Even within NASA Human Spaceflight, that’s not the whole (though it has become the tail that wags the HSF dog, as witness the recent MSFC lander-management win), plus NASA does a lot of other things that aren’t human spaceflight at all. Due respect to NASA’s competent bits…
Starlink L1 is back on the schedule for Nov. 11 (next Monday), so it was only a brief delay, whatever the cause, hardly an augenblick in Original Elon Time.
I think it’s unfair to describe Falcon Heavy as “years behind schedule.” That’s like complaining Falcon 5 and Magic Dragon behind schedule (instead of canceled long ago.) Fact is, Merlin 1D and the octaweb Falcon 9 were so much of an improvement over original Falcon 9 that its expendable payload exceeded the anticipated payload of what was once called Falcon 9S9 (Falcon Heavy to come). I think Musk probably wanted to cancel Heavy, since Starship was already in the wings, but had to go ahead with the prototype kludge of leftover parts due to politics. Had Starman’s ride exploded (remeber he gave it 50/50), that would have been the end of Heavy. As it is, Heavy has few customers, because Falcon 9 can handle most payloads. It’s a dead end now, just like SLS.
It’s also unfair to descrive the first stage landing as years behind just because Musk let us watch development in realtime. We aren’t accustomed to seeing aerospace trial and error!
Finally, I think speculating about fun SpaceX kludges is only that, fun. Musk already thought of everything. I keep reminding people not to forget about Starkicker. Put Starkicker on 39A annex. Roll the SLS over on the crawler from 39B, and lift the Orion stack from one rocket to the other with the SpaceX crane. Launch. Take SLS to the Rocket Garden.
Going back to something I said up thread about how Elon has learned to avoid features that suck up engineering hours and wreck schedules, I wonder how much of Falcon Heavy’s engineering hours were spent on propellant cross-feed?
At first they were going to have it built-in from the start, then they were going to add it as a later enhancement, with Musk saying that it turned out to be harder than anticipated. Now I think the idea is mostly dead.
I can venture some guesses as to why they let it die. For one, the upgrades to Falcon 9 Full Thrust probably meant the standard F9H could handle the existing GTO payloads, so cross-feed wasn’t needed. The cross-feed would necessarily impart far more delta-V to the core stage, putting it outside the financially viable recovery envelope. (It would either get toasted on re-entry, or the extra deceleration fuel ate up too much of the performance enhancement.) Starship rendered it moot.
I’m still interested in cross-feed because Starship could deliver enormously more fuel to orbit, with fewer total Super Heavy stages launched, if it was configured along the lines of Falcon 9 Heavy, and the stainless Super Heavy can withstand much higher re-entry speeds than a Falcon 9H core.
I’d imagine you could do much the same with a Starship Super Heavy Heavy without the need for crossfeed. It’s a difficult problem which doesn’t gain you that much if you can build a bigger launcher instead.
I think the trimaran paradigm is going to die out. Look at it this way: it will almost certainly be cheaper to develop, fabricate, and launch an 18 meter “HyperHeavy” than to do a Triple-SuperHeavy. HyperHeavy would use the same software as SuperHeavy, and most of the same hardware/GSE. As an added bonus, HyperTanker would deliver one-third more fuel than Triple-SuperTanker. And, ultimately, since Musk has stated he definitely plans on 18m Starship next, we know HyperTanker will exist. The question is whether or not it will be used to fuel an ongoing 9m Starship.
I don’t see why the Starship should land on the Moon. Or starship seems to designed to land worlds with atmosphere- like Venus:)
It seems Starship could drop off a more payload in the Venus sky as it could land on Mars or the Moon. And get to Venus in say 5 months.
Though putting something in Venus orbit could more related to going to Mars.
From Venus you get to Mars more often and faster than from Earth.
I assume Starship can do an aerocapture. Is suppose to be able to do an aerocapture with Mars? Wouldn’t an aerocapture with Venus be easier than with Mars?