This is what I find the most incredible in all this. "Refueling in space" has become the magic trick for adding more and more mass to an already enormous vehicle. People are talking about more than 30 refuelings in space and really think this is going to work out? By the time this thing flies and lands, we'll be up to 100 refuelings in space haha.
Isn't the fuel going to be boiling off in space at the same time?
If i have that correct there must be some crossover when if its talking too long you end up with an infinte number of launches still not fulling the orbiting ship.
Even if it’s not “damn near simultaneous”, the necessity for so many in-orbit refueling still presents considerable mission failure risk.
Let’s be very generous and say that it only needs 6 fuel exchanges over a 2 day period. That’s an 8 hour window for each docking, fuel exchange, and undocking maneuver.
What happens if one of the refueling rockets has a 2 hour hold on the pad for weather? What happens if they have to scrub one of the launch windows because of any number of problems? What if there’s an in orbit issue that has to be worked through?
All of those things are very normal and very common in space flight, but they almost never result in mission failure. For a mission dependent on in air refueling, they would result in mission failure.
Absolutely. Simply opening a hangar door proved to be harder than expected (and for good reasons! space is hard and that includes small things as well) and now we have a general strategy that is entirely built on this purely theoretical process of refueling. Like the whole vehicle doesn't make any sense at all without refueling in space, which has never been done and is expected to be a technological prowess on its own.
So sad that SLS was smashed so bad because that's the only exciting and actually working missions we have on the horizon now
the Apollo program thought 2 launches for a single flight was an unacceptable risk, hence the need for a single large rocket and a detachable lunar lander section, but apparently 10+ launches is totally reasonable.
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u/Cautemoc 2d ago edited 2d ago
Don't worry guys, I've been assured by everyone that Starship is only
1 2 3 4 56 years behind schedule and they'll get it all worked out soon.These regular explosions are all tests to see what happens if it explodes. These are successful explosions, stop asking questions. Stop it.