SpaceX’s Insane Plan For StarShip!
SpaceX may have ditched starship's Earth to Earth commercial flight program one of the proposed use cases for spacex's Starship rocket was to enable point-to-point global long-haul passenger flights in under an hour this requires offshore launch pads built on modified oil rigs like the two SpaceX purchased three years ago however SpaceX recently sold both rigs does this mean they're ditching the entire operation well in today's video we're gonna do a deep dive into the starship passenger flight operation and see if it could actually still make sense I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci this video is sponsored by Hoy miles back in September 2016 Elon Musk announced spacex's next launch vehicle the interplanetary transport system which would evolve into the bfr or big Falcon rocket you see that coming did you which was later renamed Starship in 2018. Starship is meant to be the first fully reusable rocket powered by full flow stage combustion engines another first which will take humans to Mars but it's also designed for other shorter missions such as sending heavy payloads like starlink generation 2 satellites into lower Earth orbit and other payloads to the moon but from the get-go Elon Musk also suggested that Starship would also be used as a point-to-point transportation system to travel anywhere in the world in under an hour now this sounds a bit like Dr Khan riding a nuclear missile in the movie Dr Strangelove I don't blame you writing a supersonic rocket with millions of pounds of fuel under my feet isn't exactly my idea of a laid-back trip but I digress but if they were to do this how would it work for most other applications industry standard launch complexes like the ones at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral or the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California would do but SpaceX can't build a launch complex as easily as you would an airport near every major city for Earth to Earth Transportation because you'd need a huge stretch of land to keep everyone else at a safe distance in case of a rapid unscheduled disassembly or rud I think you know what that's code for you got to love this terminology I love it the most logical option would be to use offshore launch pads like the converted oil rigs the company C launch has been using since the late 90s to launch its Zenit rocket with this in mind in July 2020 SpaceX bought Phobos and demos like the two moons of Mars the two twin Ultra deep water semi-submersible oil rigs for 3.5 million dollars each with the intention of converting them into spacex's first offshore launch pads this was quite a good deal considering each rig originally cost 550 million dollars but these rigs largely just sat around an important Mississippi for months with hardly any work done on them until a few weeks ago on February 8th Gwen Shotwell announced that SpaceX had just sold both Riggs stating we bought them we sold them they were not the right platforms to the point she also said that offshore launch pads were still a part of spacex's plans but they needed to focus on getting Starship to fly before that happened this surprised pretty much everyone and it got me thinking what if they're actually scrapping the entire Earth to Earth program which is the one that relies most on offshore launches to focus on Lower Earth orbit the Moon and Mars so this is the point of my day when I realized you know what if I'm thinking this you guys probably are too I think we can make a video and here we are I analyzed everything from fuel efficiency safety locations and total trip times to see what real benefits this transport system would have compared to Conventional means like airlines that we have today and let's just say I think you're going to be pretty surprised with what I found okay so let's start by putting the Starship program into context I'm not going to dwell too much on the specs since I've actually done a video on this before we'll put links below and others like Tim Dodd from everyday astronaut Felix from what about it and Marcus house Scott Manley And The Angry astronaut have all done awesome jobs and we'll put links to those video goes below Starship is meant to be spacex's Crown Jewel it is a two-stage rocket made up of the super heavy booster as the first stage and the Starship itself as the second stage both stages are completely reusable making this the first fully reusable rocket ever built Starship is powered by spacex's Raptor engine the Raptor is the first and only full flow stage combustion engine ever flown it runs on methylocks a mix of liquid oxygen and liquid methane as a palette and is one of the most powerful rocket engines ever built the super heavy booster has 33 of them the Starship upper stage on the other hand has six three sea level plus three vacuum Raptor 2 engines on April 20th 420 galavilan musk when the Starship rocket took to the skies it was the most powerful rocket ever flown by humankind so it sets all sorts of records as I mentioned before the plans for Starship are four-fold one launch vehicle for larger heavier payloads starship's key Advantage is its size which allows it to carry 100 to 150 metric tons of cargo to low earth orbit on a fully reusable rocket or up to 250 tons if only the first stage the booster is reused compare that to the Saturn V which took us to the Moon which was an Expendable rocket that could carry up to 130 tons to low earth orbit this is important to SpaceX because this allows them to launch bigger and heavier payloads into space than any other Aerospace company or agency in the world in fact the new version 2 starlink satellites are too big to fit on any rocket other than Starship and SpaceX was already approved by the FAA to launch 7 500 of these new satellites using their new launch Vehicles this means that the future of starlink literally hangs on starship's success the Starship project was in part funded by the deer moon mission commissioned by Japanese entrepreneur yusaku mizawa where he and a crew of 10 will take a tour around the moon at 200 kilometers from the lunar surface but more importantly the modified Starship hls or human Landing system was commissioned by NASA to take humans including the first woman back to the Moon after over 50 years as part of the Artemis 3 mission in 2025. that's
just two years away and this time we'll have live 8K coverage streaming worldwide I don't know about you but this is the sort of thing that makes me just so excited about the future thirdly Starship is spacex's bet for finally realizing Elon Musk dream of colonizing Mars with a capacity to send 100 people to the red planet every two years when both planets are closest together before we get into that let me do a quick minute and tell you about our sponsor this weekles is the amazing micro inverter company that we decided to go with on our property they're amazing for the following reasons first of all they're micro-inverters which means each panel has panel by panel monitoring and generation so if any one micronverter goes down your system will still be producing electricity unlike a string inverter where if it goes down your whole entire system would stop producing also microverters have really good long lifetimes around 25 years and Hoy Mouse has great warranties and great efficiency numbers plus the one drawback traditionally of micro inverters has always been price both Hoy miles they've got that figured out too with two to one one to one and four to one inverters meaning four panels or two panels can plug into one inverter there is a good cost savings go with four and one inverters and you can save around fifty percent compared to traditional micro inverters so here is a look at our data generation so far this month we've produced 1.2 megawatt hours that's 1200 kilo hours of energy and this has been a largely cloudy month so if you're a homeowner and try to go solar or you're an installer and you want to find out a great new way of saving money while having the best quality micro-converter components check out hoi miles links in description huge thanks to Holly miles and you for supporting the show finally Starship can take 1 000 passengers from one point on Earth to another in 60 minutes or less no matter how far provided it has a place to launch from another place to land and for anybody who flies long distances International you can just imagine what this would mean for the future of travel in general but let's break that down a little bit so what would we or SpaceX gain from using Starship for commercial transport well the main benefits are one speed Starship can travel will add a top speed of Sixteen thousand eight hundred miles an hour which is almost Mach 22 dramatically reducing travel times between distant locations on Earth with any long-haul flight taking less than an hour for example a trip from New York to Shanghai would be reduced from around 15 hours to just 39 minutes number two reusability full reusability combined with a capacity of a thousand passengers per flight could significantly lower the travel cost for long-haul flights number three improvements on starship's design and construction building launching and reusing hundreds of Starships will give SpaceX more data to optimize improve the vehicle design safety and efficiency that will also allow the company to improve turnaround times after each launch number four support for the Mission to Mars Mars and the Earth only align with each other every two years for a brief launch window an earth-to-earth transport system could keep all the Mars spaceports busy and profitable in between missions to Mars something absolutely essential for colonizing the red planet especially considering that SpaceX plans to launch potentially hundreds of Starships on every launch window and unless you want those hundreds of Starships to just sit around 700 days out of 750 you got to find some other way to use them and this could be the perfect way but the question remains could this actually work and is it a good idea to answer that let's look at two of starship's main limitations number one Starship is extremely noisy 33 Raptor engines of Full Throttle produce 112 decibels of noise even from five miles away that's as loud as having a chainsaw cutting a log right next to your ear number two Rock and turf basically bombs Starship holds thousands of pounds of fuel so for all the people who watch the launch attempt on April 20th that ended in an explosion which is fine that's science you got to break some eggs to make an omelet but you can realize that this is a danger and there's quite a bit of risk assessment to be done and that's not just a risk to the passengers on board but also to the communities nearby these are two of the reasons why offshore launch pads that keep Starship as far away as possible from local communities are essential for the programs success but this brings several issues of its own starship's real travel time so here's a table of common long-haul flights today and how much time it would take via Airline versus Starship and as you can imagine the difference is insane however those numbers don't tell the whole story and can be a bit misleading and that's because the plan is to use custom built C ports 20 to 30 miles offshore to launch and land Starships this means that besides the travel time we have to factor the time it takes to Embark a thousand people on a ferry with other luggage travel 20-30 miles disembark them at the launch pad and to do it all in Reverse at the destination which you just wouldn't have to do with Airlines also you might have to also Factor the time it takes to connect to a hub because you're not gonna have a Starship location everywhere unlikely at least at the beginning so maybe you have to take a plane to New York to get on the New York Starship and then fly so there's other complications but you can argue with the point-to-point component and how much time it could save you but for the sake of argument let's see how long this might take the fastest ferry in operation that can carry a thousand passengers is the HSC Francisco which can travel at a top speed of 58 knots so each trip from coast to launch pad or vice versa will take between 18 and 27 minutes minimum but that Ferry is a Guinness record holder so it's likely to be much slower than that moving on we can compare disembarking the cruise ship and getting on board Starship to making a connection between domestic flights only much more complicated with a lot more people I mean we'd have to climb a 300 foot Tower just to get to the starship's cabin and there's no way around that the typical domestic flight connection can take between one and two hours and the biggest airplanes in the world are only flying around 300 to 400 people and this is almost two and a half times that so to be conservative let's say it takes between two and four hours to board and get people to their seat in terms of launch prep if you've ever seen a crew Dragon launch on a Falcon 9 rocket with only four astronauts on board you'll notice that safety checks take an hour after everyone is strapped in so we'll estimate that time is at least triple that for Starship if the crew is super efficient and passengers are happy to comply two big ifs you'll also notice on a crew dragon mission the unlike planes they don't load the propellant the rocket fuel until the last possible minute when all passengers are on board and ready to go so after the safety checks we have to fill the propellant tanks Falcon 9 takes 20 minutes to fill 488 tons of propellant so Starship super heavy which holds 3 400 tons should take around 2 hours 20 minutes which is pretty much how long it took during the full wet rehearsal on January 23rd so to compare Starship really Apples to Apples to a typical commercial flight we need to account for all that time not just how long it's in the air so let's see how these stack up I'll add an extra hour to The Airliner flight to account for the time it takes to go back from the gate to the plane to the runway and then take off as well as the time it takes to pick up your luggage afterwards the updated table looks like this so what this tells you is that if you're planning on going to Australia now and you want to be there in less than an hour that's just not going to happen not unless they've done all that prep work ahead of time and your flight is really underbooked you'll only benefit a bit from the longer routes that take dozens of hours due to long layovers not exactly what you probably expected and neither did I but what about fuel efficiency how does Starship compare to airliners or other modes of transportation to answer that we'll need to compare all of them using equivalent units of fuel so we'll use one of the most common the gasoline gallon equivalent Starship and the super heavy booster carry a combined propellant mass of 5000 metric tons of which around 1 000 metric tons is methane this is equal to 403 000 gallons of gasoline equivalent if we assume that Starship travels the full 1000 passengers and it takes the longest possible trip from one end of the Equator to the other approximately 12 450 miles we get a fuel efficiency of just 31 passenger miles per gallon of gasoline if equivalent this means that with the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline Starship is able to take one passenger distance of 31 miles or 31 passengers a distance of one mile or any combination in between this is a horribly low fuel efficiency I mean look at how it compares to these other modes of transportation starship's efficiency then for Earth to Earth transport is even lower than driving around in a gas guzzling internal combustion engine car by yourself of course for space travel it would be the best in human history but that's not what we're discussing a quick disclaimer in a previous video about truss braced wings I did a back of the envelope calculation on the same efficiency for Starship but only use the amount of fuel in the second stage without counting for the booster where most of the fuel is so I got a much higher efficiency than the actual value that I'm representing here but time and fuel efficiency aren't the only obstacles here the way I see it getting on a Starship which is basically a bomb with no Escape mechanism is only worth it as a once in a lifetime experience for traveling to space but not as a real alternative to hopping on a plane which is the safest mode of transportation there is according to Gwen Shotwell SpaceX will probably make at least 100 cargo flights before launching humans on Starship but can you imagine what regulations will be like for commercial flights with a thousand Souls on board and a zero chance of survival if something goes wrong if the FAA only recently approved the use of unleaded fuel for jetliners I don't think we'll see the FAA granting SpaceX a license for commercial passenger flights in our lifetimes some people also worry about the pollution of the thriving private space industry it's true that some of these forms of propellant produced chemicals that can damage the ozone layer but that's not the case with Starship since its burning methane which is one of the cleanest burning fossil fuels of course it'll produce carbon emissions but how much is that likely to be for every 16 kilograms of methane that Starship Burns it produces 44 grams of carbon dioxide so after burning a thousand metric tons of methane Starship will dump 2 750 metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere once fully operational SpaceX plans they launch Cadence of several dozen to 100 launches per day so the Starship program would release approximately one gigaton of carbon annually which is substantial that's 2.7 percent of the total worldwide annual carbon emissions in 2022. in fact it's in the same ballpark as the emissions from the entire commercial airline industry this might be worth it for space science satellites and space travel but not especially for point-to-point travel the last thing I considered is that the g-forces will field during landing and takeoff after all astronauts are trained to withstand high G forces for a reason I wonder what would happen to the untrained unhealthy average human body under those conditions so I dug a little deeper first of all turns out that the G's during the liftoff itself aren't actually that bad you start off as low as around 1g and as a rocket gets lighter because of the fuel it's burning it gains more acceleration as we feel more G's but it only reaches around two and a half to three G's in a typical case but it is lost stronger than what we're used to though for comparison that sensation of getting thrown back in your seat when an airline takes off is only 0.4 G's so this would feel like almost 10 times that amount that is normally not an issue for healthy people even if they're out of shape but it can be dangerous if you suffer from a heart condition for example 3GS is what people feel at Disney's centrifugal mission space ride in 2005 a four-year-old boy actually died after passing out on this ride due to an undiagnosed cardiac arrhythmia but liftoff actually isn't the biggest problem the worst part is actually the skydiver swing Landing maneuver this can submit your body to four and a half G's although for a brief moment it'll sort of be like doing a loop on a really large roller coaster literally not for the faint of heart so for some of these reasons I think think of a future where we have point-to-point space travel taken over for airline travel probably is not going to happen I think economically feasibility even time consideration and it's just kind of hard to justify but I do think they could potentially offer space tourism flights for people for a once a lifetime type of thing and that could be fun and a good way to utilize their assets while they're waiting for Mars and Earth to realign again but that being said I don't actually think that's the reason why they sold the oil rigs because they still need offshore launch pads for Mars as Shotwell and Elon have both pointed out perhaps I just sold Phobos and demos to fund Starship development but what do you guys think let me know in the comments I'm really curious because remember nothing is more important to SpaceX right now than getting Starship to orbit once they achieve that Milestone Starship will be one step closer to becoming the backbone of the new starlink Fleet and of even more powerful satellite internet than we can even imagine right now and securing funds for further development furthermore these starlink launches could be enough to keep SpaceX busy while they tune Starships for the Artemis Mission and ultimately Mars if this is an exciting I don't know what is so for all the space enthusiasts right now what an absolute pleasure it is to be alive and to cover this stuff and we'd love to hear from you and hear your feedback what parts got you excited what'd you guys think about the previous flights and all the stuff that happened since we filmed this and shot it sound off in the comments below alright and if you like this video you gotta check out this video next I think you're gonna like until next time I'm Ricky this is tube at DaVinci
2023-05-10 21:43
