/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12562520
Falcon Heavy expendable has 2/3 of SLS's payload for less than the cost of a single RS-25. If you're confident in orbital automated docking capability you can demolish SLS on payload/$ to LLO. Pic related.

A 4.5m wide Cygnus Extra Chubby would be the perfect payload stage for pic related.

>>12108077
Starship's weakness for high orbits basically vanishes if you use kickstages. Pic related can be done with two Starship launches for $4 million. For sending Starship sized objects to Mars, I think it's about optimal unless you upgrade to a nuclear lightbulb.

Imagine how big a deep space probe kick stage you could make with Cargo Starship.
>50 ton probe packed full of cameras, sensors, and RTGs
>pair of 50 ton kick stages
>full five-kickstage Orbital Yeet Train just takes two reusable Starships ($4M in launch costs)
>add another six kick stages ($8M total launch costs) and you can enter into orbit around any planet in the system

>>11992410
>And yes I'm talking about launching fully fueled stages into orbit as a payload
4ASS engineering demonstrated using this to beat the SLS with just Falcon Heavy. Incidentally this is why the Senator from Alabama (SLS home) throws a tantrum any time NASA suggests propellant depots.

>>11972061
>Why is nobody seriously considering assembling craft in orbit
/sfg/ did to point out how gay SLS was.

>>11958078
I KNEW I'D SEEN THAT DESIGN BEFORE!

Alright, which one of you fags is an Arianespace engineer?

>NSF reporting that the base of Olympus Mons picked as a potential Starship landing site
The 4ASS Mars Olympus Mons Massdriver Yeetcannon (MOMMY) is a go!

>>11855162
That was one of the earliest 4ASS memes.

>>11743387
A few days ago I figured out that if you built a mass driver up the side of Olympus Mons on Mars you could accelerate the 4ASS Standard 50t Payload Module from pic related to Mars escape velocity (>5km/s) without using superconducting magnets, which lets you use things like Hall thrusters or Plasma Magnets to single-stage all the way to the moons of Saturn.

Given that Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system, it should be possible to power that with geothermal (areothermal?) power plants every few kilometers or so.

>>11672606

>>11651076
That's not how diminishing returns works in rockets. See pic related for how it actually works.

Basically, diminishing returns in rocketry only show up if you're trying to increase delta V, and even then it's only if you're trying to increase delta V without increasing the size of each stage.
For Earth launch to LEO, the delta V requirement is static. No matter how large the payload, you can launch it to orbit in just two stages. Of course at extreme scales these stages start to look more like pancake propellant tanks with enormous engine clusters at the bottom, but the same delta V is supplied regardless.

If you want to give your rocket more payload, you never run into diminishing returns. If you want to give your rocket more delta V, well now you're fighting the rocket equation, and you need to start adding more and more stages of larger and larger size. Luckily, the largest number of stages we'd ever reasonably need to perform human colonization of the Moon, Mars, and the easier asteroids is just three, so it's not a big deal. Sending serious payload to Jupiter's moons using chemical rockets would be pushing it. Interstellar travel delta V is enough that even if you're willing to accept a 5000 year trajectory your staging requirements are just insane if you aren't using nuclear propulsion.

>>11597048
Replace SLS with pic related. Throw all the Gateway components into lunar orbit as fast as they can build Heavys and once Starship comes online use it as a shiny tube shuttle to assemble the gateway station with robot arm and EVAs.

>>11592833
Who's talking about spending billions on a single Moon mission? I'm talking about sending 2x refueled Starship to the Moon with >100,000 kg of payload per landing, with a total price tag of less than $60 million each time.

Even if you don't believe in Starship, we still don't need Gateway to make Moon missions more practical. There's nothing special about Lunar orbit for assembling a lander from multiple lower-mass modules. In fact, if you skip Gateway and just do your orbital assembly here around Earth, you can launch a much bigger commercial lander in a single piece, then launch a series of kick stage modules to link up to it, then fire the whole train at the Moon. Pic related, that payload thing can be anything that weighs 50 tons including a spacecraft that can land on the Moon then launch directly back to Earth. You could also do much smaller payloads, for example the same size as the landers they want to assemble at Gateway, and use fewer kick stages.

>>11590075
This. Is it really that hard to develop a storable-propellant upper stage that is designed to stack end to end, which can push payloads out pretty much as far as you want them to go?