/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15861529
>>15861707
Ok, not exactly Starship. Basically something like Stoke's Nova scaled up to have 20-50 tons of reusable capability. And no I'm not advocating for it, Starship is clearly better, its just that there was a lot of design work to make it suitable for mars, especially the raptors. Seriously, "coking" is a meme problem with kerolox, they chose methalox because it could be ISRU'd on mars. And here's something interesting, you'd think SpaceX wouldn't include a big ass engine skirt for Starship right? Just excess mass AND it prevents you from being able to radiatively cool your engines. I mean, if you already designed the booster to be caught with a tower, why not do the same with the ship? Maybe re-entry aerodynamics, but I think you could reduce the size of the skirt while protecting components and shifting mass to some kind of interstage. To me, the only good reason would be storing landing legs in the skirt when you touch down on Mars.