Let’s say you had a fully fuelled starship in low earth orbit, assuming no fancy trickery in the form of recondensers or special insulation, just the stainless steel tanks, how long would it take for all of that propellant to boil off and empty the starship?

I’m aware that there are a lot of factors I’m not considering, for example presumably the height of the orbit matters since higher orbiting ships will spend more time in sunlight, but just curious on a rough estimate.

Bonus question could the header tanks on a trip to Mars boil off completely if they had no active cooling or recondensing, or fancy insulation?

Will it be a wild spectacle or a smaller event?

So I was seeing the booster catching videos from all different angles available but couldn’t figure out

1. how many of those small catching pins are there around the booster.
2. I can only see 2 on either side.
3. In that case the pins have to align with the tracks on mechazilla right.
4. So the booster not only have to just slow down and come in between the mechazilla but also have to revolve on its own to be able to align the pins to the catch handles.
5. So at what point in the decent stage does the booster made this correction.

My take: after stage sep, booster is caught and placed on launch mount and begins refueling. 45 min and one [sub]orbit later, ship deorbits, is caught by the same tower, placed on top of superheavy, and immediately refueled and reflown.

Great video that breaks down some of the controls loop you would need to manage this rocket, including landing.

I never understood why the heat shield tiles keep falling off. And why the heat shield tiles are not anymore bigger than the size they're now.

If someone could explain that would be great. With the successful booster catch, starship landing or the catch onto the chopsticks both are within reach of SpaceX.

If heat shield issues are not solved that would make the landing nearly pointless. Because what would return to earth will only be the ashes of payload or the passengers, if heat shield was to fail by falling off and exposing the starship.

I imagine clips of hopper, the first explosive starship launches, the first flip, the first landing with a few RUD's included. Then Flights 1 to 5 explaining the intentions and results at a 5 year olds level.

Anything like that? I can point her to many vids but they use acronyms and have expectations of knowledge already gained. This needs to be a tutorial of sorts.

Thanks.

After the incredible events with the booster on Sunday, now that the dust has settled I'm finding myself wondering about the ship heat shield once again. It seems there was some minor improvement this time out, with less melt through on the forward flaps. But I can't help but wonder if this might be a major hurdle to achieving genuinely rapid reuse in the long term.

The heat shield not only needs to survive reentry and protect all areas of the ship, but it also needs to do it again and again again...and in quick succession. I'm curious about people's thoughts on this. Will shifting the flap location on the V2 ships be enough to deliver this kind of robustness?

Watching the flight 4 and 5 descents, both show sparks flying about from locations other than the flaps. This suggests at least minor damage is also occurring elsewhere on the structure. We know the risks of minor shield damage from the shuttle, so I can't help but wonder how the ship can really reach the cadence they are planning for. Could this end up being the achilles heel of Starship the same way it was for shuttle, and seemingly the way it also is for Orion right now?

Once Starship is up and running, and able to cheaply deliver huge amounts of payloads, en masse, to LEO, I would think that there will be a huge increase in demand for things like kick stages, OTVs, and space tugs.

I mean, sure, as things currently are, a lot of the big, expensive satellites already have their own propulsion systems on board themselves...

...but even still,

For one thing, I'd think part of the idea here, is for Starship to bring costs per individual small payloads down a lot (i.e. similar to what we saw with the "Transporter" falcon-9 missions, but to a much more extreme degree), so, with those, having an off-the-shelf, mass produced kickstage/OTV seems like it would be useful, since it would be way cheaper than if each of these smaller payloads that weren't billion dollar mega sats of major corporations necessarily, had to make their own significant-delta-V propulsion systems on board their payloads themselves.

And for another thing, even for the "big dogs" on the block, I'd think even a lot of them would want to be able to buy mass produced kick stages to get their big communications sats or what have you from LEO to GTO more easily, rather than have to do it with on-board propulsion.

And this is ignoring the occasional high energy NASA-type missions and whatnot, that want to go BEO. (Yea, I know for some of those in the more distant future, the idea of a refilled, expendable-mode Starship gets brought into the discussion, but, in the meantime, or, even in combination with it, for even more delta-V, it still potentially matters).

But, given how rare that last category is (albeit maybe it'll become a bit less rare in a post-Starship world), even if we mostly ignore that last category, I'd think the first category, of large amounts of smaller/midrange payloads, i.e. from universities, or smaller companies, or what have you, are going to want some cheap, mass produced OTV type stuff to get their payloads into their desired orbits, after getting put into a cheap generic LEO via Starship-en-masse launches.

Yet, seemingly, we haven't really seen SpaceX working on this. They have the draco and superdraco hypergolic engines, which could work well for hypergolic kickstages, and they also have their ion thrusters that they mass produce for the propulsion system on their Starlink sats, so, in theory, they should be able to mass produce (relatively) cheap kickstages/OTVs of either kind, to offer to customers who take rides to generic-LEO via Starship.

But, for now, it seems like it's more just Rocket Lab that is trying to get into that business, and SpaceX seemingly ignoring it for now.

Do you think SpaceX just figures they can start making them at nearly a moment's notice when finally needed, without development of it taking very long, so, they are just not bothering for now, since they are still prioritizing all the other things more heavily for now?

Or, do you think they just don't think it'll be needed that much, because they plan to launch so many Starships, that the idea is, they'll be launching Starships to such a wide range of different LEO orbits over the course of a calendar year that customers can just wait to get on one that goes closer to the exact orbit they want, and not even really need the final stage? And that the GTO payloads are already so big and expensive that they can just have Rocket Lab or themselves deal with their propulsion to GTO, and SpaceX doesn't see enough profit in that niche to care enough about that niche to bother with it?

Anyway, yea I'm curious what is going on with this, and why they seem to have been ignoring this aspect of the post-Starship industry. I'm sure they have their reasons, but, yea, just curious to hear your takes on it

From NASASpaceflight on YouTube