The things they make Starship so revolutionary and paradigm shifting are:

• 100% reusability
• Flexible engine architecture
• It’s large size
• The ability to refuel in space

The last point may be something a lot of people don’t understand why it’s so revolutionary.

Refuel-ability is the most revolutionary aspect of Starship

It is not necessarily the most difficult of all the capabilities of Starship. It is almost a default side effect of the reusability and the engine architecture.

The other 3 key paradigm changing features of Starship are very difficult to achieve and combined with the refuel-ability gives Starship the ability to do things we’ve never seriously considered before.

Artemis-2 will use refuel-ability

The Artemis program will use it because it requires a component called the HLS ( human landing system). Artemis believe it or not does not come with a lander unlike Apollo.

Astronauts wanting to go to the moon or Mars will not take with them a lander. The astronauts will live in something called “Orion” which is a separate module inside the top of Artemis which supports the humans on their trip.

In the Apollo program this was called the “service module.” It provided the life support for the humans. No matter what we do with Artemis or Starship we need Orion because Starship doesn’t have a human supporting component yet.

As part of NASAs funding for Artemis they have paid for SpaceX to build a version of Starship that can rendezvous with Artemis around the moon or Mars and take the crew to the planet and land vertically on the planets surface like it does on Earth.

Starship can’t do this in one “stop shop.” Starship can take a human landing module in its top half that SpaceX is developing similar to its crew Dragon capsule it developed for going to the ISS with Falcon rockets.

For some reason I don’t fully understand NASA plans to fund 4 different HLS craft. Potentially one from Blue Origin for instance.

The first will be Starship’s version.

Starship will launch with the human supporting module and wait in orbit. A second and third starship will already have been launched that will have methane fuel in its tanks.

In 2024 SpaceX has been contracted to demonstrate this refueling capability. NASA is paying SpaceX $50 million to do a refuel of a Starship in space.

So Starship will use 2 or more tanker Starships to unload their fuel into the HLS holding Starship enabling Starship to finish its journey to the moon with enough fuel to rendezvous with Artemis and then land on the moon and take off from the moon.

I don’t know if starship will then return to the earth like Artemis or will remain around the moon or even land on the moon without humans as a depot of some sort.

The HLS is supposed to support humans for at least 2 weeks. Apollo could only support 2 humans for 3 days. HLS may be able to support far more people for much longer time on the surface of the moon or mars.

Why not go to Jupiter

We have sent probes to outer planets that weigh about 1,000 pounds. They have very limited capability and the idea of sending humans to Jupiter is science fiction.

Sending people to mars is the limit of Artemis. Even then Artemis still can’t land people on Mars. Starship can.

Starship can’t do it without refueling but refueling gives Starship the capability to do almost anything including Jupiter or Saturn.

If you want to go to Jupiter with people the only thing we need to do is place refueling modules at appropriate points along the way.

NASA could litter the solar system with refueling starships like Elon has superchargers every 50 miles on the interstates. With this starship could go virtually anyplace.

We would send maybe 10 refueling starships to get to Jupiter. At a few million apiece ( reuse cost) it’s cheap. Elon would have to build a fleet of dozens of Starships that were ready to go and hang around to meet other Starships.

The Starship architecture is so flexible that we could put additional human module Starships along the way so the crew could have backup modules in case anything went wrong with one.

You could also load up starships with human consumables so the human supporting module could be recharged like the engines so that the crew could live for years in space.

The amazing thing is this wouldn’t even be that expensive. At the costs SpaceX is planning even if they were off by an order of magnitude it would still be ridiculously cheap compared to Artemis.

The ability to refuel is critical to all this flexibility.

Prior to Starship NASA would design a spaceship for each mission or destination and that would end up costing 10s of billions. Artemis is expected to cost $160 billion.

Starship is up to 1000 times cheaper. That doesn’t mean the mission cost is 1000 times cheaper because not all the cost is simply the booster.

Starship will reduce the cost by at least an order of magnitude because a huge amount of the NASA cost is this non-reusable and constant design of new spacecraft.

NASA needs to dump Artemis

Artemis not only has huge costs it works by using used parts from the long abandoned shuttle program from 40 years ago. Those parts will run out by Artemis 4. Maybe sooner.

After NASA runs out of parts from the shuttles it will either have to build more shuttle engines or more likely have to design entirely new engines and booster.

Most of Artemis’s $160 billion is already committed or spent. Maybe $80 billion might be able to be retargeted. NASA should do this and switch to. Starship because Starship is paradigm shifting. The longer they take to switch the more money we waste and the less we can do in the future.

NASA needs to rethink everything because Starship is paradigm shifting

The cost and flexibility of Starship changes everything about the way NASA does things. Starship gives NASA the ability to be more like a train company.

I have said many times NASA is like a movie production company. They create whole new productions for every mission. Every one costs a fortune but nobody cares because it’s a show. NASA doesn’t look at it like this is a business to go to space. Every mission is planned from scratch.

With Starship NASA can even modify missions in the middle of a mission.

The safety of the Starship system could be orders of magnitude greater than anything NASA has done before.

The reason is that we can have large redundancy because of the ability to cheaply put up additional mass in the form of more supplies, spare components or even whole life support craft.

The reliability of everything is much higher because of reusability. By being able to reuse the same modules for any mission we can iterate to improve reliability.

It is proven that the way air travel has gotten more reliable is because they can reuse airplanes and keep improving them systematically. If you don’t have to design everything from scratch you can drastically improve everything from reliability to safety to cost improvements.

The Starship fundamentally creates this kind of ability to use the same components over and over to do anything.

A new Space Station

NASA plans to decommission the ISS in 2025 or maybe 2030. The ISS is 4,000 square feet and is pretty limited.

I have already written a blog post on using Starship to build a Space Station with 80,000 square feet that rotates.

This would be a project that could cost somewhere between $30-$100 billion. The original ISS cost $150 billion. This would be a space station that is 20 times bigger and capability for half the price or less.

A space station like this would support up to 100 people which would allow it to be a place for people to collect for missions on starships and to collect equipment and load starships.

Multiple remote space station

We could easily deposit human landing system Starships at different places in the solar system or the moon to represent places for astronauts to go and do science around Mars or Jupiter or even Saturn.

These would be large enough maybe 4,000 square feet like the space station. By modularizing these outposts we could have these available occupied or not continuously.

The massively reduced costs of Starship makes the support of such remote stations very efficient.

The ISS costs $4 billion a year to supply and send people to. By having several outposts and using reusable components NASA could potentially have several of these around many moons or planets in the solar system simultaneously.

These stations would be ideal for the long missions to enable quicker replacement of supplies and people by being able to stage them in intermediate destinations or take multiple hops to get to the final destination.

James Webb 2.0

The James Webb is an order of magnitude bigger than Hubble. It is truly an astonishing instrument.

It cost $16 billion.

Starship enables us to build and deploy a telescope array consisting of dozens of webb’s.

You may not know but we don’t have to build a telescope with a 300 foot mirror. You can get the equivalent of a 300 foot mirror simply by combining a dozen 30 foot mirrors.

Computers can combine and use the information from a dozen or a hundred telescopes located separated by a significant distance.

A telescope of such capability would allow us to peer into other solar systems and see planets. It would allow us to detect signs of life on planets many light years away better than possible today.

The amazing thing is that we could build a telescope like this for less than the cost of the James Webb.

Interstellar missions

The Starship is not designed to go interstellar.

Voyager-1 and 2 were sent 40 years ago into space and are now beyond the edge of our solar system. They are traveling at about 30,000 miles per hour.

While this sounds fast it will take thousands of years for voyagers to reach other solar systems.

While Starship itself can’t travel outside the solar system any better than any other rocket or system it does provide advantages to building missions that could go much faster and farther than voyagers with vastly more capability.

You can imagine several ways to do this.

1. Put a large spaceship with a huge ion propulsion capability. Ion propulsion would allow a spaceship to reach speeds eventually a small fraction of the speed of light.

Using Starship to stage the interstellar craft very far from earth without having to use any of its fuel would enable a much more capable and long lasting interstellar craft.

It could achieve speeds 100 times voyager. It would still take a hundred years to get to the closest solar system but it could be designed to actually be alive when it gets there and send back information and interact with humans 100 years from now.

2. Stage starships out in interstellar space

A less practical idea is to extend the idea of using refueling of starship by sending refueling Starships far far into interstellar space.

This would be vastly more expensive and doesn’t make sense but hey it’s possible.

3. Changing to nuclear rocket engines

Starship runs on methane engines. I’m not sure what the possibility of retrofitting starships to nuclear propulsion but nuclear propulsion would drastically cut times to get around the solar system.

A nuclear enabled Starship could go to Mars in 2 months. Having a fleet of nuclear enabled Starships that could go anywhere in the solar system in 1/5th time.

That means getting to Jupiter in less than a year or Saturn. It means potentially a much larger and faster interstellar craft. It will never take less than 20 years to get to a different solar system but remember we’ve already waited 40 years for voyager so 20 years isn’t insane.

I’m not saying this would be a manned mission. It would be purely robotic.

4. Brilliant lights. There is currently a plan to send small satellites powered by a giant laser on top of a mountain.

The laser would shine a powerful laser beam that would reflect off mirrors on thumb size satellites that would be accelerated to near the speed of light by this laser.

Imagine a brilliant lights interstellar mission using a laser based in space and powered by nuclear or solar power or a combination. This would be 10 times more efficient and make the cost and practicality of brilliant lights interstellar mission much more reasonable.

Asteroid mining

NASA had a plan to move an asteroid and mine it but dumped it in favor of mars missions.

Starship could make the idea of commercializing asteroids possible.

Asteroids solve a huge problem potentially. They contain inexhaustible amounts of minerals.

There are problems in getting the materials back to earth. Starship may be able to help answer this question.

Traditional entry into the earth’s atmosphere involves use of exotic materials like pica that is extremely expensive and disposable not reusable and spacecraft that are not easily reusable.

Elon is solving that problem with Starship. Starships enter the atmosphere using solid stainless steel and reusable non-pica tiles that don’t wear out even after dozens of uses.

This could mean we could load up a starship with large amounts of expensive minerals at an asteroid and land them.

It may still not be economic but I haven’t analyzed it. It still seems hard.

Dart 2.0

The dart mission happened a few weeks ago. A small 15 kiloton mass was smashed into a small asteroid to test being able to divert an asteroid.

We all know that such a small mass would have no impact on any asteroid that would cause damage on earth.

Using Starship we could stage in Lagrange points both nuclear bombs and potentially do things like move an asteroid into the path of the oncoming killer asteroid to divert it.

Moving an asteroid would be done with some kind of efficient propulsion system.

The point is Starship enables us to build a planetary defense against asteroids that has been problematic forever. Very exciting real practical and important missions.

Colonize Mars

Starship was designed for this purpose.

Starship was designed to enable colonization of mars.

I have written extensively how to do this and this should be one of the purposes.

NASA’s Artemis program is not about colonization.

Artemis envisions weeks of time on mars or the moon not colonization. Artemis does not leave any materials that could be used for colonists.

Artemis is a total waste of a lot of money. Artemis should be cancelled and NASA should rethink everything about space missions going forward.

Spaceship 2

Elon is planning or thinking about a second larger version of Starship.

The current Starship would cost $2 million a mission and could hold potentially 100 people on a mission to Mars.

Colonizing Mars with 100 people will take a long time if you want to put lots of people on mars.

I personally think it is still 2 decades before we should put humans on mars. I have written about this a lot. Other plans call for people going to Mars much sooner. I disagree.

Elon wants to build a Starship that is twice the dimensions of Starship 1.

This means a Starship that is 18 meters wide ( instead of 9 meters). This means a Starship capable of lifting an order of magnitude more mass into space.

This means a rocket with 120 million lbs of thrust compared to the 12.7 million lb thrust of Starship 1.

Can you imagine a rocket 10 times more powerful than a Starshjp that is already 100% bigger than any rocket that has ever flown in human history including the Apollo. !!!!

Starship 2 could carry 1000 people to mars or deliver huge amounts of mass to mars in a single mission or be an outpost near Jupiter or Saturn with one launch.

Summary

The summary is simple. NASA is not considering the paradigm shifting capability of Starship.

These ideas above really will transform the world. It is shifting the conception of humans as a spacefaring civilization.

This is the dream that Elon has pushed.

I don’t agree with everything Elon wants ( assuming I understand what he’s thinking.). But there is no doubt Starship is an incredible change that is comparable to what Star Trek envisaged with “warp drive.”

Warp drive in Star Trek changed peoples perceptions of humanity and it’s purpose. I don’t know if enough people will get excited by space missions like the above but I believe it couldn’t hurt.