Inside SpaceX's Moon Lander: The Lunar Starship

hello and welcome to the small stars channel and do we have a treat for you today we're going to take a tour of an interior designed for humanity spaceships of the near future so let's hop right inside the spacex lunar starship no matter which version of spacex's next generation spacecraft gets decked out with an interior for humans the inside volume of a starship is one big cylinder with the top tapering off into a cone you know like a rocket so the lower or aft portion of the interior volume is all propellant and engines and the starship's general design which allows for such a large portion of the spacecraft to be filled with payload is truly extraordinary giving us a lot to work with in terms of volume bear in mind though that volume isn't the only constraint of a spacecraft the propellant tanks will hold somewhere around 1200 tons of liquid propellant which supports the propulsion of up to 100 tons of payload during a typical mission 100 metric tons is equal to a thousand of me because i weigh about 100 kilograms or 220 pounds so if that's a lot for your brain to handle don't worry the takeaway here is that the spacex starship will have plenty of room inside and be able to lift and effectively change the velocity of its mass even when it's all filled up and heavy now the usable volume of a starship will be about the same or a little more than the international space station but of course the iss's volume is spread out into a network of tubular modules that fit inside the space shuttle's payload bay the usable interior volume of a spaceship even if you have a lot of it to work with can be tough to set up and plan for especially when it needs to be dynamic so that it can be effective in different gravity environments ergonomics for gravity and non-gravity situations are vastly different there are a lot of strange consequences to consider for example astronaut scott kelly who spent almost a year in low-earth orbit during a single mission said that living in the microgravity environment you're obviously never standing up with your weight on your feet the top of your feet develop a rough alligator skin because you use the top of your feet to get around which causes your foot calluses to eventually fall off and the bottoms of your feet to become very soft like the feet of a newborn baby but the iss never lands on the moon and even though the moon has only one-sixth of the magnitude of the gravity force that keeps us on the ground here on earth it's still gravity and what goes up as long as it doesn't reach orbital or escape velocity must come down even on the moon you can really hurt yourself falling down on the moon and while exploring the surface outside of your spacecraft falling can be more treacherous than you might expect because there's no atmosphere to slow you down and the gravity doesn't maintain speed it accelerates whatever is falling in fact if you jumped off a high enough cliff on the moon it's possible to reach a faster falling speed than you would be able to on earth causing you to hit the ground harder this is because the moon lacks an atmosphere the atmosphere on earth would limit your speed despite the earth's stronger gravity so anyway the lunar starship has to have all sorts of one-sixth gravity living considerations that other space-only spaceships don't need to have thanks to the starship's general shape most designs have a tube down the middle used to access the various decks as of now this is the only official spacex interior animation that's been publicly released and it's basically a well-lit empty tube and deck situation in 2020 i teamed up with space designer eric x and we released version 1 of our dual purpose starship interior concept i say dual purpose because we intended the living space to be used by humans in microgravity which is essentially zero g while flying through space and also under substantial gravity while landed on the moon or mars etc our design had 64 beds and showed more zero g-oriented approach in the mess hall on deck 5 which is meant to have velcro panels that would fold down into tables when landed on mars for the lunar starship we designed the interior for living in gravity for eight humans with a permanent bar as the centerpiece of the design to be used during meal times since the lunar starship is a moonlander for nasa's artemis program the majority of the time it will be occupied by humans it will be upright on the moon's surface sure they'll spend hours or maybe even a day or two at a time and transit from lunar orbit down to the surface and back but that's nothing compared to the amount of time the lunar starship will be able to support life on the moon and don't forget the potential for it to be used as a permanent lunar habitat after it's retired from its career as a lunar lander so that's why we designed it with permanent fixtures for substantial gravity but why do we go with only eight astronauts in such a big space well if you didn't already notice the lunar starship has no aero flaps which are the regular starship's wing-like protrusions it has no heat shield and i would wager that it will have hatch hardware in the nose instead of the regular starship's oxygen header tank what does all of this tell us is that the lunar starship will never return and land safely on earth it's specialized to do one job really well which is to land on and support human life on the surface of the moon astronauts will use a separate spacecraft like a regular starship or for the artemis program's case an orion capsule to transit to and from the earth's surface and lunar orbit the orion capsule only holds four astronauts so i wouldn't be surprised if spacex designs the first lunar starship to only support four moon exploring humans assuming they get selected for further funding by nasa if they don't get selected and this is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt i predict spacex will stop developing the lunar starship completely and shift all of their focus onto the regular and mars versions of the starship we do know that elon's goals are set for mars and not the moon and that doesn't mean that spacex won't land on the moon if they don't get nasa funding for the lunar starship with or without spacex nasa will land on the moon and a lunar base with landing pads will eventually be built on the moon as well allowing regular spacex starships to land there safely the regular starships need landing pads because they don't have the lunar starship's mid-side engines meaning they shoot rocket exhaust downwards during landing an ascent which is highly undesirable for a reusable spacecraft to do if it's landing on an uneven surface with loose material which the moon is known to have at least in the areas where we've landed before using the disposable descent stages of the apollo lunar module speaking of the general spacecraft design i wouldn't be surprised if the lunar starship's landing legs see an update because these six feet don't have a very wide stance for such a tall tower to land on with a possibly uneven surface underneath them thanks to timberwolf for this great comment pointing this out and man do i love comments now that's about the leg splay the feet themselves seem to be large enough and we know that for the apollo missions before anyone had ever been to the moon there was concern that the lunar crust might be mushy like quicksand so the legs were equipped with feet that we now know were larger than necessary by the way in 1971 the apollo 15 lunar module which happened to be named falcon of course landed with one of its feet on the rim of a 20-foot wide crater this caused one of the lunar modules other foot pads to hang above the surface and the entire lander came to rest at an 11 degree tilt so back to the present very near future power is also an important general design consideration for the lunar starship since the artemis program aims to establish a human presence at the south pole of the moon solar panels will be most effective when they're oriented vertically all three of nasa's current lunar lander options have solar panels that face sideways sticking up from the surface and you would design your solar panels similarly if they were to be used at the earth's poles as well at the equator you'd want your panels to be generally facing straight up and the farther north or south you go the more you would tilt the panels towards the equator to get the best angle of insulation and absorb the most power from the sun that you can the official spacex lunar starship images from 2020 show solar panels that cover a portion of the nose of the ship which makes sense though i'm not sure if they alone will be enough the regular winged starship will presumably have some sort of deployable solar panel system and it's fairly safe to assume that the system will be supported by a very lightweight structure that can only deploy and stow the panels while in the weightlessness of space but one day when there are landing pads on the moon power systems will be set up for regular starships to plug into during their time on the surface and then eventually since they're regular starships they'd be able to take off and bring humans all the way back to earth for now for the first exploratory missions of the artemis program if the lunar starship is used four astronauts will dock their orion capsule to spacex's lander while orbiting the moon in a nearly rectilinear halo orbit this way they can use the lunar starship to land on and live on the moon and then when they're done ascend from the moon reconnect with the orion capsule they left in orbit and ride orion all the way back to earth for what will probably be a three-day transit and then atmospheric reentry and eventual splash down under parachutes you might be wondering whatever happened to gateway nasa's lunar space station that's currently being developed alongside the artemis program with international support while the mission profile i just described still works with gateway and it would be even better to use gateway as an orbital staging post the new rectilinear halo orbit is prime for so many reasons but it does require station keeping gateway will be equipped with a very powerful solar array and super efficient ion propulsion which uses just a tiny bit of propellant and a whole lot of electricity to create changes in velocity now we get a lot of comments here and we love comments about how cool ion engines are and hey why don't they just use ion engines all over the place well ion engines don't have enough thrust to move large masses by substantial amounts but they are perfect for station keeping which essentially means maintaining an orbit especially when it comes to the station keeping needs of an nrho the ion engine just makes so much sense because just a little bit of thrust is needed at regular intervals every seven days or so each revolution around the moon takes about seven days if you're in the nra show that nasa is planning to put gateway in while astronauts are on the surface of the moon gateway orbiting overhead can keep the astronauts ride back to earth in a good orbit and provide a communications relay back to earth there are of course downsides to using gateway and as promised i will now throw some shade some have referred to gateway as a tollbooth and this isn't a baseless allegation the toll they're referring to isn't monetary although the claim is that using gateway will increase the cost of many missions the toll is one of velocity referring to the fact that precious momentum and the required propellant to generate it will be wasted by using gateway as a pit stop robert zubrin's moon direct and mars direct proposals are much more well direct and will likely get humans back on the moon more quickly and economically than the way nasa is currently planning to do it so i don't disagree with the criticisms of gateway but i do think that gateway is a great project that will end up being an invaluable part of humanity's reach into our solar system plus since it has international support like the iss i don't think it's going to go anywhere or be cancelled anytime soon even if very smart people disagree with its approach so let's fast forward all the way to where our astronauts finally land on the moon and take a look inside what should be the best most fully equipped modern lunar landing spacecraft that humanity in its current state can possibly design so starting pretty much at the top on deck 5 right underneath where all the nose hatch hardware is we have some backup life support systems and just a general storage area where supplies and extra food is kept we're going to go into the main tube here which i did remember to put a ladder in this time and we're going to go down to deck 4 where you'll find the med bay and a large open space for exercising behind this door here is the botany lab i'm not sure if it was a great idea to do this but we put the showers on this deck as well and i do admit that that is debatable so now going down further to deck three this is the habitat really this is where all the eating and sleeping happens and we just figured you'd want to look out the window while you're having your meal and if you've ever seen a diagram of the sleeping situation inside the lunar module from the 60s and 70s you'd know that those astronauts would have loved to have a bed to crawl into in their own cubby space with a closet so we have these three toilets here and then we have this couch for reading and hanging out and just being comfortable in so now when we go down to deck two this is the flight deck this is where you strap into your seat for launch and landings and this is where you know hopefully you'd work during the day i was thinking you know each chair would have a fold out kind of computer laptop situation and then behind that we have some more systems and we have the glove boxes for lunar sample analysis we figured we'd put that as close to the front door as possible going down to deck 1 we have the eva ready section this is where you get ready to leave the spacecraft now i personally love these new artemis spacesuits which they themselves can be used as an airlock and i wanted to include a suit-up airlock wall type of thing that we did for the 64-person version but since the lunar starship is built for eight astronauts and should have the capacity to hold lots of cargo and land lots of cargo on the moon we have eight suits hung up kind of out of the way and a plug type airlock hatch going down to deck zero the cargo deck spacex did say that the lunar starship would have not one but two airlocks and perhaps they might even have an airlock at the nose it's not unlikely that they'll end up with a spacesuit airlock section down here near the main hatch the main hatch dimensions happen to be just wide enough for a cyber truck to fit through it so eric x and i couldn't help ourselves it's worth noting however that i'm a huge fan of nasa's new official electric rover design which is compatible with the airlock space suits it's super cool stuff in fact a cargo lander would be able to drop off a rover like this and astronauts living on a spacex lunar starship would be able to exit their starship in one of the new artemis spacesuits approach the rover and click right in with their backs how cool is that so i hope you enjoyed our lunar starship interior concept please let us know what we forgot to include in the comments and if you want the latest updates don't forget to follow myself and eric exxon twitter links are in the description i'm continuing to turn down sponsorship offers because i hate ads and if you want to help keep the channel ad free and gain access to exclusive content via patreon and cool badges and emojis via the youtube join button consider supporting the channel open your mind and reach for the stars [Music] you

Channel: smallstars

Views: 856,249

Keywords: gravity link starship, spin gravity, artificial gravity, spacex, spacex news, starship, rocket science, mars, NASA, space, orbit, velocity, deep space, science, rocket, elon musk, raptor engine, International Space Station, Space Shuttle, space exploration, spacex starship, the expanse, space station, station, virgin galactic, star wars, star trek, voyager station, voyager, gateway, orbital, assembly, von braun, hotel, voyager station spacex, lunar starship, interior, starship interior

Id: 1u9XcrebLTQ

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021