It happened! Planetary Scientists just officially revealed the potential of SpaceX Starship...

if all goes well next month spacex will launch the largest rocket in human history and if it's successful starship as musk said will enable a quantum leap in deep space and planetary science but how well let's find the answer in today's episode of great spacex for scientists there are always more questions than answers and there are always many more missions they want to fly than funds available to them the ubiquity of water on the moon has only heightened scientists desire to get robots out into the solar system to definitely find ice deposits and subsurface oceans to characterize them just as we're learning that the solar system holds far more secrets than we might have imagined we come to find that our inability to fly out there and unlock them especially frustrating but let me ask you this what if we could some planetary scientists have started warming up to the idea that spacex's new starship rockets with its unprecedented lift capabilities and potentially paradigm shattering low costs could open up the solar system to a new era of exploration imagine sending a lander to europa which harbors a vast warm subsurface ocean such an amazing scene during recent nasa planning meetings scientists contemplated sending a complex spacecraft costing billions of dollars to conduct science on europa at best they were hoping to land a payload of science instruments about the size and mass of a mini refrigerator there with starship by contrast nasa might land a cache of scientific payloads the size of a single story unfinished house as planetary scientist jennifer heldman said you can really take advantage of the starship architecture and get to the outer solar system in ways we haven't thought about before then she concluded that it could provide a revolutionary new way of exploring these worlds but why has she come to such a conclusion starship is designed to be not just large but cheap to launch whereas agencies like nasa and esa must carefully choose a smattering of missions to fund with launch costs in the tens of hundreds of millions of dollars starships affordability as low as 2 million dollars per launch could open the door to many more and what's more starship has a key advantage over other super heavy lift rockets in development such as nasa's much delayed space launch system and blue origin's new glenn rocket the upper half of the rocket is designed to be refueled in earth orbit by other starships so more of its lifting capability can be handed over to scientific equipment rather than the fuel taking humans to the moon for example might require eight separate launches with each consecutive tanker starship bringing up fuel to the lunar starship that then makes its way to the moon with scientific equipment and crew scientists are now starting to dream of what starship might let them do earlier this year a white paper was published with heldman as the lead author titled accelerating martian and lunar science through spacex starship missions starship's key differentiator is mass which means starship could carry full-sized equipment from earth no need to miniaturize it to fit in a smaller vehicle as was required for the apollo missions to the moon in short it's a complete game changer because starship can take off from other worlds in addition to landing on them it could completely transform a martian sample return mission instead of being able to bring a few kilograms of rocks as nasa intended starship might be able to return to metric tons brown university's james head who helped nasa select apollo landing sites in the 1960s and trained the astronauts who landed there enthusiastically signed the white paper and said he appreciates that spacex has a compelling vision and is diligently working toward that goal at spacex's headquarters in hawthorne california head said he saw the kind of youth energy and determination that propelled the apollo program being on the floor of the spacex factory is the closest i felt to having been in the apollo program headset starship could also enable more extravagant missions to other locations either via a direct launch from earth or perhaps by using the moon and mars as refueling stations an ambitious future envisioned by musk one idea from an international group of scientists called conex or conceptual exploration research is a spacecraft called arcanum which would make use of starship's heavy lifting capabilities to explore neptune and its largest moon triton neptune has been visited only once a flying visit by nasa's voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 and there is so much we still don't know about it as james mckevitt a researcher at the university of vienna and the co-lead of conex said nobody's really thinking on this next level about what starship could enable other ideas are even more speculative philip lubin a physicist from the university of california santa barbara calculated that a large enough rocket such as starship could be used to prevent an asteroid from hitting earth such a mission could carry enough explosives to rip apart an asteroid as large as the 10 kilometer wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs its fragments would harmlessly burn up in the atmosphere before they had a chance to reach our planet starship could also be a better way to launch giant space telescopes that can observe the universe currently equipment such as nasa and esa's upcoming james webb space telescope must be launched folded up an expensive complex and delicate procedure that could be prone to error nasa has suggested that a proposed super telescope called l-u-v-o-i-r designed to image earth-like planets around other stars could launch on starship while musk has said spacex is already working on an interesting project which is to have a really big telescope taking a lens that was intended for a ground-based telescope and creating a space-based telescope with it elsewhere some scientists have dreamed of using starship to prepare to visit other stars renee heller from the max planck institute for solar system research in germany and colleagues say that starship could offer a low-cost way to test technologies for a spacecraft that can travel multiple light years to neighboring star systems starship could release a sail-powered spacecraft on a trip to mars which would use an on-board laser to push against a thin sail and reach incredible speeds enabling a demonstration to be conducted beyond earth's orbit then we should be able to follow its acceleration and path through the solar system for a few days and almost to the orbit of jupiter musk suggested that spacex could launch as many as a dozen starship test flights in 2022 with missions to the moon and mars both on the horizon and plenty of scientific potential to boot or as musk puts it it's really whatever you can imagine and that is all the information we have for you today if you like what my team and i are doing and would like to continue supporting us in a huge way you can become a patron through our patreon link in the description below and don't forget to tell us what you thought about today's content as well as give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed today's episode subscribe if you haven't already and be sure to hit the bell to stay up to date on future episodes of great spacex everyone's support motivates us to continue delivering quality content and to always improve and as always this is kevin with great spacex and my team and i will see you next time [Music]

Channel: GREAT SPACEX

Views: 83,436

Keywords: spacex, It happened! Planetary Scientists just officially revealed the potential of SpaceX Starship..., nasa, Space x, spacex starship, starship, starship spacex, spacex rocket, spacex vs blue origin, spacex mars, spacex superheavy, spacex SN, starship boca chica, starlink, spacex news, Starship rocket, Starship test, starship launch, Elon Musk's SpaceX

Id: IG-RwBW5a-E

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021