The SpaceX Starship SPACE STATION Is Coming!

I'm gonna let you in on a little secret the International Space Station is dying okay maybe that's not so much of a secret but the solution is you see we don't need the orbital Reef Axiom space or even the Haven one because we already have the answer to our space station needs right under our nose this is the space race is the SpaceX Starship Just a space station in Waiting well yeah it certainly could be in theory the Starship as we know it today is an evolution of the interplanetary transport system concept that was dreamed up by Elon Musk a decade ago that vehicle had one sole purpose to Ferry thousands of people from the Earth to the planet Mars and establish a self-sustaining City on the red planet the Starship represents a more scaled back and practical approach to Rocket design compared to the its but the general mission statement remains this is a rocket intended to move large numbers of people on very long Journeys into deep space so maintaining a comfortable and habitable environment is core to the Starship design so therefore it would stand to reason that if a Starship can sustain a crew on an eight-month Journey to Mars then it can be even more sustainable as a platform parked in low earth Earth orbit of course the Starship itself has yet to reach the Carmen line without blowing up but you know it's a work in progress so giving Elon the benefit of the doubt and assuming that Starship is more than just the world's largest firework how could it be utilized as a new space station the biggest advantage to the Starship is volume and we don't mean noise we mean space let's pull up an angle from the first Starship launch to help visualize this with the tanks full of cryogenic fuel we can see them clearly from the condensation on the outside so everything above the frost line on Starship is empty space and for a human scale we can compare this video of Elon Musk standing on that top platform beside the nose cone this stuff is gigantic people are like ants crawling around on this thing so that's an 18 meter tall Fairing and the body is 9 meters wide although it does obviously start to taper down at the nose but that still gives us 4 four ring sections at full width which equals about 7.3 meters of height at the full 9 meter diameter in total that adds up to approximately 1 000 cubic meters of internal volume which is just a bit larger than the ISS at 935 cubic meters of space this is a lot of room it's larger than your average 5 bedroom house now we've seen plenty of different mock-ups with the inside of a Starship laid out for a crude configuration and typically that looks like a central tunnel and Ladder going up the Middle with five or six vertical levels stacked on top of each other and the reason for this design is because in the context of a mission to Mars or even the moon Starship would have to function while standing vertically on the ground with at least some amount of gravity acting on the crew but in the context of a space station this all changes now you aren't limited by the round narrow slices of a vertical Starship one Ops option would be to make the layout submarine Style with Decks that run lengthwise from nose to tail submarines with a hull diameter of 9 to 11 meters will typically have three decks so we can imagine the same for a Starship station I'm not sure which orientation would be ideal horizontal decks or vertical I've never lived in a spaceship but what do you think let us know below or you could even have a design with no Decks at all and just make it one big open concept Style Space Station that would also be really cool you'd have so much room for a zero gravity activities you could invent some kind of new zero gravity sport up there and if you could do all that with one Starship then why not have two Elon Musk says that the cost of these things will get down to 20 million dollars a pop which is basically free in terms of space stations with over 20 years in orbit it's been estimated that the total cost to operate the ISS has been upwards of 150 billion you US Dollars and if the cost is so affordable you could link up a ton of these ships together in a big ring of like 20 all slowly rotating around to create the effect of artificial gravity which in that case you wouldn't have much choice but to use the horizontal nose to tail deck layout so that solves that question this is actually an idea that NASA was toying with back in the day they had thought about making a big ring using the space shuttle's main hydrogen tank the big orange thing that the shuttle piggybacked on into space the shuttle is a very similar size to Starship but it lacks any of the functionality because it's just a big empty tank and Starship is an actual spaceship so that all sounds pretty much perfect right and NASA themselves even agree they've endorsed the SpaceX Starship as a new orbital platform to replace the ISS that's what it says in the news right well wrong so here's the Scoop in June 2023 NASA announced that they were putting their support behind seven individual concepts for new space stations that would be built and operated by private sector companies this list includes an idea for a Starship derived space station but it also includes ideas from Northrop Grumman blue origin vast Axiom space think orbital and Sierra space in no particular order so it's not like NASA is betting the farm on Starship it's just one idea out of many that are being thrown at the wall and more specifically NASA isn't betting anything at all on any of these wannabe space stations what we are talking about here are unfunded space act agreements as part of NASA's collaborations for commercial space capabilities 2 initiative so what that means is NASA will provide the selected companies with technical expertise assessments and data to assist the companies in the development of new capabilities but there's no money involved I'm going to put it out there that we may have possibly overlooked some significant complications attached to the whole Starship space station idea the most glaring issue here is size while the internal volume of the Starship might be its greatest asset it's hard to ignore the fact that two-thirds of the total structure will be unusable space that's the area taken up by the engines the plumbing system and the propellant tanks it's over half of the ship the problem is that the Starship has to be a rocket before it can be a space station there might be some engineering solution to make the lower half into usable space but it would need to be really well thought through the area just underneath the cargo fairing is a methane tank and it's capped off by a stainless steel Dome that's welded into the body of the ship so you'd have to cut that Dome out before you could even access the space that needs a plasma cutter or a diamond blade saw and even if you could get in there now you're doing home renovations in low earth orbit that's really going to work against our theory that Starship would be easy and economical as a space station the other glaring issue that we see with the Starship station is the lack of IO or input out devices Starship is kind of like a MacBook Air there aren't a lot of opportunities to plug stuff in what do we mean well the ISS has a lot of ports and accessory attachments docking ports airlocks robot arms solar panels stuff like that the exterior of a Starship is famously smooth and shiny so you have to wonder how it could ever have the functionality of a dedicated space station module we know that Starship is intended to someday have a docking port in the nose cone but is there ever really going to be the ability to have more access points and attachments on the body of the ship keeping in mind that because a Starship is a rocket first the exterior has to be aerodynamically stable and sturdy enough to travel at supersonic speed through the atmosphere on ascent and since the star ship is so gigantic that's a lot of force that it has to resist we've seen renderings of Starship that are like half covered in Windows which looks like an absolutely spectacular view into outer space but can a Starship with Windows actually survive a launch into orbit that's something that still needs to be tested and proven before we can really start making too many assumptions if we really want to go down the most practical and efficient route for leveraging the capabilities of Starship to build a space station then it's better to think of Starship more in terms of a super heavy lift launch vehicle with a massive payload capacity Starship doesn't have to be a giant space station because it can much more easily just deploy a giant space station you wouldn't be able to use the full interior volume for habitable space but Starship could place one seriously gigantic module into low earth orbit it could be up to eight and a half meters wide by 7 meters long or maybe 10 meters long by 7 meters wide if you want to use more of the height of the Fairing and then just with two or three Starship launches you'd have one hell of a space station in orbit plus SpaceX would still have those starships that were able to return to Earth after deploying the payload so it's a win-win situation with that being said should we just park a Starship in orbit and call it a space station probably not it might seem cool at first but the more you think about it the more it just feels like a really lazy solution to a non-existent problem we've got loads of cool ideas for new space stations that are specifically engineered to be orbital platforms that serve the needs of Science and Industry and will allow us to better Humanity through work in outer space there are even some really cool ideas in the group of seven alongside Starship a couple of them we've never even really talked about on the channel before so drop a comment if you'd like to see more space station content here meet us back here every week for more updates on 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Channel: The Space Race

Views: 232,085

Keywords: starship, spacex, starship space station, spacex space station, starship launch, elon musk, spacex starship, starship spacex, space station, international space station, spacex starship space station, nasa, nasa space station

Id: F9YVmf61KWY

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023