You know the content is fire when he ask for a Titan drone at the end. :) And you know it’s a small channel when all the comments are helpful and supportive. Though I do hope to see the channel grow!
I imagine that there are some Launch Service administrators that would have some sort of attack at the idea of the Falcon 9 being a 'low cadence' launch vehicle, hahahaha.
Not sure if you mentioned this but, with respect to the payload benefit of Super Heavy drone ship landing, you also need to account for the fact that SH would need heavy landing legs and possibly heavy landing leg extension mechanisms which will eat into any benefit gained from the drone ship landing. Great video!
Based on the title, I just assumed that a hypothetical Superheavy droneship would have the hardware to catch boosters, just as the towers do, although this wasn't explicitly stated in the video.
In theory, you could just land on the engines, but that can be risky. I think that adding a catch tower might be a better idea because SH is already designed to land like that.
@@loafofbreadx tell me you’re a KSP player without telling me you’re a KSP player. This is an insane comment. You can’t land on the engines for two reasons . They’re too fragile to hold several hundred tons of weight, and the landing engines would torch the pad without some breathing room. A tower on the drone ship seems likely, but would be very heavy, requiring a larger ship, and being very high off the water, the tower would sway wildly as the ship rolls on the waves, making a clean catch 10 times harder.
@@J7Handle Yeah, it is insane i will give you that. But think of it this way, everyone thought F9 would be impossible and it is now one of the most successful rockets in history. Sure, right now landing a rocket on 30 raptors may cause small damages to the engines, but all that is needed is a slight increase is strength.
@@J7Handle landing on the engines was the initial plan when starship was in conceptual phase. IIRC musk has said that is still the long-term goal but would need more time to flesh out so it'll likely take a few years of iteration before they can get there.
When I proposed this topic, I was expecting the answer to be some small subtle optimisation I had missed, not another complete perspective change in how I viewed Starship operations. Then again, I forget which channel I'm on sometimes
I appreciate the way things like schedule and economics are part of your analyses so thank you. Too often we hear from other sources arguments about performance of the craft in question without that essential contextualizing information. It will be great if SpaceX makes their target of 100+ tons to orbit, with rapid reuse. But even with somewhat less, being able to launch once a day and at costs in the ballpark of what SpaceX projects will mean a whole new orbital economy, new industry. This is very exciting!
Another great analysis! Even if SpaceX were to optimize Falcon 9 first stage recovery steps to more closely match what is planned with Superheavy, they still would need time to do the de-coking operation as a result of using kerosene fuel, which isn't needed with Superheavy due to its use of methane.
10:40 - Musk did say in an EA interview that they were ‘overclocking the thrusters’ on the Drone ships trying to figure out how fast they could run them.
Nice video, one thing you did miss is the added complexity and weight of adding landing legs to superheavy. But that would have just added more to your point of why they can't use droneships. Really good video and well explained. I think SpaceX would not mind having a "fleet" of boosters and second starships as an interm solution until they make a breakthrough in the reusablity part.
I just wanna say, the graphs/visuals you use are very helpful and easy to read! Also, a fun thing to think about is this video doesn’t take into account possible international space ports or “oil rig” setups they could have in the future. You could have a fully functioning space port at sea.💪
1. the booster would damage when landing. 2. The drone ship would be damaged from the boosters rocket ENGINES. 3. Booster and starship are designed to be caught to save a few ton of weight. Spacex plan is 4 to 6 starship flights a day minimum, if not every hour down to 30 mins launches. That's not counting continent to continents flights from other launch sites.
You know they could always do an artificial island or oil rig style setup with a catch tower and just land there every time. That would mean less flexibility in designing each launch profile but it should give better fuel savings then return to launch site. And rather then transport the booster back by barge you could always refill and fly it back to the OG launch site. I doubt you would need all 33 engines to create a ballistic trajectory back without the need to carry starship and a payload, so you could create a simplified launch platform without the need for starting the outer ring of engines.
I had a section on this but couldn't make it fit... Launches aim in a variety of directions and therefore the location where you need to land changes from launch to launch. You could do a hybrid version where you do something like RTLS to get to wherever the fixed landing site is, but that will cost you payload. You also still need to get the booster back somehow.
What about a Super Heavy Heavy? In other words, 3 SH boosters tied together much like Falcon Heavy's triple. You'd need 3 Mechazillas in Florida. ( Or what about 1 Mechazilla in the Bahamas? )
Many modern rocket systems use variable configurations to allow for a more cost effective way of launching a wide variety of payloads; there's no need to use extra performance for smaller payloads, that's just added cost, so you should try and cut that out if you have the margins to. This typically takes the form of strap on boosters, or things like an additional stage or a kick stage. F9 and FH do this differently. They both can launch in different configurations that, for added cost, have added performance, by launching the 1st stage in RTLS, Droneship, and Expendable configurations (FH hasn't done a twin Droneship, and the reason why can be another discussion). The Starship architecture is also doing this "additional payload capacity for more price" architecture. Once again, SpaceX isn't going with the typical approach. Although Starship is capable of lifting any satellite with ease, due to it's poor mass ratio, stemming from being reusable, it has disproportionate difficulty placing objects into higher energy orbits. To get around this, Starship will need to use orbital refueling so that Starship can place payloads into any orbit. What may be most interesting, is how the new wave of space launch companies tackle this architecture problem. "Oldspace" architectures handle this very well, as they'll often use boosters or many stages, which can be varied to provided a different payloads for different costs. "Newspace" companies are starting from the ground up, are very vertically integrated, and are mindful of fixed costs like engine development, so their architectures reflect this by usually being a simple 2 stage rocket design. With many Newspace companies going with reuse, trying to improve upon what was shown with F9, and different expectations of their rapidity, it'll be interesting if they develop a different architecture to the F9/FH's reuse. That said, since propulsive reuse is what everyone seems to be going with, and I can't think of a different variation to the reuse architecture of RTLS/Droneship/Expendable, there might not be any differences.
It's very hard to predict what is going to happen with starship-sized payloads, but I suspect that we are going to see more kick stages - like Helios - rather than refueling starship because it's a simpler architecture and you don't have to figure out how to get starship back from wherever you take it. That ignore the "starship as probe" approach where it might actually be cheaper to build a starship with the probe build into it and refuel it than to build a bespoke probe the way we do now.
Transportation is probably another big issue, I assume. It will take a bigger drone-ship to carry the superheavy booster, and a bigger land vehicle to take it back from the port to the launch site. The latter will probably be super slow and cannot pass through most roads.
Plus, a drone ship big enough to carry a Starship booster would be massive and even more expensive to build and run than the existing ones. It would be so large that new berthing and tug towing arrangements would be required. A specialized port could be needed at Boca Chica and mechazilla would need to be built out on a pier to access it (which is an environmental permitting nightmare). The scale of Starship makes handling it with anything but mechazilla a serious exercise.... :)
Nice breakdown. Thanks. I think they'll eventually build a downrange oil platform like tower for missions that require max payload. They could top it off with minimal fuel have it & fly itself back to land from there.
They intend to catch with the arms mostly to save weight on landing legs, but it would come at the cost of a launch profile/angle that needs the booster to stay near the launch site
I'm sorry I don't have $52,578.00, How about an autonomous single prop drone? It comes as a kit, and it's made of plastic and balsa! Just keep the videos coming!
A drone ship sized to handle a superheavy just doesn't exist. falcon 9's drone ships are the size of a football field and in no way could handle something as huge as superheavy.
my best reasoning (at the start of the video before ive heard your arguments) is the want to offload as much recovery hardware to the ground side as possible since their already having to take so much up as is.
Another thing to account for is the landing itself. With falcon 9, the booster lands relatively unassisted with the use of landing legs. Super heavy isn’t just coming back to launch site, it’s gonna be caught by mechazilla. Since the tower handles the landings that means super heavy doesn’t need landing legs which saves a lot of weight and thus can lift heavier payloads. This weight savings may make up for a lot of the payload reduction needed for return to launch site. Sure, you could compound these benefits by putting mechazilla on drone ships but that would make all the problems you showed with drone ships significantly worse.
yea too bad the offshore oil rig idea wasn't so great after all, combining mechazilla with a droneship would be nearly impossible unless there was some island further away where there was very stable ground and it could be caught
I wonder if they will make a lower cost expendable upper stage for missions that need more than 50t? If they could use fewer engines on a lighter upper stage it might be cheaper to just have a expendable version of starship.
9:24 "The point of these scenarios is pretty simple: droneships are fine at LOW flight rates..." Holy cow, SpaceX has so completely shifted our expectations that we can now talk with a straight face about how a rocket landing at sea every five days is a "low flight rate" and "slow cycle time". We live in amazing times!
From a marine architecture POV, a droneship large and heavy enough to handle the Super Heavy will be massive. The weight and height of the booster will pose a major stability challenges compare to the Falcon-9. Especially if a catching tower is required.
Yes. I wanted to talk about the cadence issues, but the architecture is clearly a huge issue. I think you need something less like a drone ship and more like an oil platform.
Geez, how will I keep all of this in my head for when an online discussion comes up about Starship drone ships? Anyway, you left out the obvious solution. A US version of the Ekranoplan will have to be built. It'll get SH back to shore damn quick traveling at 550 kph (342 mph). Once anchored near the shore an underwater pipeline can be hooked up and then SH can get a bit of propellant and fly back to the launch mount. See, it's so easy!
@@fauzin3338 Umm... Bill Gates, of course. We know how he loves supporting Elon. It'll require his kind of money to figure out how to keep the booster from tipping over at 550 kph. ;) I keep trying to sell a bridge in my neighborhood to both of them but somehow haven't gotten a response.🤔🤣🤣
Drone ships also don't scale well to starship booster size magnitudes. Also, drone ship landings = landing legs = a significant portion of the payload capacity.
Plus you either have to put landing legs on the SH boosters (which will cut into the total mass to orbit) or make the tallest ship ever made to have a floating catch tower.
Time is a very important consideration, but so is cost. You talked about this, but I think it should be emphasised more that Starship changes the rocket game because the cheapest way to use it, by far, is return to launch site. People keep talking about a throwaway second stage, and that's not getting the point. If you use it the way SpaceX wants, you only pay for the fuel. You can take, lets say, 50 tons to orbit this way. If you want to take 80 tons then just do two launches and assemble in orbit. That's by far the best way to do space in the future rather than these special drone ship or expendable second stage options. Another great video. Thanks for sharing!
Yes, fully and rapidly reusable is the smarter path! Rapidly comes with other bonuses, more launches will mean teams gain experience faster as well - the technicians and workers who launch and refurbish it get to practice and refine what they do, speeding the process further. The same applies to upgrading the hardware. The cost of Starship missions will be propellant + maintenance. The more they fly, the more they are testing the hardware and the more opportunities they have to test new variations of the hardware that may reduce future maintenance costs. The heatshield in particular will need a lot of experimentation to develop one that will withstand repeated use without constant expensive repairs. So, the rapid reuse should help power-level the staff and tech as well! :)
SWA Does taxi at landing burn speeds. Onwards and upwards, great comparisons and analysis, especially of time on ground between both the commercial space and aviation systems!
I think the costs weigh out too if they can refill the booster and reuse a lot quicker. Will require more launches to get the same payload, but it's going to be A LOT easier to launch. The tower does everything; stacking, refueling, launching and catching.
SpaceX should copy CNSA's catch concept using 4 steel cables to close in on and catch the booster. Would allow for a much larger landing zone and reduce likelyhood of damaging the launch tower, but at the added cost of increasing turnaround time with having to transport the booster back to launchpad. SpaceX's concept of having the booster come back to the launch pad right after a launch sounds like they'd ideally have 1 booster per launch tower, with a few backups on standby. If they caught them at sea, they'd need more boosters and a whole fleet of starship catching drone ships to approach achieving their desired launch cadence, but it could allow for a greater overall launch cadence. With the current plan they'd have to perform booster inspections on the launch pad. If they caught them at sea, they could inspect them either on the way back or in queue, and have pre-inspected boosters at the launch site ready to go. They wouldn't necessarily need to catch them at sea either, the reasoning behind that is to save a bit of Delta-v, but they could instead build a dedicated land based booster catcher near the launch site.
Great video! Perfectly answered my question on your other video :) another thing to consider is that the logistics of moving superheavy from the drone ship to the launch pad might be prohibitive given that you have to drive it around upright on an spmt instead of loading them on a truck like with f9. You’d basically need a seaport that is also a space port in order for it to pull.
Fastest Falcon 9 turnaround was 21 days, not 27. This was performed by B1062 between the Axiom 1 launch on April 8 2022, and the Starlink Group 4-16 launch on April 29 2022.
You make my day when insee an Eager Space video notification 🤟itd be neat if they could launch from boca chica and land the 2nd stage in florida. Launch in batches and bring them back to boca on a big ship. I dont know that is viablr, jist that itd be neat 😉
I think launching from Boca Chica and catching in Cape Canaveral will be an option for rare extra lift launches. Eventually Space X could even to a drone ship equivalent with oil platforms, but super heavy would get refueled and fly back to it's launch site, trading more cost and complexity for time on the fly back vs a slow barge or ship.
I know people have already mentioned the heavy landing legs, but if you made an air breathing first stage, and made the Superheavy Booster stage 1.5, like the suggestion made by Terran Space Academy, the heavy landing legs will not hinder the orbital payload. However, I do not believe SpaceX will choose this path. It requires building a totally new air breathing methane engine that will have a lower thrust to weight ratio that will only be useful in the atmosphere. However, it would allow larger payloads to orbit, and remove the mass cost of the landing legs.
Yeah but trying to catch a big booster like that, its just a bit well risky by any chance? maybe make one with legs so you dont have to risk the launch pad evey time you want to reuse it
This analysis hinges on spacex having working "gas and go" for boosters which I don't see happening in the next 10 years, I can see them having a 1/day launch cadence, but not with an individual booster on an individual pad. I don't think even spacex is intending to get there any time soon, they wouldn't have built a factory to mass manufacture these if they think they'll only need a couple to hit their target flight rate.
I really think SpaceX could land 2 F9's on one drone ship. They'd have to invent a way to move the first one to the edge and also add another opti-grabber, but I really think it's possible.
There's room on the deck and they're accurate enough - but what will the blast of the F9 rocket plume do to the first rocket? It seems likely it'll damage it, or even knock it over despite the octograbber.
The only reason for SpaceX to ramp up starship production to weekly rates is because they plan to expend them. I expect boosters to be reused but the starship itself will likely be expended many times per year. Of course these are starships designed for one way with huge payloads. Since the expendable starship will lose rocket engines, I doubt the starship will go beyond 6 vacuum Raptors.
@@EagerSpace I believe I was referring to the descriptor you said they used. I don’t know if the ships (or barges) are manned or unmanned, the 30% was a rough guess the difference in payload per launch plus amortizing the added cost of the ship used for landing the booster. Your graph showed up to a 70% increase in payload so 30% drop in payload delivery to LEO cost per pound seemed conservative. If a 30% additional drop in cost per pound to LEO opened up huge additional demand, then landing on ships is a no brainer.
Kinda of confusing ! Is spacex going to catch the booster with mechzilla or land it on a drone ship ? Wouldnt it need landing legs or a larger drone ship ?
spacex is going to end up being the gas station monopoly of LEO. i figure in 10 -15 yrs most deep space missions will simply revolve around getting to orbit first and then refueling and then leaving somewhere else. that fuel/oxidizer in leo is going to be super valuable and take out a lot of risk from launching missions, the hard part, all the mass to orbit is already done, and if your rocket fails/doesnt reach orbit, spacex can just sell the fuel to the next person in line.
I don't understand why you would assume that Starship refurbishment is an order of magnitude faster than Falcon 9 refurbishment. That seems way too optimistic. I also think that drone ship landings could make more sense for a three stage Starship, since a reusable middle stage wouldn't even allow for RTLS and so would have to land on a drone ship.
What do you think are the major blockers to fast turnaround? Three stage starship is problematic; the logical track for the second stage puts it somewhere over land.
@@EagerSpace I don't know, but it seems plausible that many factors that contribute to Falcon 9 refurbishment time are also present for Starship. I didn't think of land, that's good to know. Another reason to use two stages only.
We know that one of the problems with Falcon 9 reuse is that they engines get soot accumulations because of the RP-1 fuel. Raptor avoids that because liquid methane burns very cleanly, and that eliminates one of the big blockers. My observation is that jet airplane engines run "gas and go" pretty much all the time and have ridiculously high reliability. Rocket engines are obviously different beasts but they aren't that different, and given that the engineers at SpaceX seem to believe they can get that kind of turnaround, I'm going to believe them for now.
@@EagerSpace Yeah, but I'm not sure whether soot is the only significant factor in Falcon 9 first stage refurbishment time. Anyway, for Starship reuse, the refurbishment necessary for the upper stages (heat shield) is probably the real limiting factor anyway.
Upper stages are obviously a case that we don't know yet. But they inherently are slower because you need to wait for them to get back into an orbit that lets them land at the launch site, and IIRC that's 12-24 hours.
Downrange landing pads don't help because a) they aren't going to be the right distance away and b) they are only in one direction and you need to launch in different directions to reach different inclinations.
Complicated. From Florida you want to launch due east for moon and Mars missions, but anything LEO heads north. From Boca chica you need to head southeast to miss land and then dogleg to the orbit you want.
How far down range can Super Heavy drift before falling to earth? Even if it takes a bit more fuel, it might be the best option. Say, setup international operations. Have bases in west Africa, East Africa, Southeast Asia, etc. primarily for propellant aggregation missions. Each booster landing downrange in cycles. For the scale being envisioned by SpaceX, the infrastructure would be warranted. Aside from offering other launch services to the international market. I don't know enough about the suborbital dynamics involved. Anyway, the Pacific would be a large stretch.
I had this topic covered and pulled it out because it wasn't working well, and apparently I should have worked harder. Boosters are a on a ballistic trajectory and Falcon 9 travels about 600 km to the drone ship. Open up a map and see how far that gets you... The answer is "not at all close to any useful landmasses". Not to mention you need to launch in different directions.
@@EagerSpace 240ft tall & 27 ft wide, vs 140ft tall 12ft wide is a huge difference for moving around on water. Another thing is the hot staging. Once they stop ejecting the ring and it's built in....that will be a lot of mass at the very top of that 240ft...not sure how it would survive much wind on the water at 9m wide. Will be very interesting to see how they tackle these issues if they start catching them at sea for sure. It has to he able to survive all weather conditions if they want a daily cadence.
I wrote that before the second stage incident happened, but decided to leave it in because I thought some people might find it funny. Oh, and because I'm lazy.
Back about twenty years ago I wrote a book and one of the realities of doing that is that you are going to make mistakes and - if you are lucky enough to have your book sell - they will be both public and permanent, at least until the next printing. That made me fairly immune to being mistaken it wrong about things.
Who says they will stop using drone ships? I could imagine the oil derricks could make a return once the concept has been flushed out. Also, you need RTLS to achieve rapid reuse. You can't wait 24hr for it to be shipped back to the launch site. Or, you're just playing hop-skip launching the rocket from the new landing pad, and it slowly hops it's way across the earth lol. But that's decade(s) out.
Marine assets don't suck. They are just more challenging than a fixed land position. I would propose a swath ship and dual thrusters at each leg. The thrusters respond to input from a MPU that has a 6DOF sensor about 50% the height of the booster. They have variable pitch props and can instantly change the attitude of the vessel. 3 Arms can swing up to trap the booster in vertical position. The thrusters can pitch 45 deg to help raise the platform from the depths to allow faster transit under tow with stabilization on line.
Sure and say a round billion to design, test, validate and deploy? Oh, and nothing that big will 'instantly' change is attitude. Turning takes time. :P
Today's Starship is the worst Starship that will ever fly - so any calculations based on it will be the most conservative, worst-case estimates. This is a good thing!
Let's see when SpaceX flies one StarShip per day. I think that will be a very long time from now. BTW the cost for marine vessels can also be significantly reduced and vessels can be automated or remotely operated.
Top reasons why you are mostly wrong: 1. SpaceX wants to achieve RAPID reusable rockets (talking about multiple launches per day), so... having to get back a booster from a droneship in the middle of the sea is not good. 2. They have been designing it to catch with the tower so why would they change that? It would mean a lot of lost effort (why develop the catch mechanism on the tower when you want to do something else) 3. Pretty sure that the power of 3 raptor enginges would cause some damages to the droneship, and damages are not compatible with reusability and rapidness.
Can we finally say-starship is a dumb design. Pushing engine pressures to crazy levels and expecting quick turn around is an oxymoron. Using cheap steel for reusable rocket is another oxymoron. Pressure held body is another trait of expandable rocket-a must have using steel being heavy material. Just vast number of engines is a trait of re usability-you simply can't loose so many engines on each flight. May be making second stage expandable, simpler, not so heavy might save star ship as a useful rocket.
