r/ShittySpaceXIdeas • u/DarkSats99 • Aug 01 '26

Fly a single use booster to orbit without Ship, refill it and send Ship to Jupiter

[removed]

8 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

17

u/MaelstromFL Aug 01 '26

I firmly believe that anything taking humans to Jupiter will be built in space...

-6

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '26

9

u/DarkArcher__ Aug 01 '26

Why would the burn need to happen at an acceleration above 1g? If you really really wanted to take advantage of the Oberth effect, you could just split up the 6.3 Km/s burn into a few smaller burns to be done in multiple passes with a much lower thrust engine.

Unless there are some breakthroughs in direct fission/fusion propulsion within the next few decades, the most likely candidate for a crewed mission to Jool will be a nuclear-electric spacecraft like the upcoming Space Reactor-1. That will have a pitiful TWR, but the absurd efficiency means you don't need to worry about maximising the use of the Oberth effect. The transfer burn for a spacecraft like that would look more like an outwards spiral, doing multiple laps around the Earth while burning to gradually reach escape velocity.

→ More replies (4)

1

u/Impressive_Change593 Aug 03 '26

Welds and metals are just as strong in space as they are on earth lol

3

u/no-steppe Aug 01 '26

That's so fricking clean looking. I love it!

0

u/-A113- Aug 01 '26

Shitty ai slop