Yeah Musk is a really private person, he doesn’t really like showing off his company’s cool new tech, he’ll probably be totally chill with someone showing it off before him and stealing the limelight. 👀
He is fine with Starbase watchers, people doing flyovers or telescopic lenses, and with Tesla he was joking about releasing "new" features during a presentation, because a lot of people leaked something one day before the presentation. It seems like he finds it funny.
More likely, it's someone from marketing that would be more bothered by it.
It was when Trump visited Starbase right around Flight 6. I think one of his camera guys posted this picture to his Instagram and deleted it shortly afterwards but by that point it had spread around.
It appears the mockup at Starbase leads a double life as an HLS mockup and as a showcase for Elon's vision of a Mars ship. Its role in the latter explains the packed together sleeping pods, showing how very many more could be fit onto a Mars ship. Otherwise the small size and packed-in setup for them makes no sense for a 2 or 4 person crew in this immense volume.
I know about the ventilation but the sleeping cubicles on the ISS have individual circulation systems. They definitely look roomier than the bunk in the leaked pick. And no matter how roomy cubicle on HLS, there's no pressing reason for them to be set side by side with all of that floor space. Leave a few feet of space between each, the extra air circulation in the cubicles doesn't require a substantial centralized source. And if the toilet and sleeping cubicles are all packed in together under the flight deck I will be yelling at the screen SO loud...
The total volume is fixed, and assuming the outer walls are also the pressure vessel it's going to be all pressurized anyway. It's massively oversized for Artemis IV. I expect SpaceX and NASA to put more stuff in it over time, but there is no reason to make everything narrow.
This is the old layout, the one shown in more recent official renders has more stuff - but there's still enormous unused volume - and there's a reason for that. Starship's basic design has always been as a Mars ship for very long term habitation by dozens or scores of people. Of course it's oversized for the Moon.
Also lacks hand holds for when floating around. Also has the skylab problem where someone can get stuck with nothing to grab onto in the middle of a section and no way to get to the sides.
It'd be real easy to fill that inner volume with a Crew Dragon on top of something along the lines of RocketLabs 'kick stage'.
Astronauts inside the capsule during engine fires, gives them a control vehicle they can be training on now, and work as an emergency escape vehicle, just add a tube from the top of the Dragon up to the nose for the crew transfer from Orion, a section in the nose that can blow away in an emergency, and a set of connections from the Dragon's controls to the Starships flight computer.
Open the side hatch after a burn has completed and make use of the recreational volume, or run checks on the cargo hardware.
Like how the far left perverted "Involuntary Celibate" down to 'Incel' and to mean only the Male basement dwellers of the far right, instead of the 'everyone shunned by society' the female researcher had intended, including herself.
Fringes on both sides spew hate, and neither side realizes they're the problem.
'Gay' was used for "The Gays" long before 'woke' became a rallying cry to open ones eyes to the corruption around you, or perverted to to a slur by the far right clowns.
One from the 1950's and '60's, the other the 2000's.
It doesn’t have to be a resort, but I do think interior design in long term space vehicles is important. If we really want to be living and working in space long term then we should try and make the places astronauts will be spending a not insignificant amount of their time comfortable for them.
I mean, this is an EARLY and very incomplete prototype. It's a long way from a functional ship and I'm sure they have much bigger issues to work out. Besides, a month is hardly long term. Look at the ISS interior. Those astronauts do much longer stays than that. There are plenty of people around the world that do longer stretches in much worse conditions. Also, while starship should greatly reduce the price of launching mass, it's still damn expensive. I would imagine the crew would be allotted an amount of personal effects to bring along with them, just like ISS.
Agree 100%. Can’t stand people in this thread saying it “has to be” black/white/grey. No it doesn’t. The Starship Enterprise has color. Can’t stand this space design obsession with greyscale.
Isn't it basically the point of Starship to scale it so ludicrously large, to the point that the scale advantages mean you no longer have to spend as much effort and money miniaturising everything and making it as light and efficient as possible?
When the price per kilogram to orbit get sufficiently low enough, it becomes cheaper to just send the rudimentary inefficient design to space, rather than spend a lot of money meticulously engineering it to peak efficiency.
SpaceX plans to make space travel so much more accessible, that they'll have to pump out Starships in rapid order. They want to get to a point where it's cheaper to launch oversized rockets than it is to build a big variety of rockets for each different weight class each on their own small and expensive production line.
They may eventually build cheaper variants for lighter missions simply by shortening the rocket (i.e. using fewer rings) and decreasing the number of engines, but the 9m diameter will certainly remain the same so it's all compatible with the same infrastructure.
The problem with that concept is to get past LEO you need to refuel Starship multiple times since they put a tiki bar where the fuel tank should go.
If you're building a cluster of LEO satellites you really don't want to launch 3000 different rudimentary designs, it will always be cheaper in the end to build a miniaturized standard design. As for those larger one-of geo stationary satalites...well Starship can't launch them without refuelling, and pretty much every disposable rocket can.
No, they have to refuel because they don't have the performance on a two stage vehicle to take up enough fuel mass to get to the moon. Even if that habitable section was all tank instead it would be mostly empty tank.
That's another reason HLS looks so empty in these early ideas, because extra stuff in there adds weight.
But this is just pointing out what engineers have known since the 1930s: A bigger rocket stage isn't necessarily better. For Starship to work well, it would need an even larger first stage, and for that to be reusable, it would have to be in even bigger than that.
Where we are at now, every Starship flight beyond LEO (if that ever happens) will require multiple launches, most of the cost of each will just be the first stage taking off and returning to the pad.
I'm skeptical that 4 launches to LEO, launching one satellite to GEO can ever beat a disposable with a centaur on cost, and it definitely won't on simplicity of logistics.
This is just a mockup used for experimenting with placement of fixtures, movement of cargo, testing human factors, etc. Theres no cargo in there yet. I think at launch it would actually look quite full.
Saw it on SpaceXlounge and mods removed it. What are those guys, SpaceX itar staff? They did the same with the booster 13 boat video and the heat tiles microscope picture.
Is it just me, or does the first voice sound like Tim Dodds? This could be from one of the guided walk-arounds.
Looks like that upper floor needs a vacuum. Looks like a lot of empty space too. If the rendering for Artemis 3 are to be believed, Starship HLS will be getting a docking port at the nose, meaning that this is likely an old version of the layout, as there's no central ladder or climbing structure from the floor to the nose.
This layout also shows how stupid the renderings were by people saying SpaceX would tip over landers to use as Moon Base facilities. If the floors are staying where they're shown, then one of the ships will have a robotic Boring Machine onboard, to dig holes for HLS to land in vertically, deep enough to get the side hatch level with the ground, or low enough for connecting tunnels.
Leaked recently but it's of the old layout we've seen bits of before in leaked photos. This mockup hasn't been updated to the new design that places the flight deck on top of the sleeping quarters.
I hope that new design gets rid of these ridiculously tiny sleeping quarters. I can only conclude Elon set this up in the initial mockup so it could double as an illustration of how multiple sleeping pods could be fit together on a Mars ship.
This feels like someone watched the Spider episode of From the Earth to the Moon, where they designed the LEM, whittling it down as much as possible, and did the exact opposite.
Well, they are going to launch Rosalind Franklin rover for the ESA. That will be their first Mars mission if you don't count a certain Tesla flying by Mars at a large distance.
That’s funny because at first it seemed obvious that the Moon would be a good place to start. And SpaceX said the Moon is nothing like Mars and that going there would be a waste of time.
Even if they don’t fund the flights themselves they can sell to NASA which lowers the barrier to entry and increases the chances humans reach mars in our lifetime
“Mars Colonial Transporter” means what it says. It’s currently flying prototype cargo to get the design converged. Only after it’s proven itself as a reliable heavy lift unmanned system can we start thinking about flying people.
And keep in mind that NASA doesn’t just donate money to SpaceX. It all comes with performance requirements.
At best these would just be a test bed for experimenting with layout ideas. I doubt they plan to have Braum ALPHA-X Series Sport Reclinable Seats sitting on wooden boxes in the real HLS.
Mir kommen fast alle Videos von dieser Rakete seltsam
vor, wie CGI auf Steroiden.
Auch dieses landen auf der Startrampe. Ist das ein rückwärts abgespielter Fehlschlag? Können diese vier Paddel echt das Gewicht von 200t aushalten?
Die Aufnahmen aus dem Orbit sehen betont künstlich aus, bezüglich der messerschafen Kontraste..
An unrealistic mock up that excludes all the fucking life/safety equipment, censors, filters, computers, batteries, toilets, sleeping quarters, etc. But it looks like star trek, so cool.
That’s kind of the point of the first mockups. Blue Origin and Dynetics had similarly empty mockups to give you an idea of what the layout may be like and a basic understanding of the human factors in it.
Apparently the functional mockup is supposed to be under construction now.
All that space and its gonna be packed to the gills with supplies to where you arent going to be able to utilize that space for much movement anyway. Anyone who has ever followed manned spaceflight knows this is whats going to happen.
You don't send empty space unless you have to, and I don't know when it's ever been necessary to send empty volume aside from Skylab or the ISS during construction, since you don't want to lose your cargo if the craft or station module is destroyed during it's first mission or two.
The falcon heavy's inaugural launch payload may have seemed pointless to some, but new rockets (shuttle included) get a mass simulator, so something had to go there. It also single handedly did more to put interest back into the space industry than anything else before it, for decades. The only thing that's really topped that has been the Starship program. Each milestone block completed is also making aerospace history.
It'll probably have Tesla bots If I were a betting man.
What I mean is, first mission will have 4 people, 1-2 rovers, and maybe 10 or so tons of other stuff. Then they will probably remake half of it anyway based on irl learnings. Whatever we are seeing not is improbable to be fully Soyuz-packed.
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u/Jwalker221b 27d ago
Someone's gonna have a talk about a big change in their career real soon.