News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:NASA’s bet on Starship for the Moon by Yizahi on Friday April 23, 2021 @04:48PM (#26919028)
Only some orbits would intersect with L1 point, others will require immense fuel waste to get there and then change orbit to original target. Also there are no gas stations in space, for multiple reasons - there is no steady demand to fuel in space, it is at best sporadic and spiky, and in the mean time you'll need to keep up cryo fuel from boiling off; then it is hard to operate anything remotely, so Gateway gas station would be harder to operate than ISS in LEO; there is no need to place gas station farther than LEO because in space we don't need to bother with actual distances, but with gravity. Earth to Mars is 62 million kilometers, so speaking in analogies it would make sense to refuel at half of the distance, similar to the traveling by car from New York to San Francisco. But in reality it is not. Getting 300 kilometers from Earth to LEO takes 9 km/s of delta V, getting the rest 62000000 kilometers from LEO to Mars takes 5-6 km/s of delta V. LEO is much more than half way to Mars already and there is literally zero point is refuelling anywhere else (excluding fuel generation in space possibility).

There are no comments on this comment yet.