NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying

Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying by sandworm101 on Saturday November 30, 2024 @05:04AM (#42280698)

A fully refueled starship in leo is a big big ask, akin to getting a full shuttle stack into orbit. On-orbit refueling at such a scale has not been done yet and is difficult to even think about doing. It isnt like KSP. The more efficient route would be to scrap starship and design a high-energy upper stage to be launched by the BFR instead, a purpose-built probe thrower. Starship is way to heavy to be a practical final stage for probes.

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Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying by Alex-Programs on Saturday November 30, 2024 @05:45AM (#42280838)

On-orbit refuelling at such a scale does sound rather difficult, but they also fully intend to do it in the near future. They're certainly going to give it a good try.

Also, if you don't want to make an entirely different second stage to put on top of superheavy, you should be able to fit a pretty substantial third stage in Starship's payload bay.

Right now the payload bay doesn't open anywhere near enough for that, but hopefully in the future that'll be an option.

And if you really want to make something go fast, you could refuel in orbit, give it a push from Starship, then deploy the third stage for another kick.

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Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying by rbanffy on Saturday November 30, 2024 @08:33AM (#42281524)

> Right now the payload bay doesn't open anywhere near enough for that

Shouldn't be too hard to design a starship with a blunt nose and place it under an expendable fairing.

With a 1-ton probe the budget is 99 tons for a kick stage. That's a lot of delta-v. With some creative propulsion options, maybe even interstellar probes can be done.

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Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying by sneak on Saturday November 30, 2024 @06:38AM (#42280992)

Everything you said is right, but on-orbit refueling is of course theoretically possible, and isn’t THAT huge of a leap given what SpaceX has already accomplished. Let’s not forget the space lasers, or the chopstick catch, or Starlink-live-streamed 4K views from the plasma shadow during reentry, or autonomous Dragon docking, etc.

Sure, it’s hard, but that is perhaps the best engineering team in the history of humankind, and I think they’re up to the task.

Additionally, people much smarter than me ALSO think they are up to the task, and they have more and higher-resolution data about the problem space, too.

My money’s on they get it working. Maybe it takes five years or a dozen failures, but I’m confident that they will succeed eventually and there will be orbiting methane and lox fuel stations sooner rather than later.

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Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying by sandworm101 on Saturday November 30, 2024 @12:36PM (#42282833)

Those things were never seen as impossible, just difficult. Nobody has even a theoretical concept of how to move tons of liquid oxygen between rockets in orbit. And there is some talk of banning it as too dangerous. Remember all those pad explosions related to fuel issues? We cannot risk that much space debris as spaceX goes through a learning process.

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Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying by kolinko on Saturday November 30, 2024 @01:39PM (#42283204)

If I'm not mistaken, SpaceX is already contracted by NASA to do on orbit refuelling, and one of the recent starships did initial trials of fuel transmission (internal for now).

Update: - source article - $58M contract to do that - https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-nasa-contract-orbi...

- chatgpt confirmation + links to more sources - https://chatgpt.com/share/e/674b5c1b-d318-8004-b79d-c0eefc59...

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