SpaceX’s Moon Starship is a brilliant step towards reusable Mars rockets

[Elderberry]

TESLARATI by Eric Ralph 5/1/2020

SpaceX’s newly-announced Moon Starship is a fairly radical departure from the Mars-focused, fully-reusable vehicle the company has been pursuing for years. Unintuitively, that may be the perfect half-step towards truly reusable Mars rockets.

On April 30th, NASA announced that SpaceX had won $135 million to design and build a highly-customized variant of its reusable Starship spacecraft with the intention of launching a handful of space agency astronauts to the Moon in the mid-2020s. Whether or not that initial seed translates into enough funding to seriously design and build the ship SpaceX has shown off in new renders, it has already broken the ice, so to speak, between the US federal government (or at least NASA) and the company’s ambitious next-generation launch vehicle.

With a substantial amount of money now on the table for SpaceX to begin initial work on its Moon Starship, it’s worth analyzing just how different it is from the Starship the company is working on today.

More: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-moon-starship-step-towards-mars/

[Elderberry]

NASA identifies risks in SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander proposal

Spaceflight Now by Stephen Clark 5/1/2020

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/05/01/nasa-identifies-risks-in-spacexs-starship-lunar-lander-proposal/

SpaceX’s proposal to land astronauts on the moon using the company’s reusable Starship vehicle could be “game-changing” for space exploration, but comes with risks and complexity that “threaten the schedule viability” to achieve NASA’s goal of returning crews moon by the end of 2024, agency officials said.

NASA awarded SpaceX a $135 million contract Thursday to advance the design of the Starship transporter for potential use as a crewed lunar lander. The space agency also inked a $579 million agreement with Blue Origin and a $253 million deal with Dynetics for work on their own human-rated lunar lander concepts.

SpaceX’s Starship is significantly larger than other other proposed landing systems. NASA will eventually select one company to lead development of a lander to carry astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2024, the schedule goal set by the Trump administration last year.

“SpaceX proposed the Starship,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “It’s obviously a very different solution set than any of the others. But it also, it could be absolutely game-changing. So we don’t want to discount it. We want to move forward. If they can have success, we want to enjoy that success with them.”

More at link.