Starship may bring a viable solution to large-scale settlement on Mars, a space engineer and blogger said in a presentation to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Saturday (Sept. 11). But it’s not a sure bet yet, as we still need to bear in mind problems such as logistics.
The presentation was given by Dr. Casey Handmer, currently a software system architect at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Handmer writes regularly about space journalism and SpaceX on his personal blog, which is not affiliated with his employment.
You can view the entire talk on the AIAA Los Angeles-Las Vegas YouTube channel (or below). Given the length of the discussion and the question-and-answer period, this article will touch on only the main points of the more than two-hour-long presentation.
As Handmer explained, his presentation is an offshoot of an October 2019 post about Starship entitled “The SpaceX Starship is a very big deal“, the same title as Sunday’s talk. Indeed, there has been a lot of progress in the spacecraft’s development in the years since then, thanks to numerous in-air tests. In the last few months alone, Starship made its first successful landing after several in-air flips, and SpaceX is waiting on approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to perform the first orbital mission.
Starship was also selected this year as NASA’s lander of choice for the Artemis program to put humans on the Moon. The contract implementation, however, is delayed again due to a lawsuit from Blue Origin following a failed protest to the Government Accountability Office alleging preferential treatment of SpaceX (amid less money allocated than expected for the Human Landing System project in the NASA budget.) The GAO denied the allegations and its decision text gives more details about its rationale against the initial protests from Blue Origin and Dynetics.
In starting his remarks, Handmer explained he is not an official representative of NASA or JPL and that the entire talk is from his point of view – not from his employer’s perspective and also not representing SpaceX. In disclosing potential conflicts of interests, he added that almost all of the writing he does online is for free (it’s even ad-free), with the exception of four Kindle e-books that are largely collections of his old blog posts. “This is just me, sharing my joy, sharing my passion for the subject,” he explained.
Much of Handmer’s work is countering misconceptions in space journalism; to be clear, he said he was not referring to people who work regularly in this field, but those writers who make occasional incursions in space without doing their research. “The kind of examples you can point to is like, ‘We can’t go to space without [addressing] radiation,’ ‘Zero gravity will kill us,’ ‘All the aliens are going to eat us,’ or something like that,” Handmer explained.
Handmer’s goal with the blog, he added, is to dive behind the surface of the misconceptions to look at their causes, and to provide a “static resource of information, links and concepts about particular topics” with a hope to “shape the discourse.” This is the context within which his Starship writing arose.
The main misconceptions he pointed to were these:
No one has created a ‘Toyota Camry’ or ‘Honda Civic’ of launchers yet. Handmer cited these popular, reliable car brands to show how far space launching has to go; it is not yet free from frequent failures or issues. There have been roughly 350 launching systems made during the Space Age, mainly of them developed from ballistic missile systems, Handmer pointed out. The space shuttle, which was meant to be a leap in reusability and safety, did build the ISS and contribute to many successes – but it also cost more than planned and resulted in two fatal launches, he pointed out. “With trillions of dollars [spent] and tens of thousands of engineers working for a century, no one has cracked the problem,” he said. “No one has really found a solution that that you can point to as, ‘That’s authoritative.’ “
It will cost a lot of money to build a city on Mars. In reference to Elon Musk’s eventual hopes to put a settlement on the Red Planet, Handmer said the obvious issue to raise is both cost and the launching mass. Simply put: “We’re pretty sure we can’t build a city on Mars with a trunk full of stuff. It’s going to have to be tons, many tons of things.” Starship is aiming for $200 a kilogram for launching costs, which Handmer put in context by showing a large chart of how it maps against other rockets. Even at that, he warned that costs also depend on launch volume.
We need to talk about logistics. Flashing a picture of a container ship on the screen, Handmer said the ship is one of the largest available to us today with a capacity of 400,000 tonnes of cargo. By comparison, a city on Mars will likely require a million tonnes of cargo. Rocket capacity is a huge problem in this perspective; while Starship is “an absolute monster”, Handmer predicts we would need to have thousands of launches every year to send enough cargo into space. The overall issue, therefore, is “we need both a decrease in the [launching] cost and an increase in the [cargo] capacity.” Moreover, this stuff needs to be capable of entering, descending and landing on Mars and to perform in-situ resource utilization.
The ideal Martian spaceship has several requirements. Handmer characterized these as a high delta-V capacity in a single stage that can do a single-stage lunar landing and return to low Earth orbit. It also needs to be “fully and rapidly reusable” to achieve both affordable cost and a rapid launch cadence. A high-efficiency engine is also a requirement, and he said the SpaceX Raptor may be a step along that path. “Necessarily, a lot of pain and effort has gone into designing and building and iterating the design for Raptor. And I think the results, the demonstrated performance, speaks for itself. It’s the only full flow stage combustion cycle engine to have ever flown,” he said.
Starship is ‘the first rocket that’s reflected’ the reality of launching to Mars. Handmer outlined several reasons, among them the ability to refuel the rocket’s fuel and oxidizer in low Earth orbit, and a large payload capacity and fuel capacity able to ship 100 tonnes anywhere in the solar system. He suggests, however, the logistics will still be incredible: to get 100,000 tonnes of cargo per Martian launch window every two years, a million tonnes of fuel must be in low Earth orbit. But he also had several slides pointing to the context of Starship, pointing to its ability to deliver massive payloads to different destinations in the solar system. “I think we’re about to change something here,” he noted, but added that the key is getting payloads ready to launch on time because the ship will be fueled and waiting.
Accordingly, we may have to rethink our Mars exploration approach. JPL is very capable of building a billion-dollar range rover for Mars exploration every two years, Handmer said, but that’s not nearly enough to justify a 100-tonne shipment to Mars every two years. A range of suggestions might be possible to address this, he said, such as having private companies build much smaller (and perhaps less reliable) rovers on the scale of $100 million each. That said, Handmer said Starship’s capabilities do appear to “invalidate the reason for the existence of the SLS,” which is NASA’s deep-space rocket that the agency plans to use for Artemis landings.
There are caveats to Handmer’s analysis. While Handmer is comfortable talking about launch vehicles and their capabilities and has engineering expertise and information to back that up, not all of Starship’s design is public and there are also many people who “know a lot more about the intricacies of Starship than I do.” Handmer also suggested that attendees look at the mini-YouTube series in which Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, speaks with SpaceX founder Elon Musk about space exploration and Starship. The first video is available here, but in principle, Handmer said based on these interviews Musk’s approach is to “question the requirements” for a Mars mission that way he can “delete parts or processes” that might be unnecessary to the core mission of launching, landing and performing science on the surface. (It’s a similar line of thought to those who camp in the wilderness, who know the dangers of bringing too much and never using all the equipment, he added.)
But he says we should remember to simplify. Complex space projects tend to lead to unexpected issues, such as NASA’s flagship programs, Handmer said. The Hubble Space Telescope famously launched with a flawed mirror that had to be addressed in-orbit, while NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed numerous times due to technical issues (it may finally launch in 2021 if the pandemic, liquid oxygen shortages and technical requirements don’t interfere.) Meanwhile, Handmer expressed admiration for Ingenuity, the $15 million Martian helicopter that accompanied the billion-dollar Perseverance to the surface. While Ingenuity has a more limited scope than a huge Mars mission, Handmer said the design shows “it is possible to build a high-performance space-rated system.”
Remember your Space Operations. Rocketry and spacecraft requirements affect metrics such as schedule, cost, structure, materials, labor and other items. JPL, Handmer said, has 500 subject matter expert teams that each are dedicated to a subspecialty. Each team is devoted to knowing the exact requirements for a subsystem, to “world expert” level, to know precisely what can fly in space and how many resources will be required. That said, Handmer likened the process to steel-making before the Industrial Revolution. Absent machines, “it was possible, but it was extremely expensive; it took a lot of work, a lot of muscle power.” The Romans were making steel 2,000 years ago, but only in small quantities. If Starship is produced at mass scale, Handmer argued, perhaps more efficiencies could be found in manufacturing. Mass scale is something largely not available in space engineering for Mars today (although Earth-orbiting satellites are starting to approach this, he noted.)
Mass scale can come from other activities. Starship may allow the construction of space stations 1,000 times more cheaply, he said, which in turn will lower the cost of launching people, which in turn will encourage organizations to host more people in orbit. He said the potential scale may diminish from $5 million to outfit a person, per day to only $5000 a day. Handmer also envisioned other applications for Starship, such as working on the Moon at lower cost.
Handmer briefly touched on a number of other space topics that you should check out in the YouTube presentation, including the ability to terraform Mars, the capabilities of asteroid mining, possible efficiencies of solar power, how to protect the atmosphere against massive numbers of launches, and how he ran analyses for the presentation such as costing.