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Notes -
Related to the SpaceX discussion in the CWT, can someone explain Starship's place in a mars program to a guy who never played KSP (but watched some videos)?
I see the 1st stage vehicle design as optimized for heavy surface to low orbit launches. The second stage is confusing, mixing atmospheric engines and heat shields with vac engines for fairly inefficient interplanetary burns. The whole thing looks more like Tintin's Lunar Adventure than any real mission I've seen designs for.
What am I missing here? Why is this better than launching a lightweight interplanetary-dedicated ship plus a smaller lander? Is the whole mars thing just hype for what's really a STO heavy lifter?
Compared to the moon, Mars is farther away and has a deeper gravity well.
This means that the craft has to be more substantial since the astronauts will be in there for quite a while. Also the lander needs to be more substantial since it has to escape more gravity.
The lightweight ship and small lander might not cut it.
SpaceX hasn't really explained the mars plan. They might be planning to assemble something in orbit and use a Starship as the lander.
My understanding was that the Mars rocket would be assembled in LEO from parts launched in Starships, and that a tanker configuration of Starship would be used to fuel it.
Nobody has this plan. The SpaceX manned-Mars plan is that the crew/cargo configurations of Starship are the Mars rockets, that will each send ~100T to Mars after refueling in LEO from a tanker filled by several reusable tanker-configuration Starship launches. The non-SpaceX Mars probe plans are the same as they've always been, to launch <4T to Mars directly via an expendable upper stage and a separate aerobraking shell. NASA's pre-SpaceX manned-Mars proposal was generally to assemble a Mars Transfer Vehicle in LEO, from parts launched on whatever heavy-lift was politically favored at the time (I see 5 Ares V launches in the 2009 study, for example), to put 80-90T on Mars ... but the cost was always in the $100B+ range and I wouldn't call any of the studies a "plan". Looks like the latest idea was to do (relatively minimal, thanks to SLS Block 2 plus some handwaving about nuclear-electric propulsion) assembly in lunar orbit instead?
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