Will starship make any difference in the speed of these probes or will it just allow much heavier probes to be launched?
You could also launch much-much heavier probe with a dedicated boost stage and / or electric propulsion...
Starship is aiming for being able to launch 200+ tons. So stuff like this on a dedicated mission would have vastly more delta-v available but also be kind of silly. There's no reason we couldn't scale things up and just launch hundreds of probes at once all through the Solar System. Alternatively instead of launching probes we could look to start launching modular observation stations that could one day even house humans, or perhaps even grander ideas.
Launching one off probes, rovers, and satellites is really something I think we should be aiming to move beyond, let alone on the ridiculous time intervals we operate on at present.
We shouldn't still be making basic, yet revolutionary, discoveries on the Moon, more than half a century after we set foot on it.
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.
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.
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.
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...
That can't be right; a naive application of the rocket equation gives (3.72 km/s) * ln(1,300 mT / 100 mT) = 9.55 km/s.
The equation you have uses block 1 prop + dry mass numbers. Block 1 does not have significant payload capability and the last one just flow on OFT 6. As such let's use Block 2 numbers, first one should fly early next year. Dry mass target 100t, payload 100t, prop mass 1,500t. So (3.72 km/s) * ln(1700 / 200) = 7.96 km /s. This is with using min advertised payload of 100t and Elon's forward looking 100t number for dry mass. Way above 5km/s, but reaching 9.5km/s with 100t of payload will be challenging.
I've pulled stats from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship .
Europa Clipper isn't a 100 tonne payload; it's about 6.
It's just not the right business model to build "small" probes like this that trickle back imagery when we can be downloading the same imagery AND querying data that's sitting in situ to run analysis on a planet -local server of TB of real time signals.
Imagine you see something interesting in one image, and just ask the server to find local similar things all over the planet from the imagery in storage. Instant frequency and geospatial analysis product without begging for observation time or (worse) a new mission.
Oh and a kilometer scale telescope in orbit.
The advantages of Starship is that with such a massive payload capacity it can carry many small probes and combined with a low cost per kg it will justify setting up assembly lines that churn out small probes by the thousands.
We'll pepper the solar system with these probes and they'll act as nodes in a large interplanetary network relaying data between each other and larger, more powerful nodes as you describe.
The nodes in a network are important and more powerful nodes are more desirable, but the network itself is a powerful thing that it greater than the sum of its parts.
This combined with economies of scale will always justify more smaller satellites.
The question for me therefore, based on your comment, is whether Europa Clipper’s expense can be justified because it is funding the current generation of custom space vehicle and mission experts, keeping alive their traditions and skills for the next generation.
The alternative view is that it’s a waste of money to continuously support the careers of what are possibly the spaceship equivalents of wheelwrights, stable masters, and saddlers.
Having the technology and infrastructure to produce the things that they are experts at producing but in an unprecedented scale is what we need if we want them to reach their full potential.
It allows them to more rapidly iterate over design ideas by seeing what works and what doesn't. It also allows cheaper destructive testing to work out the bugs instead of waiting a decade to find out if they just wasted billions of dollars and centuries of man years with intrinsically flawed designs.
And ultimately it allows us to build modular self-assembling spacecraft on a scale that we've only dreamed of allowing them to practice their trades in new ways that will unlock new science and knowledge for the human race.
And how does it get the initial boost along its trajectory? We could do solar electric and wait a year for it to pick up enough delta-v to start the journey ...
Fully disclosing my ignorance here: How does it work to launch 100 probes to 10 planets from earth with one launch?
With that said what I had in mind when I wrote my comment wasn't using one rocket to launch a 100 probes to different solar bodies but instead to launch 100 probes to a single body in one go. I envision a time where we'll deploy massive constellations of remote sensing satellites, like mini-star link constellations for each solar body be it a moon or planet so that we can get real-time data across the whole body instead of having to stitch together pieces of data from one probe. Like Starlink these constellations will be able to relay data between the nodes should they lose line of sight with Earth and will be able to relay data to other constellations orbiting other nearby solar bodies to get the data to Earth if the whole constellation is blocked.[0]
I could see a near future where we start sending these Starlink like communications/remote sensing craft at the same time we send craft designed to pepper the surface of a body with multiple rovers and stationary probes to survey the surface of planets and again relay the data they collect between themselves and the constellations above.
It would be cool to see terrestrial bodies explored with some sort of RTG/solar powered stationary device that has an automated lab for sample analysis and seismic measurements paired with a dozen or so of these sandflea type robots[0] that can roll and hop over the surface to survey and collect samples to bring back to the stationary labs for analysis.
You can even look at sample return missions where some of these stationary devices have the means to send samples into orbit around the solar body that they're located on where the sample carrying craft rendevous with an orbiting craft designed to return to Earth perhaps refueling with fuel depots previously put in place along the way.
But honestly let's do both. Infra and something like Planet Labs for outer planets. We can.
Their performance will likely be somewhat limited compared to what you're looking for at this point due to radiation and the excessive mass of the shielding required to protect them from it.
That can be mitigated with in situ resource production. Like burying a server rack scale processing node under ground on mars and relaying data to it with the network I described above or capturing water from comets and using it fill compartments for radiation shielding in orbital data centers.
However, it'll make a great delivery system for some serious high-energy escape velocity "third" stages, rather like the Shuttle "Inertial Upper Stage" that delivered Magellan and Galileo and Ulysses.
Or the same duration mission with a more massive payload that can both do more and report more.
One coauthor of [2] is the chief scientist for astrophysics at JPL, so it’s not just idle speculation.
The ability to launch an 8m telescope definitely has space mission designers interested. However, probe velocity itself is not addressed.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/astronomers-say-new-te...
[2] https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/76/2/40/2869438/Ac...