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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

If this remains a long term design limitation it'll be interesting to see if people design satellite hardware that consists of multiple individual rectangular slab sized things (generally same size/shape per piece as starlink v3 test satellites which have unfolding PV/antenna), that can latch together once dispensed, and further unfold.

Such an architecture might not be an impossible design consideration if the goal is to have something big like the sun-shade/cold side of the Webb telescope.

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I can't imagine that there will not be other versions. The Pez dispenser is just solving the problem at hand. Eventually, I wouldn't be surprised to see cargo bay doors similar to the shuttle's.

That seems likely. Best guess is the relatively small slot sized door is a cautious design while they're working out issues with re-entry heating and stresses and sacrificing ships into the ocean. Once they're very confident they have the configuration for the 'hot' side of the starship working well on re-entry (and probably after they've returned and caught a few), it could be expanded in size.

Yeah, they'll have more versions for sure. There are two main designs that have been discussed / shown before (one where the entire nose hinges "backwards" and exposes the payload, and one that looks like the shuttle bay doors). And I think that for NASA decadal projects (i.e. JWST-like big telescopes) they could even go with a non-reusable Starship, with "regular" fairings that get dropped.

> If this remains a long term design limitation

It is not a long term limitation. One might design any number of stages to fly in place of Starship on top of the Super Heavy booster.

Also, large science payloads can be launched by SLS. Back in the days of the Ares program, there were proposals to launch an 8 meter reflector (ATLAST-8m)[1] using Ares V. SLS anticipates payloads of such size as well.

So there are at least two viable platforms on which enormous space mirrors might launch, and one of them is likely to be highly cost effective. It's up to the science establishment to propose such missions and get them funded.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20100004890

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