Ad astra!

Last week I checked in on Casey Handmer's spaceblog. This year he has, intermittently, floated ideas on what the Starship can do: save a lot of money, save the Artemis project, save Eli Watney. (You know what doesn't get saved? Gateway.) On the hunt for something to poast about yesterday afternoon I wandered back there. Handmer has summed it all up: the Starship means that everyone working on space project needs to quit thinking every gram counts and start thinking of tonnes.

Yes, you can now bring your golfball... and a full slate of clubs. We assume you're bringing that golfcart, in the rover; now you can bring a caddy to drive it. And the fully-stocked lounge, when you're done your nine holes. We're not quite at the Orion stage where we're bringing the barber; as I recall ol' boom boom is a oneway ticket even when it works.

I do hope Nyrath Chung is reading Handmer... since everyone else is. Whilst I was dithering, Reynolds jumped on the story already.

Even though we're at "every tonne counts" instead of "every gram", there remain some parts as weigh many tonnes which Elon would rather not use. One idea was to dispense with the first stage's landing gear. (That stage hoping to land on Mars will still need gear... for now.) Instead, put the gear on the landing-pad: catch the (again, unmanned) rocket with, er, chopsticks. That's being tested too.

Back to Handmer, another good point is that if Elon doesn't mind losing a Starship (and stranding a crew), if the whole thing lands on some low-atmo planetoid, said crew can flush out its fuel and use the tank as extra living-space. Even better: with no atmo underneath, you can even swap the Starship with that Orion. There's the seed for the extraplanetary base, on the Antarctica model. Until someone finds a lavatube.

Looking around elsewhere ToughSF chimed in, a fortnight ago, explaining why we don't repurpose a Starship with a nuclear engine, Orion or NERVA: It's a chemical design from top to bottom. Starship is for pushing the parts of the (actual) interplanetary NERVA into orbit. Then it goes back to Boca, leaving the mechanics to assemble that other ship.

UPDATE 11/17: Handmer has a followup. The Mars-mirror idea will never be launched from Earth but we may consider his other ideas.

One quibble tho'. Does 100T/$10mil mean NASA's engineering marvels in microengineering are now useless? I am going with... no. One advantage of a Cassini-sized probe being (relatively) light is that it can change course. NASA could design a bunch of small probes for Uranus and Neptune, ship their components all up to some station in STL3 halo, assemble them there and blast them to the beyond with a NERVA (preferably by fusion, but hey). Starship is all about getting cargo into low Earth orbit and then getting the rocket back to Earth. NASA can still do planetology. It's just that they'll be hitching lifts shared with other guys' stuff, to fill the manifest.