Cargo manifest for first Starship (BFS) Mars mission

[docmordrid]

If you have water, flour, yeast, salt and a griddle or oven, pita bread tastes much better than flour & water.

[Lar]

BNSF railway are about to trial an autonomous container handler (looks like a giant forklift and can lift containers off stacktrains and skeleton trailers and place them as well) in one of their container facilities. So the tech to self unload containers isn't completely SF.

[JonathanD]

BNSF railway are about to trial an autonomous container handler (looks like a giant forklift and can lift containers off stacktrains and skeleton trailers and place them as well) in one of their container facilities. So the tech to self unload containers isn't completely SF.

My question would be power.  How are you going to power a heavy lift system from a BFS Spaceship sitting upright on the surface?  It's going to take a lot of juice.  Given, the cargo is a third of the weight it would be here, but still.  Batteries are only going to last so long, and solar is not going to provide a ton of energy.

[rsdavis9]

BNSF railway are about to trial an autonomous container handler (looks like a giant forklift and can lift containers off stacktrains and skeleton trailers and place them as well) in one of their container facilities. So the tech to self unload containers isn't completely SF.

My question would be power.  How are you going to power a heavy lift system from a BFS Spaceship sitting upright on the surface?  It's going to take a lot of juice.  Given, the cargo is a third of the weight it would be here, but still.  Batteries are only going to last so long, and solar is not going to provide a ton of energy.

If solar doesn't provide a ton of energy we have other more pressing problems. Making fuel on mars for the return trip takes a ton of energy. Solar cells have the advantage of sitting there with no fuel requirements and continually making electricity day after day. So over time you get your tons of energy.

The whole idea is minimize weight transfered and rely on high power on mars.
Instead of sending cement blocks make them their.
 Etc.

[Lar]

BNSF railway are about to trial an autonomous container handler (looks like a giant forklift and can lift containers off stacktrains and skeleton trailers and place them as well) in one of their container facilities. So the tech to self unload containers isn't completely SF.

My question would be power.  How are you going to power a heavy lift system from a BFS Spaceship sitting upright on the surface?  It's going to take a lot of juice.  Given, the cargo is a third of the weight it would be here, but still.  Batteries are only going to last so long, and solar is not going to provide a ton of energy.

I think how to bootstrap is a valid question. The first power cells and deployment have to be unloaded without any surface infrastructure. Once some power is available, your freedom of action is greatly increased. So some roll out cells and a small powerbank have to be unloaded early

[guckyfan]

I think how to bootstrap is a valid question. The first power cells and deployment have to be unloaded without any surface infrastructure. Once some power is available, your freedom of action is greatly increased. So some roll out cells and a small powerbank have to be unloaded early

I am thinking of the mining droids Elon Musk mentioned. They would have quite heavy batteries to do their daily work. As long as it can be assured their batteries are charged during transfer just unloading them would provide a capable power bank. Their first task would be to roll out some solar panels. Assuming the first Starships have the containers at the bottom lowering them will need next to no energy.

[JonathanD]

Well, and the upper cargo pods have some potential energy.  Might be over-complicating things, but  I wonder if you could have a crane system that uses the resistance of the lowering cargo pods to recharge the onboard batteries until such time as you have some sort of power cell set up.  You'd need some sort of way to move the cargo pods once they are lowered though, unless they can self-move somehow.  Plenty of engineering problems to be solved, SpaceX will need help.

Doesn't sound like an RTG will be in the cards any time soon, but I really hope they get one for people as an emergency backup.

Things would definitely be slow going, but realistically you have years between launch windows so I guess that's not a huge deal unless stuff just breaks, or there's another global dust storm.

[Cherokee43v6]

The following should fly on every early flight... (manned or not)

2 top flight mechanics tool sets (Craftsman, Kobalt, whatever is preferred)

20 Spades (Hey, you're planning a hundred folk)
20 Coal Shovels (flat as opposed to the rounded spades)
20 Mattox
20 Garden Rakes

(Recommend all above with well cured wooden handles... I doubt the fiberglass handles are rated for Mars temps)

1 solar kiln  (for experimentation/usage in making bricks)
1 ton of cement mix
2 electric cement mixers
1 lightweight electrically powered drilling rig to bore for water (I've seen vehicles along these lines alongside the highway being used by survey crews for soil testing)

At least two miles worth of extension cord/cabling to power/recharge devices away from the ship.

A supply of water for consumption and early test usage until water is found and can be processed for use.

[rsdavis9]

The following should fly on every early flight... (manned or not)

2 top flight mechanics tool sets (Craftsman, Kobalt, whatever is preferred)

20 Spades (Hey, you're planning a hundred folk)
20 Coal Shovels (flat as opposed to the rounded spades)
20 Mattox
20 Garden Rakes

(Recommend all above with well cured wooden handles... I doubt the fiberglass handles are rated for Mars temps)

1 solar kiln  (for experimentation/usage in making bricks)
1 ton of cement mix
2 electric cement mixers
1 lightweight electrically powered drilling rig to bore for water (I've seen vehicles along these lines alongside the highway being used by survey crews for soil testing)

At least two miles worth of extension cord/cabling to power/recharge devices away from the ship.

A supply of water for consumption and early test usage until water is found and can be processed for use.

Lots of hose for moving liquids.

EDIT: compressed air to blow out the lines at night so that they don't freeze.

[rsdavis9]

Well, and the upper cargo pods have some potential energy.  Might be over-complicating things, but  I wonder if you could have a crane system that uses the resistance of the lowering cargo pods to recharge the onboard batteries until such time as you have some sort of power cell set up.  You'd need some sort of way to move the cargo pods once they are lowered though, unless they can self-move somehow.  Plenty of engineering problems to be solved, SpaceX will need help.

Doesn't sound like an RTG will be in the cards any time soon, but I really hope they get one for people as an emergency backup.

Things would definitely be slow going, but realistically you have years between launch windows so I guess that's not a huge deal unless stuff just breaks, or there's another global dust storm.

I would think a self deploying roll out solar panels from the base cargo areas would be good. It would deploy in a 6 way radial pattern from the ship. Maybe not deploy one so you have an area near the ship to lower the rovers to. The panels could be moved later after stuff is on the surface.

[rakaydos]

BNSF railway are about to trial an autonomous container handler (looks like a giant forklift and can lift containers off stacktrains and skeleton trailers and place them as well) in one of their container facilities. So the tech to self unload containers isn't completely SF.

My question would be power.  How are you going to power a heavy lift system from a BFS Spaceship sitting upright on the surface?  It's going to take a lot of juice.  Given, the cargo is a third of the weight it would be here, but still.  Batteries are only going to last so long, and solar is not going to provide a ton of energy.

I think how to bootstrap is a valid question. The first power cells and deployment have to be unloaded without any surface infrastructure. Once some power is available, your freedom of action is greatly increased. So some roll out cells and a small powerbank have to be unloaded early

I'll note that the BFS's own solar cells are on the rear of the Starship, and Aft Cargo can carry some of the first bootstrap equipment.

[JonathanD]

This has probably been brought up, but couldn't a specialized Spaceship(tm) be designed to be a self-contained propellant plant?   In other words, instead of trying to unload something and set something up on the surface separately, simply have the entire vehicle designed to stay on the surface of the planet permanently and act as a propellant manufacturing facility and store the byproducts in the tanks.  It would just need to be able to drill for water.  Of course if you land in the wrong spot or there is no water found, it's a big waste.  But otherwise it seems like you could have a lot of design optimizations if it is an integrated machine and not something designed to be unloaded.

[Patchouli]

I'd have the following on the first landing.
A pilot ISRU plant to test the basic technology,a small crane for lowering payloads, a rover preferable something along of the JPL Athlete.
A kilopower reactor to provide electricity until the solar arrays are reconfigured.
Maybe bring a couple of small robotic bulldozers.
Lastly a small ascent vehicle for Mars sample return keep it simple maybe use a Star 37 or 48 first stage and a small hypergolic upper stage.
If there's enough payload to have a rocket powerful enough for a direct return maybe base the return capsule around the existing Stardust design.

[Lar]

This has probably been brought up, but couldn't a specialized Spaceship(tm) be designed to be a self-contained propellant plant?   In other words, instead of trying to unload something and set something up on the surface separately, simply have the entire vehicle designed to stay on the surface of the planet permanently and act as a propellant manufacturing facility and store the byproducts in the tanks.  It would just need to be able to drill for water.  Of course if you land in the wrong spot or there is no water found, it's a big waste.  But otherwise it seems like you could have a lot of design optimizations if it is an integrated machine and not something designed to be unloaded.

Yes... From the early part of the thread...

I would expect the ISRU processing equipment for the initial flight sequence to just stay aboard the first cargo BFS, using its own tanks for storage.

I think most of us think that's fairly likely at first. There's a thread (I think Ionmars was in on a lot of the organizing) on starting up chemical processing that has good speculation about this as well. It uses '17 version ships but that's OK.

[rsdavis9]

It would just need to be able to drill for water.  Of course if you land in the wrong spot or there is no water found, it's a big waste.  But otherwise it seems like you could have a lot of design optimizations if it is an integrated machine and not something designed to be unloaded.

which is why for the first ships making sure that water is available and nearby and pure enough is the primary mission.

Given pure enough water and close enoigh to the factory ship hoses should work from a rodrigez well. Heat water in the factory ship pump it out to the well and return cooler water to the ship.

[Slarty1080]

This has probably been brought up, but couldn't a specialized Spaceship(tm) be designed to be a self-contained propellant plant?   In other words, instead of trying to unload something and set something up on the surface separately, simply have the entire vehicle designed to stay on the surface of the planet permanently and act as a propellant manufacturing facility and store the byproducts in the tanks.  It would just need to be able to drill for water.  Of course if you land in the wrong spot or there is no water found, it's a big waste.  But otherwise it seems like you could have a lot of design optimizations if it is an integrated machine and not something designed to be unloaded.

It could that would be the easy part. The real problem is providing enough power for it all.
Electrolysis of water to produce 1kg of hydrogen takes around 50 kWhr. And using NASA's slightly dated but not wildly inaccurate figures for solar on Mars suggests that 100ton of kit could produce 81kW (equivalent continuous output smoothed over day and night).

Or you could go nuclear
Fission
30kW @7.8 tons each or for a whole Starship 100*30/7.8 = 385kW (but must be >1km from crew to keep radiation exposure below 50rem/year)

Radio isotope
5kW @450kg each or for a whole Starship 100*5/0.450 = 1100kW now wer're cooking on gas (but also includes 7.2 tons of Plutonium!) and there's not enough Plutonium by a very wide margin - a couple of orders of magnitude in fact:
https://spacenews.com/plutonium-supply-for-nasa-missions-faces-long-term-challenges/
 

[Melonhead]

The thread has touched on this in a couple posts, but cranes and cargo holds are places we should ignore the SpaceX artistry; we should instead be looking at something much closer to the intermodal industry crossed with the air freight industry.  The crewed ships could probably make do with the 1920’s style crane shown in the video, but that isn’t going to work for the first unmanned ships.  An obvious difference from Earth industry is that the intermodal crane needs to be part of the ship, and everything will be much lighter.  But, everything coming off the ship needs corner castings that the intermodal crane twistlocks can autonomously lock and unlock.  Air freight “unit load devices” (ULD) are a good approach for how things can be packed and locked onto the cargo hold deck.
That means the very first item off the ship is a rover/tractor.  It’ll need a robot arm with a detachable intermodal spreader so it can grab solar panels.  The second item is a trailer loaded with solar panels that the tractor can autonomously set up.  The spreader is detachable because after the solar panels are deployed, cables will need to be run to the ship and connected, so the arm will need a different gripper for that.  The “aesthetic” third fin seems like an excellent place to put the needed plugs.
There a plenty of things we can do after the power field is set up, but only after.  So, the same approach for the first unmanned ships also seems appropriate for the first crewed landing.

[Lar]

The thread has touched on this in a couple posts, but cranes and cargo holds are places we should ignore the SpaceX artistry; we should instead be looking at something much closer to the intermodal industry crossed with the air freight industry.  The crewed ships could probably make do with the 1920’s style crane shown in the video, but that isn’t going to work for the first unmanned ships.  An obvious difference from Earth industry is that the intermodal crane needs to be part of the ship, and everything will be much lighter.  But, everything coming off the ship needs corner castings that the intermodal crane twistlocks can autonomously lock and unlock.  Air freight “unit load devices” (ULD) are a good approach for how things can be packed and locked onto the cargo hold deck.
That means the very first item off the ship is a rover/tractor.  It’ll need a robot arm with a detachable intermodal spreader so it can grab solar panels.  The second item is a trailer loaded with solar panels that the tractor can autonomously set up.  The spreader is detachable because after the solar panels are deployed, cables will need to be run to the ship and connected, so the arm will need a different gripper for that.  The “aesthetic” third fin seems like an excellent place to put the needed plugs.
There a plenty of things we can do after the power field is set up, but only after.  So, the same approach for the first unmanned ships also seems appropriate for the first crewed landing.

The rover and trailer are kind of "must unload successfully or else" things, battery will only take you so far, so those solar panels, plugged in, are vital. Possibly have a pair of each as first unloads and size the batteries on the ship large enough to unload both pairs and still have some spare capacity just in case.

[CuddlyRocket]

... That means the very first item off the ship is a rover/tractor.  It’ll need a robot arm with a detachable intermodal spreader so it can grab solar panels.  The second item is a trailer loaded with solar panels that the tractor can autonomously set up.  The spreader is detachable because after the solar panels are deployed, cables will need to be run to the ship and connected, so the arm will need a different gripper for that.  The “aesthetic” third fin seems like an excellent place to put the needed plugs.
There a plenty of things we can do after the power field is set up, but only after.  So, the same approach for the first unmanned ships also seems appropriate for the first crewed landing.

The rover and trailer are kind of "must unload successfully or else" things, battery will only take you so far, so those solar panels, plugged in, are vital. Possibly have a pair of each as first unloads and size the batteries on the ship large enough to unload both pairs and still have some spare capacity just in case.

The Starship itself does have solar panels. It would make sense for these to be deployable on the Martian surface and soon after landing. This may require additional mass for structural strengthening over and above that needed for deployment in interplanetary flight, but this can probably be offset against a smaller battery requirement. The ship will be on batteries since before entering the atmosphere and if I was on board I'd be happier with a back-up power supply when trying to get the surface power system up and running rather than watch the battery capacity tick down!

The idea of being able to power the ship (and charge up the batteries) from the ground power system when up and running via a cable and charging point on the ship (the third leg does seem appropriate) is a sensible idea. This should be two-way so the ship can also provide power if needed and available. There should also be additional charging points on the ship to enable rovers and other equipment to charge. This may be vital when setting up the ground power system - if there's a problem your rover/tractors may run low on charge before completing the task! - but probably convenient even when there is ground power and plugging into the ship is in practice accessing this power.

[Lar]

CuddlyRocket:

Early iterations of the ship had solar wings that looked like they might be tough to deploy in a gravity well and might be pointing the wrong way. Fixable with mechanicals of some kind... but that adds failure points and weight.

Otherwise I agree.