Starship Mega Projects LEO and Higher

[spacester]

This thread is for projects that can only possibly happen in a world where Starship delivers on its promise with huge success. Daily deliveries at low prices. Projects receiving scores or hundreds of Starship cargo payloads. NOT projects made OF Starships, they are a delivery vehicle, not for lingering in orbit.

There is a lot to share here and I hope you all find a lot to talk about, but this thread is intended to host multiple projects, not just my thing. This is a Covid project, you know?

I will edit this first post to point to any other projects people want to post, for reference by those new to the thread in the future.

Here's my project.

[spacester]

Introducing: AQUARIUS the water bearer,
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In a near-future world with Starships delivering 100 - 150 T payloads on a daily to weekly basis at $20M per delivery,
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Electrolysis: Clean water ==> LOX and H2 feedstock for Sabattier
Sabattier: CO2 + H2 ==> CH4 + O2
Haber Bosch: H2 + N2 <===> NH3
Fischer-Tropsch: CO + H2 ==> a complex product stream of paraffins, olefins, and oxygenated compounds such as alcohols and aldehydes.
Hydrocarbon stream refining: (??) RP-1 (Pt catalyst), Wax, Propane, Butane
Pyrolysis: Waste disposal and carbon recovery

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[spacester]

Living in Aquarius means access to a wide variety of internal spaces, with choices of temperature and humidity. The Outer Ring of 16 Habitats and 16 Nodes provide 1.0 “gee” of spin-gravity at the nominal floor level   . The Tubes provide a vertical stack of 3 meter square apartments with decreasing fractions of spin-gravity as you go up. The Chutes are mostly for air circulation.

You can spend most of the day in the ring, climb a chute to the Hub and play Aquariball, fall down a Chute and have dinner back in one gee.

Aquarius is the water bearer and purifier. You can take a hot shower any time you want for as long as you want. Luxuriate.

Aquarius will have industrial levels of solar power for the processing plants she carries, your shower warms up the radiators, no biggie. Aquarius will continuously produce LOX from water. While in 1000 km orbit, it will likely be pure Earth water.

After the boost, lunar or asteroid water will be much desired even if it is dirty. Asteroidal resources most welcome. The dirty water and its “dirt” can be used for additional radiation blocking around the Hub.

But Aquarius will need to develop the capability to process asteroid water for electrolysis and as a hydrogen sink.

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[JaimeZX]

Well, I like it.  Although once you have it built it might better serve as an Earth-Mars circulator. Get a few of them going over the course of several synods and pretty soon you have a much more massive colonization fleet.

Of course that also requires ships to transfer pax on either end, but your vision here is "payload to orbit is cheap*" which means "fuel is cheap" which means possibly "shuttles to and from the circulator(s) are cheap."

* "cheap" being a relative term.

[rakaydos]

If "Mega project" is defined as "bigger than can be economically launched from earth in one piece, even with planned upgrades like 18m starship", lets look at what might be worth looking at.

Moon-base and Mars-base are the obvious ones. Most interpretations I've seen meet the "some assembly required" definition that turns them into a ground-based "mega-structure".

Starship LEO factories, and 18m starship factories will be scalable to meet our needs for quite some time. But a full industrial station in equatorial LEO would offload the equipment to the closest stable patch of microgravity to earth, and rely on starship shipments for raw materials and product delivery. Note that this would NOT be a spin station, and would likely be "crewed" entirely and almost entirely by remotes. This is also effectively earth-based manufacturing- the position of the factory is chosen to minimize energy costs for access from earth markets, and is in no way a "space import." Moon and mars can get their own industrial sats.

Mega-telescopes and other offworld science installations are another option. there was one talk I saw, a list of the possible benefits of a linear particle accelerator around the equator of the moon. (with the caveat at the end that if we wanted to experiment with REAL high energy physics, plank energy and the like, we'd need a particle accelerator describing the orbit of Neptune.) This covers the full range, from a suspended receiver over a crater on the far side of the moon, to a gravitational lensing observatory at the 1000 AU mark.

Once the mars base is big and self sufficient enough to be more of a destination than a work site, cyclers START to make sense. Obviously Mars needs enough free life support on the ground to handle all the passengers who arn't bringing the cycler's life support down with them, but a cycler can at least provide spin gravity for the trip and allow starships going to mars to be almost as packed as PTP starship flights, and for the same reasons.

[gongora]

This thread really has little to do with Starship.  The premise is that large amounts of cargo can be orbited, then (insert random project that has nothing to do with SpaceX).  Moving to the Advanced Concepts forum section.

[spacester]

This thread really has little to do with Starship.  The premise is that large amounts of cargo can be orbited, then (insert random project that has nothing to do with SpaceX).  Moving to the Advanced Concepts forum section.

Well, if it's an advanced concept to you and others, then so be it. May I be permitted to disagree? And/or explain why I think it does not belong here?

[Robotbeat]

Advanced Concepts is fine, altho honestly your idea is no more off-topic than many other similar ones in the SpaceX Mars section.

It’s an interesting idea. We do need to start considering just what to do with launch costs on the order of $10/kg IMLEO. It puts so much other thinking on its head.

[spacester]

Where would be the proper place to discuss a vehicle that consists of a SpaceX Crew Dragon embedded in a larger craft that would fit inside the payload bay of Starship (the only foreseeable rocket capable of orbiting it, with a user's guide)?

Would a SpaceX Crew Dragon based payload launching in a SpaceX Starship belong in one of the SpaceX sections? If not, wow. If yes, then Aquarius belongs there as well.

It has everything to do with Starship! We cannot design payloads for New Glenn or SLS, can we? SpaceX has floated a price and they are flying hardware. This is plainly not an advanced concept. It just isn't.

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