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Moreover, Starship has a significant advantage over other superheavy-lift rockets in development, such as NASA’s multi-delay Space Launch System and Blue Origin’s. new Glenn rocket. Designed to be the top half of the rocket refueling in earth orbit by other Starships, more of its lifting capacity may be transferred to scientific equipment rather than fuel. For example, it may require taking people to the moon. eight separate launchesEach successive “tanker Starship” brings fuel to the “lunar Starship”, which then goes to the moon with scientific equipment and crew.

Scientists are now starting to imagine what Starship might allow them to do. An article published earlier this year by Jennifer Heldmann of the NASA Ames Research Center explored some scientific opportunities It can be unlocked by Starship missions to the Moon and Mars. A big benefit is that the Starship can carry full-size equipment from Earth – no need for miniaturization to fit in a smaller vehicle, as was necessary for Apollo’s missions to the moon. For example, “you can bring a drilling rig,” says Heldmann. “You can dig a mile like we do on Earth.” This will provide unprecedented access to the interior of the moon and Mars where ice and other beneficial resources are thought to be available. Heldmann says such an idea before was “a little crazy.” But with Starship, she adds, “you can do that and still have room.” “What else do you want to bring?”

Since the Starship can land back on Earth, it will theoretically be able to bring back large quantities of samples as well. The massive volume that can be returned from a variety of different locations will give scientists around the world unprecedented access to extraterrestrial material. This could shed light on numerous mysteries, such as the volcanic history of the moon or the “problem of life and astrobiology” on Mars, Heldmann says.

Starship could also deliver more extravagant missions to other locations, either by launching directly from Earth or perhaps using the moon and Mars as refueling stations, an ambitious future envisioned by Musk.

Let’s go to Neptune

An idea from an international group of scientists called conex (Conceptual Discovery Survey) is a spacecraft called ArkanumIt will use the Starship’s heavy lifting capabilities to explore Neptune and its largest moon Triton. Neptune has only been visited once, flown by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about it. “No one is really thinking about what’s next for Starship to be possible,” says James McKevitt, researcher at the University of Vienna and co-chairman of Conex. “This is what Arcanum is designed to display.”

Weighing about 21 metric tons, the spacecraft would be four times heavier than the largest deep space probe to date: NASA and ESA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, which explored Saturn from 2004 to 2017. No rocket currently available could launch such a vehicle. but Starship will make it possible. McKevitt said the Arcanum will have multiple components, including an orbiter to study Neptune, a lander to study Triton, and a driller to crash into Triton’s surface and “perform a seismic experiment” to understand its geology and structure. says. The mission may also be equipped with a telescope that allows studies of the outer solar system and helps search for planets around other stars.

Other ideas are even more speculative. Physicist Philip Lubin of the University of California at Santa Barbara has calculated that a sufficiently large rocket like the Starship could be used. prevent an asteroid from hitting earth. Such a mission could carry enough explosives to shatter an asteroid as large as a 10-kilometer-wide boulder that wiped out the dinosaurs. Pieces of it would burn harmlessly in the atmosphere before they had a chance to reach our planet.

Starship might be a better way to launch giant space telescopes capable of observing the universe. Right now, equipment like NASA and ESA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope needs to be launched. foldedan expensive, complex, and delicate procedure that can be error-prone. NASA has proposed using a proposed super telescope called LUVOIR, designed to view Earth-like planets around other stars. Can be launched in StarshipMusk said SpaceX is already working on “an interesting project, which is to have a really big telescope, take a lens designed for a ground-based telescope, and build a space-based telescope with it.” No other details have been disclosed yet.

say hi to the neighbors

Elsewhere, some scientists have dreams of using Starship to prepare to visit other stars. René Heller of the Max Planck Solar System Research Institute in Germany and colleagues say this Starship could offer a low-cost way to test technologies for a spacecraft that can travel multiple light-years to neighboring star systems. On a voyage to Mars, Starship could unleash a sail-powered spacecraft that would use an onboard laser to propel thin sails and reach incredible speeds, allowing a demonstration beyond Earth’s orbit. “If SpaceX were kind enough to take one of our sails on board and leave it halfway through its journey to Mars, we could track its acceleration and its path through the solar system for several days and almost all the way to Jupiter’s orbit,” says Heller.

Among other ideas, using Starship to send a probe into orbit of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io is a difficult task without significant lifting capability. “It’s extremely difficult to both orbit and shield from Jupiter’s harsh radiation,” says Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona. “But mass helps with these things. You can have plenty of fuel and radiation shielding.”

Musk suggested that SpaceX could launch as many as a dozen Starship test flights with missions to both the moon and Mars on the horizon in 2022, with a lot of scientific potential. “Once the Starship starts flying, development will be very rapid,” says Margarita Marinova, SpaceX’s former senior Mars development engineer. “There will be a lot more people who can fly things.” These can be anything from standalone missions using the Starship to cruise missions in the current flight manifest. “Once you have a 100-tonne capacity, it’s pretty easy to add science equipment,” says Marinova. “If someone wants to buy loadspace, they can have loadspace. It’s going to be a really fundamental change in how we do science.”

Of course, there are very good reasons to be cautious. Starship doing test flights Without Super Heavy booster, we haven’t seen the full rocket launch yet. It is an extremely large and complex machine and may still experience problems in its development. SpaceX and Musk have also previously been (to put it politely) notorious for being knighted about timelines and targets (Red Dragon, a proposed mission to Mars, was supposed to have launched sometime). as early as 2018). And the method Starship proposes to reach the Moon and Mars is complex and untested, based on multiple Earth-orbiting refueling missions.

Still, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about what Starship could do if it were successful. From the interior of the solar system to the outside and possibly beyond, it could open the door to a whole new era in space science. “I’m sure some very smart people are starting to think about sending scientific missions to Starship,” says space scientist Abhishek Tripathi of the University of California, Berkeley.

Or as Musk put it: “Really anything you can imagine.”