> I'm getting very nervous about manned propulsive landings.
Humans will land on earth in Orion capsule not Starship. So there will only be a tanker that has to do the flip.
On the moon, there is no flip.
The Appollo didn't have a abort option is parts of the flight, unless I am misinformed.
> So I wouldn't be surprised to see the first version of that to be somewhat scaled down from the concept art.
The problem is then about how you do the integration. All the tooling and processes are designed for one size of Starship, to change the whole design just to make it smaller is unlikely to be an efficient thing to do.
Instead they could just fly part of it empty and take far less then the full 100t to the moon, rather then design a smaller version.
If a LEM landing became untenable they could abort to Lunar orbit by launching the crew capsule. You know how after landing on the moon the way they got back to Lunar orbit was by launching the crew capsule, using the lower stage of the LEM as a launch platform? They could actually do that in flight. You're right of course though, I forgot that for Artemis they wont be landing people on Earth in Starship.
All they need to do to make a lighter Lunar starship is make it shorter. Just miss out some fuel tank and payload section segments. No need to make significant changes to the functional parts, it would just be stubbier.
I didn't know they could actually do the accent in flight. Do you have a source about that? Apollo is seriously insane, they thought of everything and pulled it off.
Humans will land on earth in Orion capsule not Starship. So there will only be a tanker that has to do the flip.
On the moon, there is no flip.
The Appollo didn't have a abort option is parts of the flight, unless I am misinformed.
> So I wouldn't be surprised to see the first version of that to be somewhat scaled down from the concept art.
The problem is then about how you do the integration. All the tooling and processes are designed for one size of Starship, to change the whole design just to make it smaller is unlikely to be an efficient thing to do.
Instead they could just fly part of it empty and take far less then the full 100t to the moon, rather then design a smaller version.