A Layman’s Guide to the Starship Grift
Nobody wants a Mark Watney growing poop-potatoes on Mars more than me. Believe me. I have been rooting for manned spaceflight since very nearly the dawn of manned spaceflight. I was six years old for Apollo 11. I mostly remember struggling to stay awake for Armstrong’s first step (It was 2 hours past my bedtime).
That mission had to take an incredible number of problems into account and solve every one, from making a computer powerful enough to control the spacecraft small enough to fit inside it, to understanding what fabrics to make a lunar EVA suit out of. Every issue was solved by design – creatively, with slide-rules and on paper, then manufactured and tested— on deadline. Apollo was a program that understood the whole assignment.
What’s been disclosed about Program Starship? Not so much.
The Starship program doesn’t appear to really be trying to solve anything like the problems you’d actually confront on a Mars flight. From what I can see, and I’ve followed its development from Elon’s pre-fascist period, it’s pretty clearly been nothing but a cynical grift of your tax dollars.
But let’s explore why I think that, as a fan of all things space.
By any measure, SpaceX’s Dragon and Falcon programs are highly successful and innovative. Elon had passing involvment in development of those programs. But Starship is Elon’s baby. His, “vision for human survival”. So why does Starship seem like a fantasy when Dragon and Falcon weren’t?
Starship certainly looks impressive. Catching its booster with massive chopsticks is just undeniably, jaw-droppingly cool. Orbiting and landing the Starship has been more complex, but it’s still seems like the stuff of science fiction to see the thing descend ass-end first onto a target and nearly stand upright. Usually before exploding.
But what about the missions it’s ostensibly designed for?
As a platform for lunar missions Starship (cool kids just call it ‘Ship these days) could be iffy at best. Even landing a small robotic lander has been frustratingly difficult, as we’ve seen this week. Landing what is essentially a 15-story building on the Moon would be insanely complex. But this thing was meant for Mars, baby: Months in space, then a low-gravity soft landing, planting a flag and repeating until the end of human civilization on Earth.
Even without Starship’s two recent spectacular, air-traffic diverting, rapid unscheduled disassemblies into the Caribbean, the program on the whole appears to be nothing like a serious attempt to do anything but secure millions upon millions of dollars for the performative antics and pockets of Elon Musk. Now I’m no rocket scientist, but that’s okay, neither is Elon.
Let’s first talk about interplanetary radiation. Radiation exposure on, say, the International Space Station is very different than on a trip to Mars, or on the Mars surface. Both Earth and the ISS are largely protected from the cosmic and solar radiation spectrum by the magnetic field created by the iron core and molten innards of our planet. But get further out than the average satellite and astronauts risk becoming an expensive Hot Pocket.
We don’t have much data on what the levels and length of radiation exposure on a flight to Mars might do to a human body, or at least how quickly humans could die from it. Radiation exposure in long-duration flight on board the ISS has been studied, and the effects, even in relatively protective Low Earth Orbit, have been shown to degrade astronaut DNA and potentially create significant health and cognitive issues.
But we know next to nothing about it once we leave the cocoon of Low Earth Orbit. The 24 men who went to the Moon were exposed to interplanetary radiation levels, but for just days, not the 34 months (!) a round trip would take (or the 9 month one-way trip Elon says he’d prefer for himself) with today’s tech.
Mars is a barren, irradiated ball in part because it has no magnetic field. It will never have a magnetic field. We, and every living thing we might take with us on a 34-month journey to the red marble evolved over millions of years in an environment protected from intense solar and cosmic radiation. Even the heartiest cactus is made up of DNA that breaks down in irradiated environments. No amount of cute terraforming CGI video will change any of that. Without significant mitigation, for which there is no viable current plan, no poop-potatoes for you.
If you ask SpaceX about this, they talk in basic terms about the power of stored water and “heavy shielding” within the crew compartments to mitigate radiation exposure, without much discussion of the amount of mass that must be lifted into Trans Mars Injection to do that job, or whether that’s even in the ballpark of what the planned vehicle and booster can lift. None of those innovations have been tested nor their mass equivalent flown.
Let’s talk about microgravity: But let’s say they make a magic anti-radiation suit for everyone and every plant and seed that goes up there. Mounting evidence suggests that, even without the toll of radiation, the physiological effects of prolonged microgravity on astronauts are debilitating, even with all the mitigating tools we can invent. When Scott Kelly landed after spending just under a year in space, his body was in no condition to embark on any mission objectives beyond sitting down for an extended period. Granted, Mars gravity is only 38% what it is here, but anything less than our Earth-standard 1g, experienced over a lengthy stay on Mars, is a giant physiological unknown.
Even after Kelly recovered from the initial physical disability, there was measurable decline in his immune system, eyesight and cognitive function. It’s a good bet that means that any astronauts would arrive on Mars, at best, sick and significantly weakened at, potentially, the most critical time of the mission, only to get little relief on the surface.
Living off the land when we land: So. Even if we somehow miraculously mitigate the radiation and have time to get over our space sicknesses, what we know so far about the soil on Mars would also pretty much nix our poop-potato harvest. Samples collected by our robotic rovers reveal that Martian soil is a bed of dust and toxins covering rock that’s been frustratingly tough to drill into, at least in the places where our probes have drilled. In lieu of soil, there’s research into developing cyanobacteria that might survive on Mars that might be able to support other organisms as a medium. But probably not cheeseburgers in anyone’s lifetime.
Water almost certainly still exists on the planet (and it once had a lot of it), but drilling for it and collecting it in useful amounts would be a major industrial endeavor, something one has to assume would be achieved robotically before any people arrive. Maybe those robots could build radiation safe condos too. (To be fair, SpaceX has described, in theory, uncrewed missions that would prepare some kind of Marsbase before manned arrivals. Details about the tech are light.)
But, for the forseeable, if you if you want to grow corn, you’ll need to bring your radiation-shielded cornfield (or hydroponic warehouse) with you. And for now, your water, at great expense. The ISS, crewed by under a dozen folks at most, is the most efficient water use system ever devised. Yet, still, it gets water shipments via cargo launches 4 times a year. Shipping a single gallon of water to the ISS costs north of $80,000. And that doesn’t get it out of Low Earth Orbit. (Mark Kelly, brother of aforementioned astronaut Scott Kelly, sent a gorilla suit to Scott on the ISS as a gag gift. Cost to orbit: About $40,000. It is not known what the cost of sending a radiation-mitigating gorilla suit to Mars would be.)
Let’s talk Elon’s big Starship goal – Mars City: Elon is a guy who has missed many a self-imposed deadline, from tunnel completions to self-driving cars. But he really wants a city of a million humans on Mars by 2054. Cool, cool. What would that take?
Perhaps you’ve heard the term “launch window”. In this discussion, a launch window is the short period of time when you must leave this planet in time for the thing in space you want to land on to be at the right spot in space for you to be able to land on it. Earth and Mars orbits make them close enough for this to happen most efficiently about every 26 months starting from Earth. So at this writing, that leaves about 19 chances to launch to Mars before Elon’s deadline.
To get one million people to Mars by that date, you’d need to launch just about your average Dodger Stadium game-day crowd (and years of supplies of Dodger Dogs and nachos) into Trans Mars Injection in each of those 19 launch windows. The rosiest of plans for Starship seating capacity is 100 people (which itself is highly suspect for a trip of that duration unless somehow none of these people need food or water). That translates into building and launching — hold on to your space helmet– more than 5000 Starships during each launch window. (Not to mention, Elon’s plans include a fleet of ships that are just for refueling. Each ship reportedly costs $100 million, and that’s before being kitted out with the stuff that keeps humans alive in space for 9 months and gives them a chance at a successful start on the surface. That’s $500,000,000,000 — half a trillion– just for ships, not accounting for launch facilities, every 26 months.
Granted, if Mars-bound women were to be re-designated exclusively as baby factories (and that policy is certainly being bandied about in Republican circles) and if human birth is even possible in 38% gravity, it could lower the launch requirements by at least a few Dodger Stadiums.
Also, note that in order for a Starship to have any hope of hefting that payload into Trans Mars Injection, the stack would need to be fully fueled, and that’s something that hasn’t been done yet. There’s a reason. The failure at launch of a fully-fueled Starship and booster would create an explosion of around 1.6 Kilotons, or the power of a small tactical nuclear weapon (sans radiation, mercifully). Assuming zero failures in (checks notes) …95,000 launches over 30 years seems like a poor bet indeed. But if you like those odds, the next Mars launch window opens at the end of 2026. So hurry.
Don’t get me wrong. I have always yearned for a Star Trek version of the future, where resources are so plentiful money isn’t needed and the world is woke enough for people of every culture, gender, species and nationality to share a spaceship and explore in peace, even if basic physics limits that exploration with people on board to our own solar neighborhood.
And I do think it is possible that technologies might one day overcome many of the obstacles I’ve listed here.
But I don’t think anything about Elon’s program design, tech execution or, frankly, politics gets us anywhere near that goal in any of our lifetimes, nor has any realistic intention of doing so. If there was one thing that was truly impressive about the Apollo program, it was that they were relatively honest about how hard it was going to be, and how the scope of the problem to solve was about far, far more than just the rocket hardware.
