> Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again.
But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.
Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
I completely forgot about this. Current aerodynamics and heat shielding are optimized for Earth reentry. They may have to significantly rethink the design for Mars. What they land on Mars will likely be very different from what we see today.
Even if it does go to Mars there are some major warts on the design. When you land you're 35-40 meters or so up in the air so there's a whole other elevator assembly needed just to get people out of the rocket to the ground.
We've been hoisting people and cargo up/down with pulleys and cables for thousands of years. This seems like the smallest obstacle Starship has to face.
We’ve been opening and closing doors for even longer and yet it has still posed a challenge for SpaceX when dealing with the payload door on Starship. Space makes even trivial things hard.
Sure. But they gotta fix the door, either way.
Winching stuff out of said open door seems like a much, much easier task.
What viable alternative design would not have this constraint?
A smaller purpose build lander that doesn't need the fuel capacity for the entire journey would be significantly shorter and could be wider too. That would get it significantly closer. Enough that a simple ladder would be viable so they aren't reliant on a winch/elevator.
So you're suggesting something similar to the Apollo LEM that will land, and carry enough fuel to return to orbit to dock with something that will contain enough fuel that will return to Earth?
Wouldn't that make the mission unfeasible because it requires ISRU of return fuel?
The Starship version of the Mars mission also requires ISRU. At least that's what was presented.
https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2022/05/27/how-will-spacex-make-r...
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.