I'm going to let you in on a little secret. The International Space Station
is dying. Okay, maybe that's not so much of a secret. But
the solution is. You see, we don't need the orbital reef Axium space
or even the Haven one because we already have the answer to our space station
needs right under our nose. This is the space race. Is the SpaceX
Starship just a space station in waiting, Well, yeah, it certainly could
be. In theory. The starship as we know it today is an evolution
of the Interplanetary Transport system concept that was dreamt up by Elon Musk a decade
ago. That vehicle had one sole purpose to ferry thousands of people from the
Earth to the planet Mars and establish a self sustaining city on the red planet.
The starship represents a more scaled back and practical approach to rocket design compared
to the its, but the general mission statement remains. This is a rocket
intended to move large numbers of people on very long journeys into deep space,
so maintaining a comfortable and habitable environment is core to the starship design. So
therefore, it would stand to reason that if a starship can sustain a crew
on an eight month journey to Mars. Then it can be even more sustainable
as a platform parked in low Earth orbit. Of course, the starship itself
has yet to reach the common line without blowing up, but you know it's
a work in progress. So giving Elon the benefit of the doubt, and
assuming that Starship is more than just the world's largest firework, how could it
be utilized as a new space station. The biggest advantage to the Starship is
volume, and we don't mean noise, we mean space. Let's pull up
an angle from the first Starship launched to help visualize this. With the tanks
full of cryogenic fuel, we can see them clearly from the condensation on the
outside, So everything above the frost line on Starship is empty space. And
for a human scale, we can compare this video of Elon Musk standing on
that top platform beside the nose cone. This stuff is gigantic. People are
like ants crawling around on this thing. So that's an eighteen meter tall fairing
and the body is nine meters wide, although it does obviously start to taper
down at the nose, but that still gives us four ring sections at full
width, which equals about seven point three meters of height at the full nine
meter diameter. In total, that adds up to approximately one thousand cubic meters
of internal volume, which is just a bit larger than the ISS at nine
hundred and thirty five cubic meters of space. This is a lot of room.
It's larger than your average five bedroom house. Now, we've seen plenty
of different mockups with the inside of a starship laid out for a crude configuration,
and typically that looks like a central tunnel and ladder going up the middle
with five or six vertical levels stacked on top of each other. And the
reason for this design is because in the context of a mission to Mars or
even the Moon, starship would have to function while standing vertically on the ground
with at least some amount of gravity acting on the crew. But in the
context of a space station this all changes. Now you aren't limited by the
round, narrow slices of a vertical starship. One option would be to make
the layout submarine style, with decks that run lengthwise from nose to tail.
Submarines with a hull diameter of nine to eleven meters will typically have three decks
so we can imagine the same for a starship station. I'm not sure which
orientation would be ideal, horizontal decks or vertical. I've never lived in a
spaceship, but what do you think? Let us know below. Or you
could even have a design with no decks at all and just make it one
big, open concept style space station. That would also be really cool.
You'd have so much room for zero gravity activities. You could invent some kind
of new zero gravity sport up there. And if you could do all that
with one starship, then why not have two. Elon Musk says that the
cost of these things will get down to twenty million dollars a pop, which
is basically free in terms of space stations. With over twenty years in orbit,
it's been estimated that the total cost to operate the ISS has been upwards
of one hundred and fifty billion US dollars. And if the cost is so
affordable, you could link up a ton of these ships together in a big
ring of like twenty, all slowly rotating around to create the effect of artificial
gravity, which in that case you wouldn't have much choice but to use the
horizontal nose to Taildeck layout, so that solves that question. This is actually
an idea that NASA was toying with back in the day. They had thought
about making a big ring using the Space Shuttle's main hydrogen tank, the big
orange thing that the Shuttle piggybacked on into space. The Shuttle is a very
similar size to Starship, but it lacks any of the functionality because it's just
a big empty tank, and Starship is an actual spaceship, So that all
sounds pretty much perfect, right, And NASA themselves even agree. They've endorsed
the SpaceX Starship as a new orbital platform to replace the ISS. That's what
it says in the news, right, well wrong, So here's the scoop.
In June twenty twenty three, NASA announced that they were putting their support
behind seven individual concepts for new space stations that would be built and operated by
private sector companies. This list includes an idea for a Starship derived space station,
but it also includes ideas from North of Grumman, Blue Origin, Vast,
Axiom Space, Think Orbital, and Sierra Space in no particular order.
So it's not like NASA is betting the farm on Starship. It's just one
idea out of many that are being thrown at the wall, and more specifically,
NASA isn't betting anything at all on any of these want to be space
stations. What we are talking about here are unfunded Space Act agreements as part
of NASA's collaborations for commercial space Capabilities to initiative. So what that means is
NASA will provide the selected companies with technical expertise, assessments, and data to
assist the companies in the development of new capabilities, but there's no money involved.
I'm going to put it out there that we may have possibly overlooked some
significant complications attached to the whole starship space station idea. The most glaring issue
here is size. While the internal volume of the starship might be its greatest
asset, it's hard to ignore the fact that two thirds of the total structure
will be unusable space. That's the area taken up by the engines, the
plumbing system, and the propellant tanks. It's over half of the ship.
The problem is that the starship has to be a rocket before it can be
a space station. There might be some engineering solution to make the lower half
into usable space, but it would need to be really well thought through the
area. Just underneath the cargo firing is a methane tank and it's capped off
by a stainless steel dome that's welded into the body of the ship. So
you'd have to cut that dome out before you could even access the space.
That needs a plasma cutter or a diamond blade saw. And even if you
could get in there now you're doing home renovations in low Earth orbit. That's
really going to work against our theory that Starship would be easy and economical as
a space station. The other glaring issue that we see with a Starship station
is the lack of IO or input out devices. Starship is kind of like
a MacBook air. There aren't a lot of opportunities to plug stuff in.
What do we mean, Well, the ISS has a lot of ports and
accessory attachments, docking ports, airlocks, robot arms, solar panels, stuff
like that. The exterior of a Starship is famously smooth and shiny, so
you have to wonder how it could ever have the functionality of a dedicated space
station module. We know that Starship is intended to someday have a docking port
in the nose cone, but is there ever really going to be the ability
to have more access points and attachments on the body of the ship. Keeping
in mind that because a starship is a rocket, first, the exterior has
to be aerodynamically stable and sturdy enough to travel at supersonic speed through the atmosphere
on ascent, and since the starship is so gigantic, that's a lot of
force that it has to resist. We've seen renderings of Starship that are like
half covered in windows, which looks like an absolutely spectacular view into outer space.
But can a starship with windows actually survive a launch into orbit. That's
something that still needs to be tested and proven before we can really start making
too many assumptions. If we really want to go down the most practical and
efficient route for leveraging the capabilities of Starship to build a space station, then
it's better to think of Starship more in terms of a super heavy lift lawn
vehicle with a massive payload capacity. Starship doesn't have to be a giant space
station because it can much more easily just deploy a giant space station, you
wouldn't be able to use the full interior volume for habitable space, but Starship
could place one seriously gigantic module into low Earth orbit. It could be up
to eight and a half meters wide by seven meters long, or maybe ten
meters long by seven meters wide if you want to use more of the height
of the fairing, and then just with two or three starship launches, you'd
have one hell of a space station in orbit. Plus SpaceX would still have
those starships that were able to return to Earth after deploying the payload, so
it's a win win situation. With that being said, should we just park
a starship in orbit and call it a space station? Probably not. It
might seem cool at first, but the more you think about it, the
more it just feels like a really lazy solution to a non existent problem.
We've got loads of cool ideas for new space sta that are specifically engineered to
be orbital platforms that serve the needs of science and industry and will allow us
to better humanity through work in outer space. There are even some really cool
ideas in the Group of seven alongside Starship. A couple of them we've never
even really talked about on the channel before, so drop a comment if you'd
like to see more space station content here.