SpaceX's Starship megarocket blasted off on its latest test flight, with President-elect Donald Trump joining Elon Musk to witness the spectacle firsthand in the latest sign of their ever-closer ties.
Don’t forget ESA’s ATV and the NASA RRM for refuelling the ISS. As was the case with launchers for a while, the Europeans and the Americans have beautiful, expensive and awesome solutions, while the Russians just get the job done (often by waiving safety standards)
Anyway, the ISS is a different beast, it’s in LEO and it didn’t need to be launched in one go, so you can send up heavy equipment and integrate it on-orbit, activities which require Gantt charts so autistic that my eyes bleed when I think about them. Starship-to-Starship refuelling would mean sending a single spacecraft up with all the necessary equipment to do propellant transfer, which is what I was thinking of when I wrote my comment, as you say.
Don’t forget ESA’s ATV and the NASA RRM for refuelling the ISS. As was the case with launchers for a while, the Europeans and the Americans have beautiful, expensive and awesome solutions, while the Russians just get the job done (often by waiving safety standards)
Anyway, the ISS is a different beast, it’s in LEO and it didn’t need to be launched in one go, so you can send up heavy equipment and integrate it on-orbit, activities which require Gantt charts so autistic that my eyes bleed when I think about them. Starship-to-Starship refuelling would mean sending a single spacecraft up with all the necessary equipment to do propellant transfer, which is what I was thinking of when I wrote my comment, as you say.