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From the Moon to Mars
Published in Jonathan Allday, Apollo in Perspective, 2019
The 48 m long Starship (Figure 9.12) will be equipped with a combination of vacuum and sea level engines, to allow it to return to Earth under power and be reused. Unlike the space shuttle, Starship will land vertically in an effort to reduce the time needed for turnarounds.
Future Exploration and Adventure in Our Solar System
Published in Thomas Hockey, Jennifer Lynn Bartlett, Daniel C. Boice, Solar System, 2021
Thomas Hockey, Jennifer Lynn Bartlett, Daniel C. Boice
SpaceX is developing Starship, a private heavy-lift launch vehicle. It has at least one customer for a round-trip voyage around the Moon. In addition, it has plans to transport humans to Mars as soon as 2024 with this rocket.
Envisioning a sustainable future for space launches: a review of current research and policy
Published in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2023
Tyler F. M. Brown, Michele T. Bannister, Laura E. Revell
Stratospheric chemistry is highly nonlinear (Dvortsov and Solomon 2001; Shindell and Grewe 2002; Stenke and Grewe 2005; Vogel et al. 2011), so the magnitude of impacts described in Table 1 depends on the background atmospheric composition and relative concentrations of other species (Röckmann et al. 2004; Portmann et al. 2012; Revell et al. 2015; Butler et al. 2016). Not included in Table 1 is methane (CH4), which is emerging as a new rocket fuel; many rocket engines currently in development have opted for methane fuel, including SpaceX’s Starship, Rocketlab’s Neutron, and the ESA Arianespace Ariane Next. As yet, the emissions products of methane fuel are poorly understood and not experimentally quantified. Nonetheless, the upcoming popularity of this fuel type could drastically change estimates of the launch industry’s atmospheric impact. Further efforts to produce theoretically ‘greener’ fuels for future launch vehicles will also alter the emission profile of global launches – highlighting the need for further study.