I understand that SpaceX is able to deliver material goods and personal to the international space station.
I don’t understand why the design to take people to the moon is substantially different, and why it’s failing while getting to low earth orbit.
In: Engineering
The Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX uses to transport astronauts and cargo between the Earth and the ISS can carry about 22 tons to low Earth orbit, which is about 250 miles up, and requires the spacecraft to reach a speed of about 17,200 mph.
The Starship is meant to get over 5 times as much mass (100 tons) to the surface of the Moon which is almost *240,000 miles away* (that’s almost 1000 times farther away than the ISS) and it has to reach of speed of at least *23,000-24,000 mph*.
In other words, it’s designed to carry much more stuff a much greater distance and it has to go a lot faster to do so. All that makes it a lot more complicated. Add on top of that that it’s using a lot of new cutting-edge designs that aren’t featured on the Falcon 9, which means there are a lot of things that have never been done before. Naturally, there will be failures as tests are done to iron out all the kinks.
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