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Also known as not an orbit, or a suborbital flight / trajectory.
Saying a suborbital flight is a partial orbit is like saying a cessna can partially achieve hypersonic velocities.
There is no public information indicating design on this variant has even begun.
... And Starship+Heavy Booster was supposed to have completed a succesful orbital flight in Q2 2022, per NASA's contract with SpaceX.
Which it still has not done, in Q4 2024.
If SpaceX somehow completes an orbital flight of this thing in say Q2 2025, and keeps to the originally agreed contract timeline, well thats only 3 years behind schedule.
But this is Musk. Not the best track record on delivering on promises, more of a 'pray i do not alter the deal further' kinda vibe, but spoken with all the menacing intimidation of Darth Helmet.
So far he's gotten a banana to suborbit in this thing.
...
I'll eat a sock if a SpaceX launcher and lander gets human beings to the moon and back safely by the end of 2030.
Did I forget to mention Musk's plan for a moon mission requires the Starship Lunar Lander variant to remain in Earth orbit, rendevouz and dock with and refuel from something like 12 or 16 other Starships?
... And there is also no publicly available information indicating actual design of this refuelling system either, just vague cgi concept arts of a plan?
I'll eat two fucking socks.
I'm a space systems propulsion design engineer by profession. I worked on a project which I will not name that requires on-orbit refuelling. (It's not this one and I don't and will never work for Elon Musk).
The technology for in-orbit refuelling doesn't exist, and there's a whole lot of new technology required. Remotely docking is akin to self-driving in complexity; don't forget to factor in the signal delay if you're in a lunar or translunar orbit. If you make this a crewed activity only, then the problem becomes one of pneumatics. A pressure system that can reliably contain and transfer pressure up to the levels of spacecraft fuel (around 300 psi for liquid, 3000 for gas) repeatedly, in both directions is very, very heavy. The valves are heavy, the tanks are heavy, the control systems are heavy. Too heavy to be considered viable for spaceflight. Even less so for a mission whose payload is "as much transfer fuel as we can possibly get up there". A huge amount of innovation has to take place before this can become real. As of 2022, when I last worked on this, none of the technology was even being researched, that is to say it was not even at TRL 3. Typically these things take on the order of a decade or so to get to TRL 9, if they are successful and quick.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying I'll be fascinated to see which solutions they come up with, and that I'm sceptical that they do have current solutions which are feasible and useful, rather than something like a one-shot refueling subsystem that weighs 250kg and delivers 15 litres of hydrazine.
I appreciate your expert input!
Yeah the only stuff I could find about actual orbital refueling was basically some tests with cryogenic fuel pumping on the ISS, which had some fairly serious problems, and a few times that basically a small satellite was refueled / serviced by another small satellite, which yeah as you say, just deliver a tiny amount of hydrazine, an exceptionally less volatile and easier fuel to deal with.
Hydrazine isn't less volatile or easy to deal with. Not unless your point of comparison is that one fluorine test rocket.
Here's the MSDS on hydrazine: https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1006.pdf
It's easier to store. Aside from it being the single most hazardous chemical substance known to man, that is