SpaceX HLS

By Eduarddo

Starship is a super heavy-lift space vehicle under development by SpaceX. At 120 metres (394 feet) in height and with a liftoff mass of 5,000 metric tons (11,000,000 pounds), Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, surpassing the thrust of the NASA Space Launch System and Saturn V, as well as the Soviet N1, which had previously held the record.

The space vehicle consists of the first-stage Super Heavy booster and the second-stage spacecraft also named Starship. Both stages are powered by Raptor rocket engines, which burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants in a full-flow staged combustion power cycle. Both are designed to be fully reusable, performing controlled landings on the arms of the launch tower used to lift the vehicles and reflown within hours. Starship is designed to have a payload capacity of 150 tonnes (330,000 lb) to low Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration and 250 t (550,000 lb) when expended.[3] Starship vehicles in low Earth orbit are planned to be refilled with propellant launched in tanker Starships to enable transit to higher energy destinations such as geosynchronous orbit, the Moon, and Mars.

SpaceX HLS

Starship HLS, or Starship Human Landing System, is a lunar lander variant of the Starship spacecraft that is slated to transfer astronauts from a lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon and back. It is being designed and built by SpaceX under the Human Landing System contract to NASA as a critical element of NASA's Artemis program to land a crew on the Moon no earlier than 2025.

The mission plan calls for a Super Heavy booster to launch a Starship HLS into an Earth orbit, where it will be refueled by multiple Starship tanker spacecraft before boosting itself into a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO). There, it will rendezvous with a crewed Orion spacecraft that will be launched from Earth by a NASA Space Launch System (SLS) launcher. A crew of two astronauts will transfer from Orion to HLS, which will then descend to the lunar surface for a stay of approximately 7 days which is to include five or more EVAs. It will then return the crew to Orion in NRHO.

•Well, I'm sorry but I didn't see the need to add raptor engines at sea level to this craft, it works very well without them, it would take up weight and space.
•I must admit, the US flag was quite large, but it was well done and I liked the result
•Landing engines don't have a giant TWR, they're more for the final touchdown than a drastic reduction in speed.

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