From Popular Mechanics

• The SpaceX Starship user guide is a short document designed for commercial payload customers.
• Elon Musk’s space exploration company is set to send astronauts up on a demo flight in May.
• Musk’s planned fleet will set many records for space travel, including for payload.

What’s inside Elon Musk’s quickstart guide to space travel?

Well, mostly it’s technical data, and even that’s more like background information and high-level overviews than how to “use” anything. The concrete takeaways are intended for just one group: “Potential Starship customers can use this guide as a resource for preliminary payload accommodations information.”

In that sense, using a Starship from Musk’s SpaceX company could become the newest form of container shipping. Having a standardized, predictable amount of space across a fleet is exactly what led to the development of cargo containers, which reduced cost across almost all legs of shipping by saving fussy labor to load and unload individual items or boxes. Musk has even used recycled cargo containers in the building of his SpaceX Starship headquarters.

Inverse reported that a Twitter user first noticed the potentially huge payload a Starship can carry into low Earth orbit. A table in the user guide lists 100 tons, but from other math in the table, one can extrapolate that number is more like 150 tons. That means the entire decommissioned Mir space station could be taken up in one launch.

Even for a much higher altitude of orbit, the Starship still purports to carry up to 21 tons. That number is large enough to include virtually all the different satellite models ever launched or the entire Apollo lunar lander unit. And the user guide (seen below) offers a tantalizingly real call to action, like any piece of sales collateral: “For payload specific loads or rideshare loads assessments, contact sales@spacex.com.”

The Starship is one of Musk’s most ambitious and fast-moving projects among a portfolio that includes bewildering ambition and scope already. SpaceX plans to begin commercial flights in 2021, with a moon trip scheduled for 2023. Even if the company can’t hit these goals—and truly, no one knows how the global COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic will ripple effect into the future—Musk has a track record of both delivering in short time frames and staying flexible and optimistic after the kinds of failures and iterations that all major projects encounter.

SOURCE Popular Mechanics / Yahoo. Read more..