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Ben Blackburn says:
August 5, 2019 at 3:34 pm
Airlines land, refuel and take off all the time, and all the pilots do is walk around and kick the tires between flights. That is the goal for Starship.
Yes, they will inspect any heat shielding that it has after every flight, but it will be designed so that it doesn’t take months to inspect like the Shuttle,, and won’t need repair under normal circumstances.
The shuttle used an aluminum skin and structure, so any heat leakage would cause catastrophic failure because the aluminum just falls apart..Starship will be stainless steel, so it may warp or melt in worst case scenario, but only where the damage is, and they won’t have crew or fuel directly on the other side. So much more robust design, and being a simple shape, much less complicated heat shielding design.
The Starship booster is about the same diameter as the Shuttle external tank, and about 50 feet longer.
It will have more fuel, and more power, than the shuttle did.
And then Starship will be sitting on top of it, instead of on the side like the shuttle.
And unlike the shuttle, Starship has a lot of fuel on board itself.
The shuttle only used fuel from the external tank and had none on board.
So when you look at the total fuel on board the full stack its considerably more than shuttle had.
This is possible because the Raptor engines are more powerful and efficient with the ffsc design.
As far as fuel for landing, it will take very little fuel for the booster to land, because most of its weight will be gone as fuel is burned on ascent so it just needs enough to run 1 or 3 out of the 31 engines and only for a few seconds.