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GW Impact of Space Exploration
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[QUOTE="TeethWhitener, post: 6831177, member: 511972"] You piqued my curiosity so I did some very rough number crunching: Starship + super heavy has a propellant capacity of 4800 t (I’m assuming that’s metric tonnes). If we assume this is all methane (the conservative estimate omitting the oxygen), and that liquid methane has a density of roughly 400 kg/m^3 at its boiling point, then cranking through all the math, we end up with about 3 million gallons of methane. A straight shot to the moon and back is roughly half a million miles, giving a fuel efficiency of 1/6 mpg. (Of course this is meaningless. The ISS has completed over 100000 orbits of roughly 25000 miles since its launch, meaning it has travelled well over 3 billion miles. So even given several million gallons of fuel to combat orbital decay, it would likely be more efficient than any car on the road today.) [/QUOTE]
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