alt Hacker NewsA spacecraft with a 4m diameter spherical living space and 4m of water shielding around it will weigh about 1,000 tons. The propellant tanks needed to move it around the solar system will be similarly titanic.
How many orders of magnitude were you figuring for your "dramatically cheaper"?
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vikingerik • today at 9:09 PM
And just for comparison on that number, the entire Apollo spacecraft (command+service+lunar modules) was about 50 tons to lunar orbit. And that took a gigantic Saturn V to launch.
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That's 5 Starship block 4 launches, seems fine? Propellant, presumably for long duration voyages we're not relying entirely on chemical combustion. If we're using cyclers, once they're up to speed, you need barely any fuel for corrections, just to taxi to/from the cycler.