Ayo some NASA peeps are beginning to design architectures around the capabilities provided by Starship and it's pretty radical. Nuclear electric xenon propulsion depot Starship anyone? ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/2021…
Why yes; that is a SLS lox tank dry lab; thank you for asking. There are 39 launches just for refuelling lox/ch4/xenon. 2 MW nuclear reactor. 3000m^2 of radiators. 12km/s of ∆V, conservatively. Can go anywhere in inner solar system; Jupiter at a stretch.
@jenekuns Yes!!! A nuclear tugboat is needed to efficiently traverse between planets…let’s goooo
@jenekuns A little unclear about this. The side Starships are nuclear? Or the center Starship has a nuclear thrust in its cone and then pushes the ship backwards? Seems pretty awkward as a design no matter how I look at it.
@jenekuns If you shoot atoms out the back of a rocket ship, won’t they just slow down the ship behind? The only truly sustainable propulsion technology is to accelerate ships via magnetic fields.