Oh the whole tube is way bigger. Just the pressuriseable payload space is bigger than the internal volume of the space station. Here's a view of what Starship docked to the ISS would look like. Or is it the other way around?
In fact Starship may make space stations obsolete, for the same reason we don't have anchored floating research stations out on the sea that we go back and forth to using little boats. We use research ships instead.
Plus if you wanted to, you could send up a slightly customized Starship to serve as the crew portion of the station and then send up a Starship-shaped “equipment pod” with redundant life support systems, fold-out solar panels, etc and dock it to the crew quarters. Just like that, you have a rough equivalent to the ISS in two launches.
That process could be repeated N times to quickly build a station that’d dwarf the ISS.
If we’re talking science fiction, then sure, you could do anything.
You’re talking about metal tube that never reached the orbit. You thing you just need “slight” customization to make it a space station?
That thing doesn’t fly yet, is not human rated, has no life support capabilities, has unknown lifetime in space, has no propulsion system that would keep it in orbit for long period of time and bazillions of other things.
It’s just a metal tube at this point. I know it’s cool to fantasize what it could be, but so far its metal tube that doesn’t even fly and is hugely behind schedule.
And it’s built by guy, who’s known for overhyping.
You mean the company that's been launching one rocket every 3.5 days this year?
I mean when you have a company that's shipped nothing and they are saying big things, that's one thing. But when you have a company that's actively launching and reusing more rockets than everyone else combined, that's another.
All the things you've listed are previously solved problems that have existing solutions. SpaceX isn't even inventing anything new here.
>That thing doesn’t fly yet
Starship has flown and landed in low altitude flights. It's the booster+starship that's in testing now.
Basically what I mean is - if it can do what it's meant to do - go to Mars - then it's also an easy space station replacement.
You can argue if it will get to Mars of you want. But silly to argue that anything that can get to Mars with human occupants won't be able to also orbit the earth with human occupants
At the same time it's much more likely that a company that makes rockets that do one thing would also make rockets that do another thing much more easily and faster than a company that does not make rockets at all.
Starship and Superheavy have missed their aspirational timelines, but that’s largely moot when there’s nothing else with remotely similar capabilities in development. Even if it doesn’t fly until 2030 (which I think is unlikely) it’d still be lightyears ahead of the competition thanks to the larger industry deciding it didn’t particularly care to meaningfully advance past late 70s technology until very recently.
But that doesn't mean it's a viable replacement for space stations.
Those are 2 totally different topics and it boggles my mind how people can write whole science fiction story around and argue that it's basically a fact.
It’s just casual spitballing of possibilities with oversimplification for the sake of brevity. The main point is that any number of things can be set atop Superheavy as long as it has the general shape of Starship and some kind of attached propulsion, and there’s a lot that can be done with that level of lift capacity paired with a volume that large.
That doesn’t make it comparable to a space station any more than arguing here makes people rocket scientist.