Bimfred

Hate to disappoint, but it’s far more than you could possibly imagine. You could dump the equivalent mass of the entire human civilization, every single person and everything we’ve ever made, on the Moon and it wouldn’t have a noticeable effect.

Sure. Why shouldn’t gay guys and women have eye candy as well?

Because NASA, with nearly 30 billion in funding and using technology designed half a century ago, took 11 years to build a Shuttle cosplaying as a Saturn V. They were legally mandated to. That’s not a dig at NASA, it’s a dig at the morons who hold their purse strings.

In roughly the same timeframe, SpaceX developed two brand new engines, both of which have amazing performance in their weight class. They developed a reusable medium lift rocket that’s now one of the most reliable launch vehicles ever. Now they’re working on a fully reusable super heavy launcher that’s capable of interplanetary missions. And they did all that without NASA’s budget.

Private launch companies, of which SpaceX is only one, allow for faster development, faster innovation and cheaper launches. They’re actually saving taxpayers money. And the amounts that NASA does pay them don’t just vanish into the CEOs’ pockets the moment the payment clears. It goes to engineers, maintenance workers, construction workers, caterers, everyone employed by these companies and their suppliers.

Even if the US and EU pony up the not insignificant amount of cash to do it, there’s still nothing that can put 1000t into orbit, let alone L1. And splitting it up into 100t segments isn’t a solution, since L1 is unstable. The segments will need power, thrusters, gyros, propellant and guidance for station-keeping, so there goes a large chunk of your mass budget. To compensate for that, you need more mirrors. And they need to be continuously replaced as they break down or run out of propellant.

Peter Parker as a Prime Warframe.

Aren’t the batteries and electric motors driving the grid fins at the top of the booster? That and the entire interstage are gonna get blasted with the thrust plume of three Raptors. Reinforcing them enough that it doesn’t affect planned reusability targets could take a bigger bite out of the payload than they get from hot staging.

That said, assuming the booster doesn’t get royally annihilated immediately, they’ll surely do a thorough analysis on just how much damage the booster takes. Might be that hot staging doesn’t work out for regular use, but they’ll keep it on hand for launches that need every last bit of delta-V.

I think Soyuz boosters currently do hot staging, the interstage is open IIRC.

You are correct. I believe most Russian rockets have used hot staging. It may be destructive, but it works.

The technological developments that built modern civilization have always come with tradeoffs at the expense of nature. This is simply the next step on that path. It’s unfortunate that it’s necessary, but commendable that they’re making efforts to minimize the impact as much as possible.