If you're one of those people that wants to complain about this [name 'Starship'], please show that you're also complaining of Boeing StarLiner and at Lockheed Starfighter otherwise I'll presume you're biased against Elon Musk specifically.
The frustration at the misuse of the name will only drive further attempts at building the actual thing. Except it too will likely have an exaggerated name when it comes along.
It's just pedantry about the name, must really hate the Starliner too, or the Starfighter, or anything else with the word star in it, if it can't physically get there.
Nope. It takes far more delta-V to get to the Sun than to get to Mars.
To get to Mars you need to change your solar orbit from that of Earth to match that of Mars. The difference is a small fraction of Earth's orbital velocity.
By comparison, you only need to add about 41% of Earth's velocity to escape the solar system entirely.
But to get to the Sun, you need to subtract 100% of Earth's orbital velocity. It's a colossal amount of delta-V.
> But to get to the Sun, you need to subtract 100% of Earth's orbital velocity.
Yeah, one would need to substract 100% of velocity if it wanted to land on a surface of the Sun safely, bringing the ship to a full stop. But why might one bother with the slowing down, if ship will just get melted by the heat of the Sun? You need just to rotate a vector of velocity by some clever gravity assist maneuver.
That's so counter-intuitive. It feels like the sun is a giant gravity well and we just have to give something a bit of a shove in the right direction to fall down into the well. It's not like its rocket science.
That might work if it was starting stationary, but it's not. It's starting from Earth, which has enormous orbital velocity perpendicular to the way to the sun. Everything on Earth already has that velocity too, and there's no way to get rid of it except cancel it out by burning a lot of fuel to basically go just as fast in the opposite direction.
This is a common misconception. It requires much much more energy and delta-V to send a craft on a collision course with the sun than to send it to Mars, or even to send it outside the Solar system altogether[1][2].
Not technically true. To dive into the Sun requires a much higher delta-v then to transfer to Mars. If you look at the Parker Solar Probe it is using a 7 year flightpath getting multiple gravity assists of Venus to miss by 6Gm at 200km/s.
If you're one of those people that wants to complain about this [name 'Starship'], please show that you're also complaining of Boeing StarLiner and at Lockheed Starfighter otherwise I'll presume you're biased against Elon Musk specifically.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVgEKBwE2RM&t=41