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Starship is a spaceplane because
it has the ability to be both a short
range spacecraft and a medium- to
long-range spacecraft. Because of the
combination of high delta-v
performance, it has to have a great deal
of fuel capacity.
So a spacecraft that can make these kinds
of maneuvers needs to have a high capacity
for fuel. If you imagine that spacecraft
is like a tanker and it's out there in
space, then the fuel that you put in
that tanker you've got to be able to get
out of the tanker. You've got to be able
to carry a lot of fuel because there
are other things you want to do in space
as well. You don't just want to keep the
tanker there for one-way trips, you want
to refuel other spacecraft, you want to
replanetary vehicles, that's one way to
do it. We just happened to focus on this
specific problem. Now it turns out that
it's the only way to solve it.
In the case of SpaceX's Starship, they
decided they wanted to be able to launch
to orbit, they wanted to be able to go
back and forth in orbit and that meant
they had to have some extra fuel for
those kinds of maneuvers.
When you go to orbit you're orbiting a
single body, the earth. It's a fairly
dense body but it's pretty close. The
diameter of the earth is about 62,000
miles. So if you imagine if you take
that tanker and you fill it up, then you
take it to some outermost orbits, there's
not much more you can do with it, so
that's why the tanks are relatively
small. That tank, that space tanker, has
to be filled before you can go.
So I guess you could say it's like the
tanker that you see in the cartoons,
