I totally understand why they've gone for that design but the welded together steel plates really make me think of the sort of thing Wallace and Gromit would build.
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Starship Prototype Unveiled
11–20 of 342 posts
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to know the hiring process. There must be many people applying for these positions and I doubt that whiteboard welding is a thing. Or is it? :)
AFAIK it's uncommon skill, you need the steady hands of a surgeon to have a chance. Definitely not work I could do, I know that.
Yeah, having learnt the (very) basics of welding recently it has become very clear to me how much of a skill/art it actually is. Even at the basic level it is a combination of a lot of senses; sight, hearing, touch. And there are multiple movements which need to happen both simultaneously and smoothly, and be adjusted based on the aforementioned senses.
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to know the hiring process. There must be many people applying for these positions and I doubt that whiteboard welding is a thing. Or is it? :)
AFAIK it's uncommon skill, you need the steady hands of a surgeon to have a chance. Definitely not work I could do, I know that.
Sooo...it's rocket surgery for real?
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to know the hiring process. There must be many people applying for these positions and I doubt that whiteboard welding is a thing. Or is it? :)
AFAIK it's uncommon skill, you need the steady hands of a surgeon to have a chance. Definitely not work I could do, I know that.
I used to wander around the reactor auxiliary building at the nuclear plant I worked at and take pictures of the piping welds. They were works of art. The skill was obvious.
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#15Eventually the shell will be a single large roll of steel that is unrolled, bent into a tube with a seam going hotdog that is welded. It will be very strong, lighter than the current patchwork, and extremely beautiful. More similar to the renderings. Can’t wait.
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to know the hiring process. There must be many people applying for these positions and I doubt that whiteboard welding is a thing. Or is it? :)
AFAIK it's uncommon skill, you need the steady hands of a surgeon to have a chance. Definitely not work I could do, I know that.
Best internet resource that goes into the detail of this?
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to know the hiring process. There must be many people applying for these positions and I doubt that whiteboard welding is a thing. Or is it? :)
AFAIK it's uncommon skill, you need the steady hands of a surgeon to have a chance. Definitely not work I could do, I know that.
My dad did this kind of work in the oil industry for 30+ years as a pipe fitter. His specialty was stainless and they had to be x-ray perfect welds. He recently retired but was always very proud of his work. It took me a long time to understand why.
I wish he could have gotten into the space industry vs oil refineries. The latter is much harder on a person.
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#18I would love to know what the "Day-in-the-life" of a welder working on those ships would be. Did they train specifically for aerospace welding? How did they land that specific gig. Must be so inspiring to wake up and work on that.
I'd love to know the hiring process. There must be many people applying for these positions and I doubt that whiteboard welding is a thing. Or is it? :)
There is definitely tests for welding jobs. And then their welds are regularly tested to maintain certifications.
The tales I heard from my father were X-ray scans of their finished, grinded, polished welds and they had to be perfect. Not a hair-sized infraction would be permitted.
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK it's uncommon skill, you need the steady hands of a surgeon to have a chance. Definitely not work I could do, I know that.
I used to wander around the reactor auxiliary building at the nuclear plant I worked at and take pictures of the piping welds. They were works of art. The skill was obvious.
> I used to wander around ... the nuclear plant I worked at and take pictures
DHS would like your location...
Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled
#20380s for ISP for the Raptor vacuum engine seems durn good, considering the tradeoffs between hydrogen and methane.
The most efficient engines we've flown, the RL-10 [0] (used on the Delta IV and Atlas rockets as part of the Centaur Upper Stage) and the RS-25 [1], (the Space Shuttle Main Engine) get around 450-460s for their specific impulse. These engines use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The issue with liquid hydrogen is twofold: it is not very dense, and to keep it from boiling away in liquid form, it needs to be really cold. So you need huge, insulated tanks to store it. Hydrogen is everywhere, but it's kind of a pain to use as rocket fuel.
Merlin Vacuum [2], which is currently used on the Falcon vehicles gets 311s. The RD-0110 [3], used on the Soyuz gets 326s. These use RP-1, which is highly refined kerosene. It's super easy to work with. On earth. Where we have 200 years of infrastructure in place to support using hydrocarbons. It takes that infrastructure to refine it into a form that rocket engines can use without gunking up the works with unburnt carbon and other particulate crap.
Raptor uses methane, which is kind of like a jack of all trades between density, efficiency, ease of processing, storage, and ease of use in engines. This is basically how SpaceX seems to operate: rather than optimizing a single part of the system (like trying to get the most efficient engine), they try to optimize from a systems level. I don't really know much more than that, because there hasn't really been a lot of stuff for civilians to read on methane engines. This is kind of the cutting edge of the second golden age of space exploration. This freaking rules, what a time to be alive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RL10
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)