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Starship Prototype Unveiled

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121–130 of 342 posts

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imo Elon is starting to get into contention for greatest engineer of all time. I don't know man, did he design it himself?

Is there any reason to believe it would be happening now if he didn't exist?

Maybe not. That still doesn't qualify him as an Engineer, though.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#122
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason to believe it would be happening now if he didn't exist?

Maybe not. That still doesn't qualify him as an Engineer, though.

I doubt SpaceX would be a thing if Elon didn't have engineering capabilities.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#123

I am so amazed by the genius of making it out of steel. It's just so completely counter intuitive but has accelerated their progress so much. If they told you the stats of the material, better strength at cryo tempertures meaning mass reduction, higher melting point meaning minimal heat shielding and great thermal conductivity it would be easy to imagine it was some new super composite. Then your head explodes when t…

How come no one thought of using steel before?

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#124

I am so amazed by the genius of making it out of steel. It's just so completely counter intuitive but has accelerated their progress so much. If they told you the stats of the material, better strength at cryo tempertures meaning mass reduction, higher melting point meaning minimal heat shielding and great thermal conductivity it would be easy to imagine it was some new super composite. Then your head explodes when t…

How come no one thought of using steel before?

Steel was used before for the early Atlas rocket models. But the skin was too thin and collapsed on its own weight. You can see YouTube videos of this.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#125

380s 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 h…

ISRU on Mars makes Methane fuel and excellent choice. Zubrin’s favorite in ‘A case for Mars’.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#126

I suspect that Starship will fly to space before SLS ever will. I also think Starship has a significantly higher chance of flying at all than SLS.

For reference, SLS refers to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

FWIW SpaceX is exactly the kind of phenomenon that might spur state investment.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#127
post #23
post #15

Eventually 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.

How do you picture them rolling a piece of steel 50 meters wide? As far as I know, the widest rolling mills in existence are 5 meters wide.

Just curious - what industry are you in that you know off of the top of your head the max size of rolled steel?

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#128
post #46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised the guy being a youtuber. He is the codecs guy at Apple Computers

Eh, it's just another form of blog at this point. Not the greatest for searching, but a valid medium for expression.

I think they might be suggesting that Scott may have specific exemption from Apple's PR policy (summary: "say nothing to anyone") to be allowed an independent public voice - particularly on a technical/engineering topic. Apple is not, so far as we know, currently developing orbital-class rocketry, but there's genuine potential for product topic overlap in Project Titan vs Tesla and perhaps more besides.

I would not be at all surprised if there's a List Of Things Apple PR Hereby Politely Requests That Scott Doesn't Mention.

When I was at AWS I was similarly forbidden from mentioning anything to do with video games to just about anybody, despite not having anything to do with video games myself, and many other topics besides the obvious (e.g. "don't disclose EC2/S3 capacity numbers"[1], "don't reveal how Glacier works"[2]), and in fact there was a whole programme of PR training and tiered permission to speak at conferences or to the press/analysts that boiled down, mostly, to knowing what you could and couldn't say, and how diplomatically you parried questions on the latter.

Either that or Terry Pratchett's law of rewritten rules applies.

[1] no-one would believe me anyway

[2] it's a massively redundant array of vinyl records

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#129

380s 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 h…

https://youtu.be/Sdwy9fzQzl4 Scott Manley does a great job explaining such things!

I really like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbH1ZDImaI8

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#130

I am so amazed by the genius of making it out of steel. It's just so completely counter intuitive but has accelerated their progress so much. If they told you the stats of the material, better strength at cryo tempertures meaning mass reduction, higher melting point meaning minimal heat shielding and great thermal conductivity it would be easy to imagine it was some new super composite. Then your head explodes when t…

> Imo Elon is starting to get into contention for greatest engineer of all time. I don't know man, did he design it himself?

Depends how you define "design". Most engineers I know are not involved in the bog-standard design, but rather when the decisions get outside the comfort zone of the designers (either engineers or engineering techs themselves). From all accounts ("Switching to stainless steel is one of the best design decisions I've ever made"[1], comments from Tom Mueller about Elon leading the design team on Raptor[2]), Musk is performing the role of a head engineer.

Many jurisdictions would still have an issue with him using the title engineer. (edit: it's recently been determined to infringe on first amendment rights [3]. Still applies in Canada)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/davt2l/cnn_intervie... timestamp around 2:30

[2] https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1099411086711746560

[3] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yw798m/oregon-unconstitut...

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