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Starship Prototype Unveiled

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211–220 of 342 posts

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#211
post #22
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.

Definitely not hotdog (assuming that's from stem to stern). Musk wasn't totally clear when describing it, but he said mk3 would be in three months. The circumference of starship is 28.26 meters. For a single weld the entire length of the ship, the roll itself would need to be that wide. The largest rolling mills in the world are ~4 meters wide[1]. They require backup rollers[2], ie rollers that push down the rollers…

I feel like he was talking about a single weld on each ring section.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#212

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…

I'm no rocket scientist, so bear that in mind, but something has been bugging me about the flight paths for this vehicle [0]. It has to make some very large, specific orientation changes several times during descent, using the heat shield on one side of the vehicle, and then only rotating to upright orientation in the lower atmosphere, after quite a lot of falling sideways. The orientation maneuvers seem much more co…

It’s actually similar to the shuttle, In a couple of ways simpler, and a couple of ways more complex. The shuttles body was also designed to both generate lift and be a blunt body - with a transition of mode between them. The blunt body allowed it to survive reentry while the lifting body allowed it to glide. However that glide was way more complex then NASA generally talked about. The shuttle pulled some aggressive s-turns to bleed off energy during the re-entry.

This approach is more or less the same as what the starship is doing here, except instead of using a glider trajectory for the controlled landing they instead use retropropulsive landing. This is needed because what SpaceX is landing here is a second stage, not a first stage. Way more heat, way more power.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#213
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of the F-104 Starfighter: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Lockheed... Or the F-86 Sabre: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/F86F_Sab...

Is the surface of these less smooth than surface of normal rockets/planes, or is it simply the effect of mirror like surface making bumpiness easier to see?

The latter - a matte surface would be lit from essentially the same angle, but even a tiny discrepancy causes big shifts in a reflection.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#215
post #165
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh what? This is exactly the inverse of what happens. Quenching leads to stronger, more flexible steel. Slow cooling leads to harder, but more brittle steel. The reason is grain structure - slow cooling allows larger grains, which don't allow the movement of dislocations as freely, but the loss of flexibility costs in ultimate tensile strength.

Please cite your correction or delete it if you find you are in error. I have provided my 2 sources which are in addition to my peer and personal experience in blacksmithing.

I don't know about his general claim, but a detail within his comment is right.

Smaller grain size leading to stronger material -- this is a result of more grain boundaries as the scale of the grain goes down. Hall-Petch strengthening.[0] A secondary effect is that with smaller grains oriented in random directions the metal is more resistant in general from stresses in all directions; whereas with larger grains you tend to get weakness in a particular direction (along the slip planes.)

This is common knowledge, at least it's basic material physics that I learned in college.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_boundary_strengthening

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine all the necessary hands are already on deck for Crew Dragon. Starship wasn’t built by the Falcon or Crew Dragon manufacturing teams, and the vast majority of the design and engineering currently happening for Starship has long been completed for Crew Dragon. Let’s also remember that NASA is hardly the only company that pays SpaceX, they have other income sources and what they do with that income is ultimate…

From this[1] article: "Musk said in 2018 that SpaceX was “all hands on deck for Crew Dragon,” and it would be making trips to the ISS by December 2018. After that, he said, “most of our engineering resources will be dedicated to BFR, and I think that will make things go quite quickly,” he said. BFR was the earlier name for Starship." "All hands on deck" is not some subjective term, it is naval and means get everyone…

Except there is nothing they can do now. There are a ton of safety reviews which depend on NASA, and only a small amount of people at SpaceX are required to keep the NASA team more than filled with work.

Elon responded saying he would do whatever it took to go faster, but there was nothing he could do.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#217

Earlier 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? :)

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.

I can't imagine anything but xray for the entire ship, every mm of weld. Given the forces involved, it seems like a completely new level of perfect is required.

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#218

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…

Didn't the Russians use a lot of steel in their Space Age era rockets? It always seemed to me like we went too high tech too quickly and the Soviets were practical to a fault, and the truth should be something in between.

The Sputnik rocket was made from AMg-6, aluminum-magnesium alloy. Later space rockets also weren't steel-based...

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#219

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…

You missed one of the most important parts about methane as well: The Sabatier Reaction [1]

Hydrogen + CO2 => Methane + Water

This is an extremely important reaction. Mars, for instance, has effectively unlimited Hydrogen and CO2 which also means effectively unlimited Methane and Water. How just absurdly convenient is that?

But it also plays a major role in things like life support. We breathe out CO2. On Earth where we have an enormous atmosphere this doesn't matter. But in closed systems, such as the ISS or what will be the habitation regions on Mars, this is a major issue that needs to be dealt with or we'd kill ourselves with our own exhaust.

NASA, on the ISS, used to deal with life support by producing oxygen from imported water, and discarding the produced hydrogen. They'd then collect exhaled CO2 from the air using CO2 scrubbers and also discard that. That was a pretty inefficient system that required large amounts of imported water to sustain. Now they use the Sabatier Reaction to convert the exhaled CO2 into water and methane. Only the methane is discarded. And as a result of this, instead of needing to import large amounts of water, now all they need to import is a small amount of hydrogen to keep the reaction running.

On Mars this will result in a really cool system. What will be an increasingly large scale life support system will be literally creating rocket fuel as a byproduct. Of course methane is also a controlled and efficient gas, so it can also be safely used for things like cooking dinner.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

Re: Starship Prototype Unveiled

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! Only a software engineer would risk a product launch delay because of an uber-bikeshedded pet feature (Model X doors) or wait until the last minute to ship and then construct a makeshift “factory” in a parking lot and make staff go through a death march, QA be damned.

The Model X doors are terrible. It's an SUV that you can't put a roof rack on. Does seem like a case of geek myopia over usability.

Or… optimized for a different case (ease of access for small kids).
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