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SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

arstechnica.com

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Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#31

Post by 908B64B197 »

milansuk wrote: post #14

In 2019, Elon tweeted[0] that the price of one Raptor engine is under $1M with the goal going under 250K for the next version. Any recent info where there are now? I'm still surprised they moved to this orbital fly so quickly without doing more tests. Going from 3 engines to almost 30 is crazy. Also, If I understand it right, both booster and starship will end up in the ocean. I hope they will be able to reuse at lea…

Only in America things like this can happen.

A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-conductors doubling every 18 months, going from exotic, mission critical hardware to commodity; SpaceX is doing the same thing with flight hardware. Contrast that with previous generation engines (the RS-25 comes to mind) with a sticker price of 125 millions... per engine! [0]

[0] https://spacenews.com/aerojet-rocketdyne-defends-sls-engine-...

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#32

Post by radu_floricica »

hirundo wrote: post #2

Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13548625…

There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one in particular I hear very often and should be debunked.

A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket".

Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not friendly enough to support us with lower tech.

Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars from scratch?

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#33

Post by lucideer »

colordrops wrote: post #9
paxys wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. I'm as much into spaceships as the next nerd, but people need to get real. The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generati…

Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how about doing a bit of critical thinking on this. What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc? They dwarf everything put into space exploration, and are arguably less useful. Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up? An…

> They dwarf everything put into space exploration

If you want to make it into a discussion about comparing & contrasting impacts, you're going to have to take the collective impacts of those pushing the space-colony agenda: everything from perpetuating individual road transport & UK airline companies to the largest "bookstore" in the world and lots in between.

Space exploration is an extremely important and worthy scientific endeavour & orgs like NASA have been criminally underfunded for decades.

What is absolutely not worthwhile and shouldn't even uttered in the same breath as the history of efforts on ISS and similar, is a bunch of budding space cowboys sending phallic representations of themselves into orbit on PR missions and hiding their own destructive impact on our planet behind a colinist fantasy so thin only a complete scientific illeterate would fall for it.

SpaceX has contributed positively to benign public missions by being a contractor, but all the marketing bullshit outside of that around Mars is demonstrably nonsense.

> a bit of critical thinking

Indeed.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#34

Post by mulmen »

lttlrck wrote: post #7
hirundo wrote: post #2

Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13548625…

How is the FAA blocking environmental protection programs? It's important that we explore, but exploring won't fix the mess we've made.

It could. That's pretty much the entire argument in favor of exploration actually.

We are going to need far more advanced technology than we have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate change. If we move heavy industry to space that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other areas like energy generation or storage.

I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day. They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and electricity resources.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#35

Post by lucideer »

mulmen wrote: post #26
colordrops wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how about doing a bit of critical thinking on this. What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc? They dwarf everything put into space exploration, and are arguably less useful. Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up? An…

This whole "whatever I don't like and/or understand isn't worth doing" philosophy is just not interesting. Humanity is not a hivemind. We can do more than one thing. History has countless examples of innovation in one area leading to breakthroughs in another. Just make your own contribution to humanity where you can, we will be fine.

That's true most of the time. Where it falls down is in cases where it's not "we".

There's plenty of orgs doing worthwhile and important space exploration.

There's a bunch of individuals destroying this planet who want to go to space and are selling a nice colonists fantasy to get backing.

You're right that it's not either or: let's continue supporting viable space efforts. But let's not be naive about it.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#36

Post by boardwaalk »

radu_floricica wrote: post #32
hirundo wrote: post #2

Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13548625…

There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one in particular I hear very often and should be debunked. A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket". Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a…

Should be debunked if it’s not true (that a colony could be self-sustaining), but you haven’t debunked it here.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#37

Post by freeopinion »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #18
lapetitejort wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where the…

To be clear, I'm not saying regulatory agencies are bad. What I am saying, though, is that these agencies don't have an incentive to trim down red-tape in the interest of efficiency. On one level, it would be bad for their employees and budget. On another level, something might slip through the cracks so it makes sense for a safety agency to be far more risk averse than what it watches.

Better efficiencies with significantly more launches per year and eventually interplanetary travel would be bad for the agencies that regulate it? How do you figure?

The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me.

When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#38

Post by mulmen »

Crunsher wrote: post #4
hirundo wrote: post #2

Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13548625…

How is this project going to protect the environment?

By making it cheaper to do things in space instead of in the atmosphere we breathe.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#39

Post by Taniwha »

chasd00 wrote: post #21
lapetitejort wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where the…

If only the launch site was near, and launch trajectory over, a huge body of water where a crash would not endanger anyone or anything.

It's likely not just the FAA .... especially because they are launching within 5km of the Mexican border
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