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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

#71

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

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…

> The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket.

We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions.

For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity.

We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention.

But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.

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

#72

Post by what-the-grump »

s5300 wrote: post #60
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…

Consider the fact, that the publicly richest citizen on Earth, as well as one of the people behind one of the largest financial transaction sites, may have genuinely already concluded that, as the history of politics among other things have shown, that the Earth/humanity may simply be unsavable, for whatever reasons they find. He has a lot of talent at his disposable, and presumably information to a decent bit of oth…

Or you know it's vaporware again like FSD and he is just making bank in an industry that is new? Now that technology allowed capital to keep up with government cheese enough to take on space freight.

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

#73

Post by paxys »

908B64B197 wrote: post #31
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-d…

Where in America are these magical semiconductors being made?

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

#74

Post by colordrops »

ncallaway wrote: post #53
colordrops wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Totally unnecessary Good point, I should have restrained myself here. The rest of your comments would be fair, except that u/paxys said the following: > There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. Which clearly indicates that we should not be working on space travel until AFTER we've solved humanity's problems.

> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. I didn't read it as indicating that we should fully postpone humanity's problems. For example, the next few sentences read: > 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 generations and centuries. That indicates to me that the dela…

Those comments were added after I responded. In fact it's still being edited. This was the entirety of the comment I responded to:

> 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.

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

#75

Post by merpnderp »

lucideer wrote: post #33
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…

> 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 s…

Who looks at a rocket and thinks "Hmm, I bet the engineers could have gone with a more efficient design, but they decided to go with a dick?"

Like do people really think that there's better shapes to go with? And if people really believe this, what part of our public education system failed them most? Because my money is on critical thinking.

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

#76

Post by tablespoon »

908B64B197 wrote: post #31
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-d…

>> Only in America things like this can happen.

> Semi-Conductor doubling every 18 months

IIRC, the recent doublings have been happening in Taiwan. That's why people make such a big deal about TMSC. America (i.e. Intel) actually has some catching up to do.

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

#77

Post by outworlder »

paxys wrote: post #73
908B64B197 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-d…

Where in America are these magical semiconductors being made?

They are referencing Moore's law. Some of them are made in the US, some are not (not today, at least).

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

#78

Post by tablespoon »

gridspy wrote: post #66
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…

I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy industry into space. Move our power generation into space and beam it down. Make advanced technologies in space which benefit those on Earth. Move people into real orbital habitats. Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve. We can't "wait" for anything, or the window during which we can develop space travel will close. 10 or 100 years from now we migh…

> I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy industry into space. Move our power generation into space and beam it down.

Wasn't one of the disasters in Simcity 2000 having your power-beaming space laser miss your power station instead light your city on fire? It seems like such a thing would cause massive hazards.

> Move people into real orbital habitats.

> Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.

Or force people to live deep underground. Then when they save up enough money to buy a ticket, they can be transported there much more economically.

As for me, I like living on the surface.

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

#79

Post by milansuk »

gridspy wrote: post #56
gpm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, If I understand it right, both booster and starship will end up in the ocean. You mean for the first test flight? Do you have a source? Long term plan is definitely land landing, but I haven't seen anything about the first test flight. I assumed that they would try and land it from the start, they've already landed starship a few times, and it seems like that's where a lot of the unknowns still are (e.g. they…

The test flight trajectories are posted with the FAA and covered in numerous places, for instance Article: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/13/spacex-outlines-plans-... Video (Marcus House): https://youtu.be/9-9k513UIVw?t=298 Basically both vechicles (the massive booster and the starship itself (2nd stage) are going to "land" on the water, which means a hover and then sinking into the water. Booster - Boost and sep…

Yep, this is what I meant, thanks for the sources.

Although, I'm not sure about that "then sinking into the water" part. There are big LO2 and methane tanks and If they are empty enough and closed, both Starship and Booster shouldn't sink. I guest, we'll see it soon.

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

#80

Post by foxyv »

piercebot wrote: post #59
908B64B197 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-d…

What is it about America (or other countries) that makes you think this couldn't happen anywhere else?

Personally, I think it has a lot to do with American sub-culture, the US dollar, our crazy university system, and immigration. This is speculation on my part so take it with a BIG grain of salt.

The USA brings in 50 million or so people from other countries. Often they are bloody minded, stone cold, hard workers that will sacrifice everything to give their children the opportunity to be Americans. These people are some of the best in the world in my opinion.

The US dollar being used as a reserve currency for most of the world means that it is the center of international investment. This means that the billions of dollars that flowed into PayPal and Elon Musk's startups probably came in large part from foreign investment funds.

Our universities crank out some of the weirdest and least conventional engineers you can imagine. Most of them are half-crazy in the first place. The archetype of Mad Scientist can be found in physics departments and engineering labs all over the country. Conformity is often seen as a kind of perversity. We idolize professors like Feynman and read novels like Ignition! This is why you see bridges collapsing and power grids failing while we build some of the most advanced technology in the world. We hate boring maintenance and love to launches cars into space.

Finally in no small part is American sub-culture. Specifically the science fantasy of space travel and colonization that is in the heart of a lot of American engineers and scientists. The same fantasy that captured the heart of Elon Musk, a billionaire South African immigrant who made his fortune in Silicon Valley. In addition there is the added fact that few other countries would allow some random small company to build ICBMs in their metaphorical backyard. The USA is kinda loose like that...

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