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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

#81

Post by narrator »

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?

One problem with other countries is there is an industrial oligarchy that can't get shake itself out of the "The Innovator's Dilemma." Disruption is not considered valuable. The Russians have two aircraft design bureaus Sukhoi and MiG to help somewhat in preventing stagnation, but it would be impossible for a SpaceX to come out of nowhere in Russia like it did in the U.S. Elon even went to Russia in the early SpaceX days to buy an old ICBM and they told him to screw off.[1]

One related anecdote. I read somewhere a while ago about how Apple had a lot of internal security, even between teams. They said the reason for that is that if someone in the iPod department found out about the iPhone they'd realize the threat to their career and work to undermine it.

[1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34976-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-t...

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

#82

Post by Talanes »

colordrops wrote: post #51
paxys wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we can do multiple things at once. In the thread you joined we are discussing the single most important thing. So what really is your point here?

Your comment clearly indicates that we should hold on on space travel until after other problems are solved.

"Clearly" is a bit too much, given that you've had to comment multiple times to people who didn't read it that way.

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

#84

Post by maccam94 »

gpm wrote: post #52
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…

> 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 plan for the first test flight is to aim for a controlled water landing, but the odds of that being completely successful aren't high enough to risk a land landing. The new drone ships are still under construction: https://spaceexplored.com/2021/07/07/update-on-spacexs-gulf-...

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

#85

Post by shakezula »

midasuni wrote: post #45
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…

Why are you posting on HN then? Get out there and save the planet.

This isn't helpful or insightful input for anyone, including the people literally trying to get out and save the planet.

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

#86

Post by e40 »

foxyv wrote: post #80
piercebot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

> 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.

Over the last 40 years I've known and worked with some of these people, and I marvel at their tenacity and the sheer force of will they have to succeed. It just blows me away. Sadly, it seems to disappear from the next generation. I'll admit that I have a small sample size.

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

#87

Post by shakezula »

Diederich wrote: post #68
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. This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket. While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I will note another very important thing SpaceX is doing: "The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not…

> This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket.

It's always presented as a false dichotomy, though. We can have both.

People insist we should be spending our money fixing the planet, but we already are, including Musk who just sponsored the largest XPrize in history for a carbon sequestration method.

First we must overcome the political hurdles to get people to even recognize that climate change is a problem. Obviously money is only barely starting to trickle in to carbon sequestration tech.

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

#88

Post by colordrops »

Talanes wrote: post #82
colordrops wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment clearly indicates that we should hold on on space travel until after other problems are solved.

"Clearly" is a bit too much, given that you've had to comment multiple times to people who didn't read it that way.

Can you explain what you meant by that comment then?

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

#89

Post by krisoft »

milansuk wrote: post #79
gridspy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"sinking into the water" means that it enters the water. A splashdown. It doesn't mean that it will sink to the bottom.

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

#90

Post by shakezula »

what-the-grump wrote: post #72
s5300 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm getting bored of watching rockets land like they do in the movies.

Soooooo. It's probably not vaporware homie.

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