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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

#111

Post by sandworm101 »

throw0101a wrote: post #98
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…

> 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; Silicon Valley did not bootstrap itself. It received untold billions of dollars from the US government during the Cold War (and lots of stuff happened during the WW2 economy, when the US was the Allies' armorer). Do you thin…

>> Notwithstanding the millions that NASA gave them in their early stages.

And the billions spent on the technologies that allow those engines to exist. SpaceX didn't invent rocket engines. It stands on the shoulders of many giants going back through Apollo to the early days. There are even traces of Soviet tech in the raptor (ie closed cycle). Nearly all of that work was funded by taxpayers ... and by whatever funded the soviet programs.

Building a better mousetrap is great, but that doesn't mean that all the previous mousetraps were not also great too.

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

#112

Post by BobbyJo »

sfblah wrote: post #101

I genuinely don't understand what the point of all this is. Is this all about sending people to Mars? Is it basic research? What is the end goal here? I don't follow this too much, so I'm hoping someone can paste me a link to something I can read to explain the justification for building this thing.

Do you have any idea how much raw material and energy would be available to humanity if we were able to successfully colonize the solar system? The scale of what we could build and learn would be absolutely shaking. Seriously. That's enough 'why' for me.

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

#113

Post by sebzim4500 »

paxys wrote: post #5
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 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…

He's not claiming there is a national conspiracy against him. He is claiming that between regulatory capture and regulators trying to justify their existence, government agencies are not acting in humanity's interest.

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

#114

Post by sebzim4500 »

onion2k wrote: post #19
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. Perhaps that's true, but space launches are important enough that going "slowly"[1] is a good idea. One catastrophic accident with the destruction of a spacecraft leaving a large amount of orbital debris would make space launches much, much harder until we clean up. Rushing to space could slow us down a lot. [1] The space race ha…

From Musk's perspective, any timeline which does not establish a permanent presence on Mars within his lifetime is too slow. It looked like that would be impossible before the Starship program, now it merely looks unlikely.

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

#115

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

sfblah wrote: post #101

I genuinely don't understand what the point of all this is. Is this all about sending people to Mars? Is it basic research? What is the end goal here? I don't follow this too much, so I'm hoping someone can paste me a link to something I can read to explain the justification for building this thing.

The initial technical goal is "more mass to orbit". Due to the rocket equation, the amount of fuel needed is ~20x the amount of payload to low earth orbit. Any fuel needed to get from low earth orbit to higher orbits needs to get to low orbit first, and so counts as mass. So the more mass and the greater a distance one wants to fly, the larger the required rocket. This rocket is very large.

People and the necessary life support for people are quite massive compared to robots. Once one can get lots of mass to orbit, one can think about things like sending people past low earth orbit (around the moon, to the moon, or to Mars). So far, NASA has committed to sending people to the Moon, but no farther. Elon Musk says that the goal is Mars, but any craft which could be used to start a Mars colony also has the ability to start a much larger moon colony, or perhaps to land on the moon and take off again without leaving (expensive) parts of the rocket behind.

There is some applied science research, such as around methods for reentry, but the final goal is establishing human colonies.

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

#116

Post by matmatmatmat »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #65
908B64B197 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain why the MAX was allowed to re-use the 737 type certificate?

There's a swath of people who have adopted the position that it's best to let industry be the primary agent of regulation, largely for ideological political reasons. As we saw with the MAX debacle, such a position is foolish, as companies will always be cravenly willing to cut corners in the interest of short term profits. This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more…

It is unclear to me why anyone would vote this down. It's spot on.

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

#117

Post by cblconfederate »

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…

bootstrapping itself by extending tech designed decades ago? that doesn't sound right. Until today, the biggest rocket design was still the soviet N1 from the 60s. It's good to celebrate space achievement but rewriting history is annoying

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

#118

Post by perrylaj »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #107
sfblah wrote: post #101

I genuinely don't understand what the point of all this is. Is this all about sending people to Mars? Is it basic research? What is the end goal here? I don't follow this too much, so I'm hoping someone can paste me a link to something I can read to explain the justification for building this thing.

Elon Musk claims this is all to establish a civilisation on Mars in order to decrease the chance of humanity destroying itself. He might not have an entirely faithful relationship with the truth, but there is really no other rational reason to be so aggressive with the Starship program. SpaceX already does the vast majority of commercial launches using its Falcon 9 rocket, so they don't need to do anything this drast…

My assumption has always been that the first to Mars will have a huge edge in gaining access to any natural resources (ore, salts, etc) that might have commercial value. I imagine the first organization to establish mining and refining capabilities on Mars would stand to make trillions in the production of things like steel and aluminum, as would be needed to build out any sizeable settlements on the planet.

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

#119

Post by jvm »

throw0101a wrote: post #98
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…

> 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; Silicon Valley did not bootstrap itself. It received untold billions of dollars from the US government during the Cold War (and lots of stuff happened during the WW2 economy, when the US was the Allies' armorer). Do you thin…

This is such an annoying argument.

The government gave $18B to the SLS and so far has vapor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

The government spent $211B on the shuttle program and got 133 launches. SpaceX will probably surpass that number this year at a fraction of the cost.

NASA's record on rockets since Apollo has been abysmal.

I don't think government is necessarily bad (the Russians did a much better job in recent decades!) but it leans into its failures and often has bad incentives. SpaceX fails fast, has great incentives, and has achieved an incredible amount on a (comparatively) shoestring budget.

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

#120

Post by project2501a »

908B64B197 wrote: post #105
treespace88 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In almost all other countries the rich use the government to keep competition out. All under the banner of national pride. In Canada we lock out all foreign investment in lots of areas.

I never understood why Canada would restrict international players from disrupting sectors like telecom (a commodity really) but didn't seem to have any problem with Airbus taking over the CSeries program for almost nothing.

> (a commodity really)

you mean a utility, right?

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