I see they've been taking tips from my overdone Kerbal rockets.
(Honestly this is cool.)
SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
161–170 of 421 posts
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
On what timescale, at what level of capital investment?
In a little over 100 years we've gone from the first powered flight to flying a helicopter on Mars. We might not be mining asteroids in 5 years but it isn't unreasonable to think it could happen in our lifetimes.
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 succee…
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Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#164I 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…
There is a very practical reason: Starlink. Launching all those Starlink sats on Falcon 9 must be much more expensive than they would like, and Starship aims to provide a considerably higher payload capacity with much lower cost (if the re-usability plans work out).
Apart from that, Musk is great at marketing and sometimes full of crap, but when you listen to some of his converstions it's not hard to believe that the Mars mission is earnestly what drives him.
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#165I'm stunned at the level of "optimism" in these comments. Guys, we're not going to be setting up colonies on Mars, we're not going to setting up heavy industry in space. There is literally no. point. at. all. Mars is less hospitable than even the least hospitable places on Earth. "Heavy" industry, pretty much by definition, means it's way cheaper to do it on Earth than in space (no amount of rocket development will e…
> Also, uh, why don't we just fix Earth? Oh, that's not sexy? No, of course not, because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas or a colony run by a dictator. Go ahead and start "fixing earth" then, you're free to do so if you think it is "sexy". Meanwhile others will work on launching rockets, a task they seem to be quite adept at. Also, drop the nonsensical references to a "colon…
> Go ahead and start "fixing earth" then, you're free to do so if you think it is "sexy".
I don't think it's sexy, at all. It's hard work, but it's also necessary.
> "colony run by a dictator"
A space colony is a pretty harsh environment. I'd be that it'll tend toward harsh, centralized leadership sooner rather than later, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong on that. In my defense, the things that make democracy possible -- plentiful resources, some level of societal trust, public safety -- are not going to be plentiful on Mars.
> Humankind needs a frontier to strive towards, this has always been the case and will probably remain so.
Agreed.
> There used to be many frontiers but technology has developed as such a rapid pace that they're starting to become quite rare.
Disagree. It is still the case that every question we answer in science leads to two more. Now, granted, not everyone needs/wants/can be a scientist.
> As said, feel free to "fix the Earth" but may I suggest framing this in a more positive and inspiring way?
Yeah, I probably should've, that would've probably been more convincing.
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#166What's the scaling like for rocket engines? How much more efficiency (in various forms) could you get if you made 1 giant engine instead? (Disregarding reliability)
I'm not a rocket scientist, but my understanding is that efficiency is derived from the exit velocity of matter from the engine. So the faster it can fire matter in the opposite direction the more efficient it is. There are some other factors as well like bell shape, which are generally designed to provide better efficiencies at different atmospheric pressures (ranging from sea level to vacuum of space). The main consideration after these factors is the mass of the engines. If multiple engines and one giant engine had all of these same factors equal, then I don't think there would be much difference in the efficiency of the rocket. Likely though, there are differences and other advantages to multiple small engines. The easiest one for me to think of is modularity. If you want a specific thrust for a payload it's much easier to add more small engines together than to try and throttle down the large engine to the correct amount, if that is possible at all.
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#167What's the scaling like for rocket engines? How much more efficiency (in various forms) could you get if you made 1 giant engine instead? (Disregarding reliability)
Musk has actually talked about that before, during the early stages of Raptor development. He said they were downsizing Raptor from the originally planned size, because their analysis showed a smaller size was the sweet spot for maximum thrust/weight ratio.
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#168Elon 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…
Sorry, this is such an absolutely absurd argument.
What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet.
The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve....
Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T?
For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be.
Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time.
Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#169Earlier 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; 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 be…
> Russians did a much better job in recent decades
The multiple problems with Nauka suggest they've lost their edge and never learned the lessons from docking issues with Progress in the past.
Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean you don't understand why American's would think that America has done incredible things, or do you not believe America has done incredible things?
Neither, the term refers to the belief that the US is somehow inherently different from other nations, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism Saying that something "could only happen in America" (usually) indicates a view that America is somehow unique (as in the American exceptionalist view). I'm not saying that America hasn't done great things, or that Americans shouldn't believe they have…
The rhetoric of American exceptionalism annoys me a lot.
But occasionally I think it has some justification. And I think SpaceX is one of those rare cases. I just can't see a firm like SpaceX existing in any other country. The US offers a unique combination of easy access to capital, relatively low regulation, and high government funding for private space ventures, which I doubt you will find anywhere else.