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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

#201

Post by CTmystery »

jvm wrote: post #119
throw0101a wrote: post #98

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; 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…

You start by saying the argument is annoying but then you don't refute it in the slightest. Illustrating that the gov also invests heavily in gov agencies does not sever the productive link between gov investment and private industry

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

#202

Post by gengelbro »

darknavi wrote: post #187

Reading some of these comments makes me wonder what it was like when explorers were trying to justify exploring the "New World". Humans have been exploring forever. Why stop now?

I guess you haven't been reading the room lately. In the modern retelling, the explorers that found the "New World" produced only net negatives and we'd have been all much better off had they stayed in western europe.

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

#203

Post by mlindner »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #83

What'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)

There are a lot of issues you get from scaling an engine up, one of the major issues being combustion instability. The larger the "blob" of fuel and oxidizer mixed together that you're trying to burn, the more you will get things like eddy currents and shockwaves flowing through the material. These disrupt the combustion and make it uneven, possibly leading to feedback cycles where these elements self-reinforce eventually causing vibration or otherwise damage to the engine. The smaller the physical size of your combustion chamber the easier these things are. The largest single engine ever built, the F1 engine that pushed the Saturn V, had massive issues with this that were further made worse because the engines were largely designed without the aid of computers.

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

#204

Post by quartesixte »

jvm wrote: post #119
throw0101a wrote: post #98

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; 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…

For what it’s worth, NASA doesn’t directly build much. Even the Apollo program was a huge web of private vendors (many who still exist today).

SpaceX is/was just another entry on the long list of private contractors commissioned to build things for NASA, DoD, et al. But different here is that SpaceX worked at very very different speed than Aerojet Rocketdyne, ULA, and all the other old-space fossils. Still, those old contractors are valuable for other things — good welders, technicians, and engineers take many years to train and these old legacy corps provide a steady income stream to maintain a certain level of manufacturing readiness.

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

#205

Post by darknavi »

gengelbro wrote: post #202
darknavi wrote: post #187

Reading some of these comments makes me wonder what it was like when explorers were trying to justify exploring the "New World". Humans have been exploring forever. Why stop now?

I guess you haven't been reading the room lately. In the modern retelling, the explorers that found the "New World" produced only net negatives and we'd have been all much better off had they stayed in western europe.

> In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

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

#206

Post by taylorlapeyre »

gengelbro wrote: post #202
darknavi wrote: post #187

Reading some of these comments makes me wonder what it was like when explorers were trying to justify exploring the "New World". Humans have been exploring forever. Why stop now?

I guess you haven't been reading the room lately. In the modern retelling, the explorers that found the "New World" produced only net negatives and we'd have been all much better off had they stayed in western europe.

Very few make or believe that argument. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wishing that things had gone a little better than they did at the time. We can still believe in a more humane world while still greatly appreciating the benefits that modern society has given us.

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

#207

Post by randallsquared »

matmatmatmat wrote: post #150
abledon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas Colonizing another planet 'is' a real problem? Also, if we can 'just fix Earth' tell us how we convince all nations to come together and sing Kumbaya, put aside our resource differences and disarm all nuclear missiles (I'm looking at you North Korea)

That's a silly strawman argument; no one is seriously asking for this.

The point being made by GP is that there are very many reasons why modern civilization on Earth may be shortlived: climate change, biological war (or lab accident!), global thermonuclear war, economic failure modes, AI or AGI, large impact, etc. Fixing any one of these doesn't solve the same problem that redundancy would solve, and some of them require solving seemingly impossible coordination problems.

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

#208

Post by m4rtink »

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…

Something kinda similar happened in Japan after the second world war - from cities burned to the ground in 1945 to first japanese nuclear power plant and bullet trains by the 1964 Olympics. Pretty remarkable IMHO.

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

#209

Post by sangnoir »

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…

The publicly richest citizen on Earth doesn't believe that at all - in fact, he believes earth is savable, and is the best home for humans and should be kept pristine by performing all (polluting) manufacturing in space. Sure, it's not as romantic as "Let's colonize Mars", but IMO, its a lot more practical. Not polluting earth is far easier than terraforming Mars

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

#210

Post by sandworm101 »

lfuller wrote: post #199
sandworm101 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Enjoy the ride & don’t poop on the party. Legitimate criticism of SpaceX fanboys is not "Pooping on the party". People who pretend that this is a ground-up space program, an icon of how private enterprise is always better at everything, need to be educated in the history of spaceflight. I myself could build a car in my garage that is better/faster/cheaper than everything available in decades past. That doesn't mea…

If you truly believe that you can make a car that is significantly better than the current state of the art AND turn it into a viable business at scale, then what are you waiting for? You’ll be a billionaire.

Key words: in decades past.
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