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Starship has been fully stacked

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Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#41

Post by 908B64B197 »

Only in America things like this can happen.

A whole industry bootstrapping itself into transforming exotic, mission critical hardware into a commodity; SpaceX is making flight hardware a commodity, just like Silicon Valley did with semiconductors!

Meanwhile Europeans are playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 (already 11 years old) and it looks like Ariane 6 won't be competitive with SpaceX anyways [0]. And China is still raining toxic fuel and spent rocket stages on villages. [1]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/europes-challenger-t...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#42

Post by kart23 »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #27

A tangential, silly observation. I hear Musk being called "a Steve Jobs" a lot... wouldn't "a Howard Hughes" be closer to the mark? Maybe a generational thing....

I'd say more akin to Henry Ford. Probably not as influential for manufacturing, but like ford, built a ton of cars, also in aerospace (ford trimotor was the one of the first successful US ariliner), and against unions.

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#43

Post by [deleted] »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #25
blhack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s core to their strategy. They also assembled a lot of the rocket in tents on a beach in Texas. Originally they hired a company that normally builds water towers to construct it. The idea is that the rocket needs to be a commodity, not something built in a clean room by specialists.

I almost wonder if this is one of the key differences related to development speed between SpaceX and their competitors (Blue Origin, etc.) Most big space rockets are built in relatively low unit counts as ordered (unless I'm mistaken), whereas Musk's other large concern focuses on mass-production and solves problems for mass production. Hearing Musk speak about manufacturing challenges in the Everyday Astronaut inte…

[deleted]

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#44

Post by IanClarke »

go_elmo wrote: post #4

Its so interesting to watch this technology evolve, life and uncut. Its almost as if every other day another milestone is revealed. Especially as its a tech that one doesn't work with (mechanical engineering / rocket motor engineering etc). Looking forward for all the great space missions that will be made possible by this (europa, enceladus, more comet missions & many more space-telescopes), not so much for humanity…

They work 24/7. 12 hour shifts "day" and "night" with 3 and 4 days off each other week. They also distribute the work properly in parallel and have the perfect visionary (Elon) and capable leadership / lead engineers, fixing on mistakes and iterating. Probably it's forbidden to work like that in a lot of other developed countries, which basically only allow for 8 hours of work Monday to Friday. And also lack the proper leadership.

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#45

Post by IanClarke »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #27

A tangential, silly observation. I hear Musk being called "a Steve Jobs" a lot... wouldn't "a Howard Hughes" be closer to the mark? Maybe a generational thing....

Who? Everyone knows Steve Jobs. And after small, portable music players (iPods) and smart phones (iPhones), cars and space are just the next big things ripe for disruption. Also the other things Elon does (Powerwall, Solar Roof) are just timed very well. He has a sense for such things. Just like Steve. He also informs and educates us (the public) just like Steve did, creating the famous distortion field. I am happy we have a new Steve Jobs.

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#46

Post by nickik »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #25
blhack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s core to their strategy. They also assembled a lot of the rocket in tents on a beach in Texas. Originally they hired a company that normally builds water towers to construct it. The idea is that the rocket needs to be a commodity, not something built in a clean room by specialists.

I almost wonder if this is one of the key differences related to development speed between SpaceX and their competitors (Blue Origin, etc.) Most big space rockets are built in relatively low unit counts as ordered (unless I'm mistaken), whereas Musk's other large concern focuses on mass-production and solves problems for mass production. Hearing Musk speak about manufacturing challenges in the Everyday Astronaut inte…

For sure, it also has to do with vertical integration. If you don't have that, then you need to ask every one of your suppliers to take the approach you do.

In a risky venture this is very hard to achieve.

SpaceX can just say 'we are gone do it this way' and they have almost everything required in house and can plan for mass manufacture from the beginning.

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#47

Post by nickik »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #27

A tangential, silly observation. I hear Musk being called "a Steve Jobs" a lot... wouldn't "a Howard Hughes" be closer to the mark? Maybe a generational thing....

He does not like the Howard Hughes comparison. He wants his inventions to actually change the way thins are done in everyday live.

Watch this interview with a former Astronaut who worked with SpaceX for Crew Dragon. He made this comparison on TV and talked about it with Musk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNG6ZzDh9C8

Quite a funny story.

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#48

Post by mlindner »

Dunedan wrote: post #20
Steltek wrote: post #16

It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".

> It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. This crane is neither boring, nor old. It's an engineering marvel itself. It's a Liebherr LR 11350 [1], one of the most powerful mobile cranes available worldwide, modified by SpaceX for their own use case [2]. [1]: https://www.liebherr.com/en/int/products/mobile-and-crawler-... [2]: https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/LR11350

Nitpick, but your source, doesn't actually state what you claim. SpaceX didn't modify this crane for their own use.

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#49

Post by mlindner »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #30
gpm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but to SpaceX it's just a commercially available off the shelf component. I'm sure they payed a pretty penny for it, but compared to the cost of building a custom building for integration, a penny is probably a pretty accurate estimate of the cost.

Exactly. If you deal in Javascript all day a tube frame and keeping your bearings from corroding sounds hard but all this stuff is trivially solve-able. Big complex machines like this are the equivalent of a tall stack of software. No one part is complex. It's basically a given that it will work. Whether it scales is somewhat up in the air. The most impressive thing about it is that it can be economically viable to o…

What you're saying doesn't really jive with reality though. SpaceX needs a specialist crane because they need to stabilize the rocket from the side, not the top, during launch. If it got hit by too much wind it would fall over otherwise.

Re: Starship has been fully stacked

#50

Post by ehmish »

IanClarke wrote: post #44
go_elmo wrote: post #4

Its so interesting to watch this technology evolve, life and uncut. Its almost as if every other day another milestone is revealed. Especially as its a tech that one doesn't work with (mechanical engineering / rocket motor engineering etc). Looking forward for all the great space missions that will be made possible by this (europa, enceladus, more comet missions & many more space-telescopes), not so much for humanity…

They work 24/7. 12 hour shifts "day" and "night" with 3 and 4 days off each other week. They also distribute the work properly in parallel and have the perfect visionary (Elon) and capable leadership / lead engineers, fixing on mistakes and iterating. Probably it's forbidden to work like that in a lot of other developed countries, which basically only allow for 8 hours of work Monday to Friday. And also lack the prop…

I think it's pretty normal in most developed countries to have operations happening 24/7, in some there's rules requring extra pay for saturdays and sundays, and a lot have weekly per-worker limits on the number of hours worked and/or numbers of hours where extra pay is required, but it's certainly not impossible.
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