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Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

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Re: Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

#221

Post by aprilthird2021 »

iamthirsty wrote: post #75
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine reading an article about the achievements of an Indian startup, based in India, with Indians at the helm, and thinking "Ugh, they only achieve things because US companies grace them with jobs!"

> Celesta Capital, Rocketship.vc, Artha Select Fund and Artha Venture Fund, and existing investors Mayfield India, Pi Ventures and Speciale Invest.[0] Not making an argument about off-shore work, but to be fair a lot of the funding came from out-of-country. — [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/catherinewang/2023/10/17/indian...

A lot of the funding for various American startups comes from SoftBank and the Saudis, but we don't hear the same criticism of them when they achieve things...

Re: Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

#222

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

nvy wrote: post #135
1024core wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wright Brothers first airplane flew only 100m or so.

The "Wright Brothers" moment for rocketry happened 60 years ago.

Every new team has to start somewhere; even SpaceX had to learn to crawl before they could walk, and that was with the benefit of decades of prior art to draw upon. It would be a shame if SpaceX became the last company to ever succeed at designing a rocket because no one after them would try.

Re: Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

#223

Post by Iulioh »

dotnet00 wrote: post #145
skybrian wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about why that is. Naively, it seems like printing layer by layer would allow for a lot of inspection. Maybe even photograph each layer as you go? And then test and go back to see what kinds of defects were apparent in the photos.

It's just that it's very easy for deviations from what the sensors see to occur. In traditional 3d printing, this can be stuff like a sensor switch wearing out, maybe physically moving slightly, being temperature sensitive, maybe the frame has changed shape slightly due to heat, moving the sensor a little, maybe something in the microcontroller happened to cause a slight delay in reading the sensor, or looseness deve…

We aren't talking about deposition 3d printing for metal parts as it needs to get to the oven and precision is...not it's strong part

The most common form for metal precision production is powder bed fusion

You deposit a whole layer of powder and a laser melts the desired parts

Re: Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

#225

Post by gus_massa »

nordsieck wrote: post #206
schmidtleonard wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work? It seems to be working great for the industry leader.

> Doesn't work? It seems to be working great for the industry leader. What are you talking about? SpaceX's Falcon 9 is arguably the most reliable rocket ever made. They've launched hundreds of times in a row without failure. If your point is that they're blowing up Starship prototypes, well... they're in the middle of a development program and they're not flying customer payloads.

They blow up a few of the early Falcons, and the explosions got a lot of news coverage.

Now they are launching an landing[1] safetly, but it's boring and the news show a cute puppy instead.

So for most people the rate of explosions vs launching is skewed.

[1] It's crazy that landing rockets is boring now.

Re: Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

#226

Post by InitialLastName »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #152
sandworm101 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze In rockets/aerospace, where the failure of any one of a thousand different parts means instant disintegration, checks are always worth the squeeze. Everyone talks about building rockets on the cheap and accepting a slightly-higher failure rate, but in reality that doesn't work. Even a tiny increase in component fault rates translates to total mission failure once multiplied…

Well, if you build it robust enough, you can test less. Not saying testing is worthless, but sometimes a one-piece that used to be 45 pieces held together by rivets is just, much much more resilient.

Robust enough to not need testing == too heavy to be cost-effective.

Re: Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

#229

Post by digdugdirk »

Etheryte wrote: post #26

> The machine also automatically outputs a report that details any deviations during printing, removing the need for postfabrication qualification. Anyone who's previously worked with 3D printing knows that this simply does not pass any kind of a sniff test. Both preventing and detecting internal defects is one of the, if not the hardest problem in 3D printing. There are many large companies trying to find ways to re…

Just out of curiosity, is your 3D printing experience on the consumer side? Or the professional/commercial side?

There are various types of non-destructive testing that could be integrated into a larger scale 3D printer for post-production analysis, and it's a direction I'm surprised there hasn't been more movement in.

Re: Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours

#230

Post by Iwan-Zotow »

jes5199 wrote: post #156
sandworm101 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze In rockets/aerospace, where the failure of any one of a thousand different parts means instant disintegration, checks are always worth the squeeze. Everyone talks about building rockets on the cheap and accepting a slightly-higher failure rate, but in reality that doesn't work. Even a tiny increase in component fault rates translates to total mission failure once multiplied…

this might be 20th-century thinking. if you can build enough copies of a rocket cheap enough, maybe disintegrating a bunch of them isn't a showstopper

what about payload?

ready to build many Webb telescopes?

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