291–300 of 351 posts
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They can always leave. I'd presume that many of them are on-board in the first place because they're engaged by the idea.
Right, particularly, engineers who can build space stations definitely have other employment options.
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Welding by hand is both an art and a science. There is going to be variability in the quality of the weld, which will introduce variability into the strength. Machines can be far more precise and consistent compared to humans. They probably designed their tolerances assuming perfect welds and then didn't have them.
> They probably designed their tolerances assuming perfect welds and then didn't have them. This sounds like terrible engineering practice.
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It's sad that you think your priorities should be everyones' priorities. Find like-minded people and get to work. But what people get inspired of is none of your business to judge.
I feel perfectly entitled to judge those who spend their days dreaming of Mars as a solution to their problems. I will not support such efforts, and I feel quite comfortable being a detractor as well. Who are you to tell me what to judge?! This argument gets you nowhere with me.
They dream of Mars as it is exciting and will lead to new knowledge, understanding, and meaning.
Excerpt: "Just iterate, baby" "I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a re…
Iteration is what originally gave the Soviets the advantage in the space race.
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If you strap 10 rockets together, you don't need to keep all 10 copies of some components. You don't need 10 computers, or ten emergency abort systems, or ten communications systems, etc. One large tank will have less mass/volume than 10 small ones, etc.
Interestingly there are couple rockets that are close to "strapping couple rockets together" for various reasons: The R7 rocket - mostly to avoid engine ignition in flight & due to having a lot of nozzles you need to fit on a rocket - this was then kept for Soyuz even after an additional stage has been added that is started in flight - Soyuz 2V uses a more efficient engine & uses only the central stage The proton Roc…
Poorly for the current market using a FH makes sense, but to break to another level, building one big rocket is better. Both the US Saturn 5 and the Soviet N1 were big single tube vehicles.
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No, not in aerospace. The common approach is to spend years designing, simulating, and then actual tests come at the very end, and sometimes you don't even test because you can't or it would be too expensive. That's what Boeing are doing with their own rockets; Mars missions until now didn't really go through an iterative process; satellites are usually manufactured only by one and they better work once in orbit.
SpaceX built an incredible custom simulator in order to design the methane engines used in Starship[1]. Right now they are experimenting with manufacturing techniques, which is much less amenable to simulation [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2zhad6/spacex_at_gp...
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Let's be objective: SpaceX has radically lowered the cost to get to Earth orbit, and commands a majority of the worldwide launch market. They are simply more efficient than other launch providers, so much so that they are branching out into global communications (StarLink) to capture more revenue (global comms is 10x the market size of the launch market). They don't need to go to the Moon to succeed. There is no mark…
I don't disagree that SpaceX has been successful. I just disagree that this trial and error methodology is some radical new thinking from Musk—it's not.
And with the Starship, they have gone to an extreme that even for SpaceX seems crazy.
There are tons and tons of interviews and podcasts with experienced people who worked there. Listing to those that came over from NASA is specially interesting.
Excerpt: "Just iterate, baby" "I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a re…
The science, then, lies in identifying the hardest problems. The art lies in identifying people who can solve these problems.
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If you want to change history, you'll put up with a brutal working schedule. If you want a cushy 9-5 job, just apply to the nice big corporation down the street. At the end of the day, you just go home and enjoy your comfy bunny slippers.
This sounds suspiciously identical to a tweet Elon posted last year that went 'viral', including the bit about how people working 9-5 (like that even exists at most corps today) as somehow being 'weak'.
lol, you've found the nefarious element!
(It could be that I'm actually quoting from memory but, if so, it's not conscious.)