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Building a rocket engine from scratch

blog.ablspacesystems.com

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Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#61

Post by myrmidon »

randmeerkat wrote: post #59
myrmidon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider the view "many discoveries were made much earlier by soviet counterparts" to be mostly incorrect and heavily biased. But it is a common and easy trap for a lot of nationalities to fall into, because there are innumerable discoveries that happen before (and/or independent of) the canonical "inventor" (and you're automatically more likely to know the independent inventors if they come from your country!). Re…

> the cold truth is that it's mostly a personality cult and that any single scientist that ever existed, no matter how brilliant, was still replaceable I found the MBA.

> I found the MBA.

Nope, thats a false positive.

Also cutting the quote there heavily twists the meaning: I'm not saying those scientists were replaceable as persons, just that their effect on all of humanities scientific progress was.

Many persons have a strong notion that we owe certain discoveries to a specific person, but this does not even hold up to cursory examination in my view (those discoveries would have been made in short order by someone else).

I'm very curious though if you have counterexamples, or think the premise is otherwise flawed.

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#62

Post by Symmetry »

z3phyr wrote: post #51
trhway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In USSR/Russia we had a stand-up comedian (Zadornov) who in one of his jokes was explaining how the conciseness of the language is advantageous on the battlefiled. Recently I had to write in Russian (my native language) a tech doc of many pages. That is after 26 years of tech writing only in English (my 2nd language). That experience resulted in an epiphany for me on why Russia is so technically behind as I suddenly…

Th soviet mechanical and rf engineering efforts were very well regarded during the early cold war period, and I would argue, much more sophisticated. Language did not stop the USSR. It was the economic policy like banning some disciplines based on ideological grounds like cybernetics etc. Check it out, the things for which a western scientist or engineer is given credit, were discovered/invented much earlier by sovie…

How much of it was ideological and how much of it was just that Gosplan didn't want computers taking their power, and so Gosplan cut funding to computer development?

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#64

Post by hinkley »

choeger wrote: post #46
mdorazio wrote: post #40

Great post on building extremely complex hardware from scratch. At the same time I hate to be that business guy, but both this blog post and the abl site are missing a good answer to my first question: Why? Given that SpaceX exists and is quickly approaching feasibility of Starship on top of Falcon, what is the primary goal of this rocket system? How will it compete? Who will its customers be? Is it getting its metri…

From the outside: Diversification is always great. Build a whole ecosystem of small-scale rocket manufacturers instead of one big monopoly. That will foster competition and innovation. From the investor: SpaceX might fail. Even if there Falcons are pretty much unbeatable now, you don't know what's going to happen with Starship. And even the Falcons could conceivably be grounded for years after some hypothetical flaw…

SpaceX was looking to reduce prices to orbit by 10x, and they are currently sitting at around 6.7x.

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#65

Post by avmich »

myrmidon wrote: post #61
randmeerkat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cold truth is that it's mostly a personality cult and that any single scientist that ever existed, no matter how brilliant, was still replaceable I found the MBA.

> I found the MBA. Nope, thats a false positive. Also cutting the quote there heavily twists the meaning: I'm not saying those scientists were replaceable as persons, just that their effect on all of humanities scientific progress was. Many persons have a strong notion that we owe certain discoveries to a specific person, but this does not even hold up to cursory examination in my view (those discoveries would have b…

> I'm very curious though if you have counterexamples, or think the premise is otherwise flawed.

I suspect we can find counterexamples if look enough, though to truly present some a serious knowledge of science history is needed.

What do you think of contributions of Srinivasa Ramanujan and George Cantor?

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#66

Post by avmich »

hinkley wrote: post #64
choeger wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the outside: Diversification is always great. Build a whole ecosystem of small-scale rocket manufacturers instead of one big monopoly. That will foster competition and innovation. From the investor: SpaceX might fail. Even if there Falcons are pretty much unbeatable now, you don't know what's going to happen with Starship. And even the Falcons could conceivably be grounded for years after some hypothetical flaw…

SpaceX was looking to reduce prices to orbit by 10x, and they are currently sitting at around 6.7x.

I interpret this as that SpaceX has a high margin between market prices and their internal costs, so they can safely reduce prices when needed while remaining profitable. The competitor of course should aim not to the current prices, but to SpaceX's costs to be able to compete on the market.

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#67

Post by avmich »

greenish_shores wrote: post #57
nothercastle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees who are married to their job are the best employees. Just like in a real relationship you can treat them like shit and they mostly stay married

Honestly I did read that as "Employers who are married to their job are the best employers". You probably won't treat them like shit, but they'll still remain married anyway. But such employees will sometimes leave and build their own stuff. Which they'll very likely succeed at, exactly because of the approach they have. Ultimately, I think these are a bit different fields/markets, and a bit different kind of jobs. E…

> But such employees will sometimes leave and build their own stuff. Which they'll very likely succeed at, exactly because of the approach they have.

Microsoft was known at some time to provide good environment for their engineers so they could focus on making the product, instead of learning the business side of things, which both removed distractions and reduced the incentives to leave and do things without well-learned habits.

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#68

Post by hinkley »

avmich wrote: post #66
hinkley wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX was looking to reduce prices to orbit by 10x, and they are currently sitting at around 6.7x.

I interpret this as that SpaceX has a high margin between market prices and their internal costs, so they can safely reduce prices when needed while remaining profitable. The competitor of course should aim not to the current prices, but to SpaceX's costs to be able to compete on the market.

I probably over summarized. I think there’s still room to undercut or compete (particularly on specialty projects) until SpaceX hits 10x for sure, and maybe as high as 15x.

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#69

Post by philipwhiuk »

cuSetanta wrote: post #52

Oh wow, I work for a supplier for ABL and am today in the process of putting some of their stuff into our thermal chamber for cycling. Thats neat. We work for a lot of launcher companies, but ABL is the most interesting for me (even though we do relatively little for them). The containerised approach to the entire system is a really clever adaptation of existing methods to create a rapid launch system.

The jury is very much out on 'rapid'.

Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch

#70

Post by philipwhiuk »

alfor wrote: post #63

I was wondering what is that space company and what are their edge with spaceX. On the site you can see: launch on demand, simple system that can go anywere, tactical launchs. This is for nukes or similar stuff.

It's not for nukes. We have silos and submarines for those. It's for "responsive launch" and (skeptically) because the DoD has lots of money for space and not much idea what to do with it.

It's the Astra business model, hopefully without the Astra failure model.

(And practically speaking it's because you can't bootstrap a heavy lift launch company on VC funding or even a SPAC - the small sat launcher is a proof-of-concept for your medium/large launch vehicle).

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