> Example of a Clean Sheet
lol, engineering humor
Building a rocket engine from scratch
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX was looking to reduce prices to orbit by 10x, and they are currently sitting at around 6.7x.
Just curious, how did you calculate the 6.7x?
I found an article that declared pre-and post-SpaceX cost to orbit per kilogram and it was something like 18.5k versus 2.6k (numbers from memory).
Elon before the first Dragon worked was talking about reducing launch costs by a factor of ten.
Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch
#93"At one point, I received a well-deserved earful from our machinist about how tightly spaced the turbine blades were. The program was taking nearly a month to run and required tiny end mills that broke often. We performed a turbine blade count study to see if we could use fewer blades with more space between them. It turned out the performance impact of running fewer blades was minimal, so we cut the number down, all…
It was an explicit choice they made to have this manufactured in-house, to _enable_ that tight feedback loop.
Far from a hard lesson, it was one they designed the company around.
Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cattle?
I’m guessing this is a techie reference. Computer servers can be divided into two roles in modern technical architectures… they are either “cattle” or “pets”. Pets are computer servers that have names and are always up. Cattle are servers that are transient, spun up and down as needed and do not necessarily have any long running identity/name as a component of a larger system. http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-compu…
> The poster is making a critiques of how by treating historical persons contributors as cattle, we are considering them a dispensable, unnamed, a commodity that is easily replaced and interchangeable and missing their very real contribution, value, and humanity.
Beautifully said.
Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch
#95Great 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…
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Re: Building a rocket engine from scratch
#96Great 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…
They can be boxed infrastructure that only require a generator for launch. They can be owned and operated by US gov, allowing them to be launched by land, sea or expeditionary. They can theoretically drop cargo anywhere on the planet in 5 minutes. Which is every military tacticians wet dream.