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One of the old Atlas rockets was stainless steel. The point is optimizing the entire rocket instead of a small section. Starship will spend most of its time be
by avernon 6y ago
One of the old Atlas rockets was stainless steel. The point is optimizing the entire rocket instead of a small section.
Starship will spend most of its time being in high heating conditions (like reentry) or very cold because the rocket fuel is loaded into the rocket at very low temperatures. It turns out that while the strength to weight ratio of carbon fiber is better than this alloy of steel at room temperature, it is impacted negatively by both hot and cold. In contrast, the steel alloy they are using actually has higher strength at low temperature and performs much better than carbon fiber at higher temperatures.
So the whole rocket can be lighter and simpler. Carbon fiber rockets that are going to reenter require a lot of heat shielding that this ship won't need.
And rockets and their engines are designed together. So it would be very difficult to make a design change like moving from aluminum to steel on Falcon without essentially designing a new rocket. Instead they will focus all their energy on Starship and eventually replace the Falcon series.
SpaceX has said it is possible that the build cost of a Starship/Superheavy stack could be lower than a Falcon 9. The variable costs of a launch would also be cheaper while delivering more payload.
This is the rocket that could make a lot of science fiction come true. That is what the excitement is about and we should all hope they get it to work.
- iso1631 6y ago> This is the rocket that could make a lot of science fiction come true The irony is that those 1930s scifi stories with silver rockets landing vertically on distant planets, which looked so ridiculous in the 80s with the Shuttle being the future, look like that's exactly what the future will be. Seeing the 2 boosters landing side by side after the first Heavy launch was something out of a scifi film.
- mips_avatar 6y agoI can clearly remember the day of the Falcon Heavy launch. I almost cried when the fairing came off and starman in his tesla was in open space, it was so incredible. I think a lot of people clearly remember that day, probably more so than the 2018 superbowl which was played 2 days earlier.
- SEJeff 6y agoI was at kennedy space center at the Apollo / Saturn V center and was pretty much in hysterical happy tears when the side boosters came in for the landing. It was magical.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- iso1631 6y agoI'm not into food, but that video - and SpaceX know how to do publicity - made me very hopeful that I will get to see people landing on Mars in my lifetime.
- zaroth 6y agoEither a hilarious autocorrect, or someone is testing out Facebook’s new chatbot.
- NotSammyHagar 6y agospace -> food that's quite a typo. Aren't we at the point that you could have lots of bots ruining sites like this by posting things like that? It seems doable to do even today. I really enjoy technical/cultural/watercooler conversations with a like group of technical scientific people. hope it doesn't go away.
- iso1631 6y agoI assume "2018 superbowl" is some pasta cooking competition?
- tpmx 6y agoI remember seeing it around or just after midnight when I was visiting a customer in Taipei. I had fallen asleep two hours earlier, but set a timer to wake up just for this historic event. Totally worth it. That was one the best executived live streams of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c
- Already__Taken 6y agomy mum's a bit if a nerd but I don't think she's been as excited as seeing those two rockets land since she first saw star wars when it came out.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoI've noticed that- I watch a lot of MST3K and it's always a 50s Sci-fi flick that show rockets landing vertically like SpaceX. They also really like to explain gravity and orbital mechanics at length in every movie because this stuff was all so new and cool!