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HN is great. "For the informed" comments like this with absolutely no substance or information from the past two years of progress at Starbase. They achieved t

HN is great. "For the informed" comments like this with absolutely no substance or information from the past two years of progress at Starbase. They achieved the highest chamber pressure for a full flow staged combustion engine. . . . EVER. They've flown and landed upper stage prototypes, achieved an engine production capacity that not even China or any state power in the WORLD has managed in the history of humanity and account for a significant portion of global payload to orbit right now. They've developed an in house metal alloy that allows for temperatures in the turbine and combustion chamber to reach levels that the United States Government considered "Impossible" during the cold war and one so exotic that only like 4 engines have ever been built in all of human history. The only one of those engines to leave the test stand is . . .the Raptor. They develop and build their own heat tiles and have achieved significant output capacity in the past two years. The support system at the launch site which includes the launch tower, grappling arms, fuel stores etc are in very advanced stages at the moment and certainly ready to handle a steady stream of iterative full flight tests. All this IN PARALLEL !! The weight of the booster through iterative design has been steadily coming down as well, the engine ISP and chamber pressure has been rising in insane steps to the point where it is already amongst the best rocket engines known. Complexity of the engine build has visibly come down in the past few months alone. Each of these items by themselves take YEARS and were similarly expected to take YEARS even when Spacex started work on them. They're much further along than many people thought they would be two years ago. There is a lot of juicy detail in the three part video that the Everyday Astronaut did with Elon Musk at Starbase, i'd urge the people interested in this thread to go watch that instead of the armchair idiocy of either the OP or myself and make up your own minds.

kranke155 5y ago
HN is full of rich techies who suffer from confirmation bias who think they know everything since they are in the top 1% of earning power, even though the truth is most of them are of average intelligence.
- lief79 5y ago
  Unfortunately, I suspect you might over estimate average intelligence. I do hope I'm wrong.
- LanceJones 5y ago
  Not exactly a searing rebuttal.
ncmncm 5y ago
All of what you are hyping, the visible big stuff, is the easy part. (Except the Raptor engines, those are hard, but they are also quite far from done: they have not been flight tested. No, those 10km hops don't count: that's just data collection.) We won't know if it all works until after they have gone to orbit, come home, and sent the same hardware up again. They will get that done, sooner or later, but how soon or how late is not predictable. The rule, for stuff like this, is "always later than you wished".

kranke155 5y ago

HN is full of rich techies who suffer from confirmation bias who think they know everything since they are in the top 1% of earning power, even though the truth is most of them are of average intelligence.

lief79 5y ago
Unfortunately, I suspect you might over estimate average intelligence. I do hope I'm wrong.
LanceJones 5y ago
Not exactly a searing rebuttal.

ncmncm 5y ago

All of what you are hyping, the visible big stuff, is the easy part. (Except the Raptor engines, those are hard, but they are also quite far from done: they have not been flight tested. No, those 10km hops don't count: that's just data collection.) We won't know if it all works until after they have gone to orbit, come home, and sent the same hardware up again. They will get that done, sooner or later, but how soon or how late is not predictable. The rule, for stuff like this, is "always later than you wished".