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Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3 billion it will be ready in 2050
by cladopa 1y ago
Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3 billion it will be ready in 2050 for 50 billion.
Much better for making your friends rich.
- imtringued 1y agoIsn't Rocket Lab doing carbon fibre rockets?
- albumen 1y agoCarbon fibre second stages that melt/burn up on re-entry.
- consumer451 1y agoPeter Beck says that "we like the black." The tiny Electron is entirely carbon, isn't it? Their new Neutron has a fully reusable first stage, also out of carbon fiber. For Neutron, they have the largest automated fiber placement machine known to exist: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zmJdJIlPOr4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zmJdJIlPOr4
- audunw 1y agoAnd? We still have yet to see whether full re-usability of the second stage is the best approach. The Neutron approach is really interesting, they can make the second stage incredibly light and cheap. Blue Origin claims the economics of a super-cheap disposable second stage, even for as one as large as theirs, is pretty much equal to a more expensive and heavier reusable second stage. (they're developing both in parallel to see where the chips land).
- ActorNightly 1y agoSpace X isn't much better. Its still Musks company.
- actionfromafar 1y agoTo this discussion, IMHO the important part is that he's fallen out of favor. He wasn't loyal.
- qwerpy 1y agoSo, the company gets things done but the CEO is unpopular with certain crowds. Seems better than Boeing, which is bad at getting things done. At least their CEO is inoffensive, and that’s what is important?
- llbeansandrice 1y ago“Unpopular” is a weird way to frame “is a Nazi”.
- boxed 1y agoI mean.. Werner von Braun wasn't just "sort of a Nazi if you squint real hard", but an ACTUAL Nazi. At some point you need to focus on getting the job done, and not on purity tests and struggle sessions. THAT is why the US once got to the moon, while China starved 40 million of its own people, and the Soviet Union collapsed.
- ActorNightly 1y agoThere is a difference between being an engineer, and being useful despite your shit views, versus being what Musk is currently.
- boxed 1y agoEveryone keeps saying Musk is just handwaving and not an engineer. Why can't we make the same argument about von Braun? The proof is always handwaving, so I don't see how it's different.
- ActorNightly 1y ago
- gnarlouse 1y agoBOING!? new insult unlocked.
- duskwuff 1y agoIt's the sound their jets make when...
- jjk166 1y agoStainless steel was a questionable choice for starship. If the pros outweigh the cons, which is yet to be seen, it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices. In general it's a terrible choice for rockets. I'm not saying Boeing would do a better job, but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.
- shdh 1y agoThey did experiment with carbon fiber if I recall correctly Stainless steel is much more cost effective
- jjk166 1y agoAnd they abandoned it to try to eliminate the need for a heat shield. This plan did not pan out. The whole point of a reusable launch system is the cost of the vehicle is amortized over many launches, so you can use expensive, high performance materials.
- Symmetry 1y agoPartially it was that stainless steel was cheaper. A bigger issue was that making large carbon fiber structures takes much larger than with steel and so it would really have eaten into their iteration time. But also while the strength to weight savings from carbon fiber are a big deal at regular temperatures the heating from Starship reentry erased that.
- _diyar 1y ago> [if stainless works] it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices. Yea but isn‘t that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them. I‘m not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they picked the best material given the options, right?
- jjk166 1y ago
- mcintyre1994 1y agoTo be fair if you want to give money to Trump’s friends then the most efficient way is just keep funnelling it to SpaceX.
- jojobas 1y agoSo far the HLS project with SpaceX spent 3 billion and delivered nothing.