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.
So, 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?
Stainless 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.
> but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.
You seem like commenting on a situation as one would comment about a moon visuals by looking at it without a telescope. But maybe I'm wrong and you are very close to SpaceX engineers and know some folks that work there or other internals...
But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.
I'm no expert that I can attribute the durability of the vehicle to the choice of stainless steel or whatever alloy they have there, but me and online folks have been amazed at IFT1 when starship tumbled and didn't break apart... or IFT11 when heat tiles were purposefully removed on critical spots and the ship still landed. Maybe suffered burn-thru but it didn't prevent a soft ocean splashdown.
Can it be attributed to stainless steel? I'm no engineer, so I don't know. It's just that the observable result is amazing.
> [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?
gnarlouse|4 months ago
duskwuff|4 months ago
imtringued|4 months ago
albumen|4 months ago
mcintyre1994|4 months ago
jojobas|4 months ago
ActorNightly|4 months ago
qwerpy|4 months ago
actionfromafar|4 months ago
jjk166|4 months ago
jve|4 months ago
You seem like commenting on a situation as one would comment about a moon visuals by looking at it without a telescope. But maybe I'm wrong and you are very close to SpaceX engineers and know some folks that work there or other internals...
But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.
I'm no expert that I can attribute the durability of the vehicle to the choice of stainless steel or whatever alloy they have there, but me and online folks have been amazed at IFT1 when starship tumbled and didn't break apart... or IFT11 when heat tiles were purposefully removed on critical spots and the ship still landed. Maybe suffered burn-thru but it didn't prevent a soft ocean splashdown.
Can it be attributed to stainless steel? I'm no engineer, so I don't know. It's just that the observable result is amazing.
shdh|4 months ago
Stainless steel is much more cost effective
_diyar|4 months ago
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?