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Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

Here's my guess: This thing, which is being assembled outdoors in the elements by dudes on mobile cherry pickers and which has low enough build and finish quality to not even make to as a temporary Epcot Center exhibit, is designed to make it to some altitude, careen sideways then EXPLODE, creating a Twitter storm and news headlines.

It exists to readjust people's expectations on how difficult the project to get to Mars is, and how likely it is people are going to die, which is something than Elon has taken some glee in reiterating over time.

Edit: Look at the third picture here and tell me this is anything other that a "rocket sketch" https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/01/why-is-spacex-working-...

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Have you seen the grasshopper[0], which had roughly the same purpose for the early Falcons? That hardly looked like a space vehicle, but did its job quite well. I do very much agree it all feels a bit rushed (working during weekends as well), and I really do wonder why they are in such a hurry.

Also, plenty of Falcons have exploded in one way or another, I'm not sure what is new (or unexpected) about that. Things will go wrong a few times and as Elon said in SpaceX's early days "failure is an options". It will have to go right often enough before it gets even close to human-rated. I guess for Mars that means going there and back again a few times (without humans).

[0] https://i.pinimg.com/474x/44/4f/3e/444f3e51839ba246a02bd3d29...

Yes, that Grasshopper to me looks like a carefully constructed work-in-progress device whereas the the current one looks like a full scale mockup with shiny wallpaper.

Maybe I overreached with an internet explosion, but the silver craft just screams "spectacle" to me, even if, due to development progress on the Raptors it can indeed do a hop. I've been proven wrong before!

They are testing a lot of things at once - it's a new metal (for rockets, at least, it hasn't been used since the Mercury times) with new assembly techniques and new structural demands. It'll fly with new engines that have never flown before and, finally, the full-scale article will need to do something nobody has ever done before - come back from orbit and do a propulsive landing.

I dislike the active cooling part (which they'll probably start to test along the rest with this vehicle). Everything "active" will eventually fail at the worst possible time.

Since the alternative is basically use of insulating tiles, which as we know are not free of significant concerns, I have come to accept that it is required complexity.

If we had science-fiction engines, we could do a propulsive brake and skip messing with the atmosphere altogether.

Doesn't "the tyranny of the rocket equation" kind of make the idea of fully propulsive braking systems kind of infeasible?

I know it's possible, but when you have an atmosphere not using it would be just throwing away potential weight that you could be using for the mission at hand.

I'm not rocket scientist, but it sounds like solving that problem using other means (like active cooling) gives you a good amount of weight to play with before it even begins to equal the cost of propulsive braking. And that means you can have a lot of redundancy or can use less efficient but simpler to operate/manufacturer/fix.

It all depends on how much mass you can eject how quickly. If you have good enough propulsion you can save on thermal shielding (and propellant mass).

And, if you have a true science-fiction-grade engine, you may not even need propellant. ;-)

I don't think that a company that is currently actively trying to raise funds from investors[1] wants "SpaceX test rocket explodes" as a headline just to make the point of how likely human casualties are when going on missions in their new product.

It really is only designed to go up to 5km (that's their current altitude limit for the testing license [2]) and test landings. It doesn't need to be anything more than a metal tank with legs but of course SpaceX/Elon are all about style so they want it to look cool.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-is-raising-50...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/9z9ccn/spacex_files...

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