Starship has been fully stacked | Hacker News Reader

Starship has been fully stacked

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120 pointsloourr46 comments

Its so interesting to watch this technology evolve, life and uncut. Its almost as if every other day another milestone is revealed. Especially as its a tech that one doesn't work with (mechanical engineering / rocket motor engineering etc).

Looking forward for all the great space missions that will be made possible by this (europa, enceladus, more comet missions & many more space-telescopes), not so much for humanity becoming multi-planetary, as the scientific value is lower imo. E.g. a great project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

They work 24/7. 12 hour shifts "day" and "night" with 3 and 4 days off each other week. They also distribute the work properly in parallel and have the perfect visionary (Elon) and capable leadership / lead engineers, fixing on mistakes and iterating. Probably it's forbidden to work like that in a lot of other developed countries, which basically only allow for 8 hours of work Monday to Friday. And also lack the proper leadership.

I think it's pretty normal in most developed countries to have operations happening 24/7, in some there's rules requring extra pay for saturdays and sundays, and a lot have weekly per-worker limits on the number of hours worked and/or numbers of hours where extra pay is required, but it's certainly not impossible.

And unstacked !

It was surprising to see that it only took them about an hour to unstack (I didn't catch the stacking but I think I heard it was around the same amount of time ?).

I'm still very perplex about the "catching" mechanism they are designing, Musk mentioned in the Everyday Astronaut interview [1] that it was a very hard problem and I'm very curious to see if/how they can solve it.

[1] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

Yeah, I think the chopsticks makes sense. For the actual contact I would have thought a friction based solution (wide soft/grippy chopsticks) being easier in practice. Too bad the metal they are using is not magnetic.

I'm sure you've seen this rendering and Elon's response, but I thought I would post it for other's who have not: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1422603106035118085

I've seen that rendering and it looks absolutely nuts. "catch the falling rocket with tongs". It would be amazing if it works, but for now it looks like something that sci-fi would avoid as not seeming plausible.

Looking at that, surprised they didn't go for a taller tower and some kind of cable arrest system like aircraft carriers have. I'm sure they thought of it.

I am interested as well - terrestrial civil engineering, and associated carbon steel, concrete, and rebar materials, are dirt cheap in comparison to interplanetary aerospace engineering and their alloy or composite materials.

I'd have started my design like a Delta robot or inverted Stewart platform, with a trio of sturdy towers, a catchment ring in the middle, and cables running to large electric motors with massive heatsinks (saltwater?) that could position the ring anywhere in X/Y/Z between the towers. By choosing a site with a low central valley between three natural peaks, you could get a huge amount of volume and not need as high a tower, I hear there's a site over a Puerto Rican sinkhole that recently became available - though be gentle during disassembly of the previous structure, it belongs in a museum....

Engineering is expensive, materials are cheap; always make the process window as large as possible!

I had not, thanks ! This seems crazy, I can't wait to see it in action.

Nice video, thanks for sharing. I liked that bit on requirements:

> Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. 'Cause you can't ask the departments, you have to ask a person, and that person who's putting forward, the requirement or constraint must agree that, they must take responsibility for that requirement.Otherwise you could have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with, off the cuff and they're not even have the company anymore. But it came from the, let's say, air loads department. They're like, actually there's no one at our current department that currently agrees with that.

As a "consultant" I fight phantom requirements every day! I can't agree more with this method!

Only in America things like this can happen.

A whole industry bootstrapping itself into transforming exotic, mission critical hardware into a commodity; SpaceX is making flight hardware a commodity, just like Silicon Valley did with semiconductors!

Meanwhile Europeans are playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 (already 11 years old) and it looks like Ariane 6 won't be competitive with SpaceX anyways [0]. And China is still raining toxic fuel and spent rocket stages on villages. [1]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/europes-challenger-t...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...

It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".

That’s core to their strategy. They also assembled a lot of the rocket in tents on a beach in Texas.

Originally they hired a company that normally builds water towers to construct it. The idea is that the rocket needs to be a commodity, not something built in a clean room by specialists.

I almost wonder if this is one of the key differences related to development speed between SpaceX and their competitors (Blue Origin, etc.) Most big space rockets are built in relatively low unit counts as ordered (unless I'm mistaken), whereas Musk's other large concern focuses on mass-production and solves problems for mass production. Hearing Musk speak about manufacturing challenges in the Everyday Astronaut interview, much of what he was talking about in terms of manufacturing challenge was about lessons learned from Tesla. Seems like focusing on the production problems this way may be a reason he's pulling of launch vehicles at the price points SpaceX is achieving.

For sure, it also has to do with vertical integration. If you don't have that, then you need to ask every one of your suppliers to take the approach you do.

In a risky venture this is very hard to achieve.

SpaceX can just say 'we are gone do it this way' and they have almost everything required in house and can plan for mass manufacture from the beginning.

> It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane.

This crane is neither boring, nor old. It's an engineering marvel itself. It's a Liebherr LR 11350 [1], one of the most powerful mobile cranes available worldwide, modified by SpaceX for their own use case [2].

[1]: https://www.liebherr.com/en/int/products/mobile-and-crawler-...

[2]: https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/LR11350

Right, but to SpaceX it's just a commercially available off the shelf component. I'm sure they payed a pretty penny for it, but compared to the cost of building a custom building for integration, a penny is probably a pretty accurate estimate of the cost.

Exactly.

If you deal in Javascript all day a tube frame and keeping your bearings from corroding sounds hard but all this stuff is trivially solve-able. Big complex machines like this are the equivalent of a tall stack of software. No one part is complex. It's basically a given that it will work. Whether it scales is somewhat up in the air.

The most impressive thing about it is that it can be economically viable to operate while complying with the litany of relevant regulations across multiple jurisdictions. If you just need to stack rockets it's not hard to come up with a cheaper and better one trick pony that only lifts rockets. You see examples of such one trick ponies in every shipyard.

But SpaceX is constrained to some degree by engineering man hours so they were glad to just write a check for an expensive generalist piece of equipment. Cranes like this didn't exist in the 1960s so NASA built a bunch of traditional gantry cranes into a building. SpaceX can skip that sort of fiddling around and just write a check, so they do.

What you're saying doesn't really jive with reality though. SpaceX needs a specialist crane because they need to stabilize the rocket from the side, not the top, during launch. If it got hit by too much wind it would fall over otherwise.

Nitpick, but your source, doesn't actually state what you claim. SpaceX didn't modify this crane for their own use.

I don't think many boring old construction cranes have a lifting capacity of 1350 t, nor do they need it. This is a mobile crane.

A tangential, silly observation. I hear Musk being called "a Steve Jobs" a lot... wouldn't "a Howard Hughes" be closer to the mark? Maybe a generational thing....

The combination of “largest ever”, unusual material, and enormous number of engines definitely evokes the spruce goose. I think the difference is that Elon is clearly building a starship factory instead of a single expensive prototype.

While I understand why you'd think of that... not really what I meant (actually, the Spruce Goose hadn't crossed my mind). Hughes as being an aircraft engineer type being involved with running a lot of different businesses seems a closer match than comparison with Jobs.

I'd say more akin to Henry Ford. Probably not as influential for manufacturing, but like ford, built a ton of cars, also in aerospace (ford trimotor was the one of the first successful US ariliner), and against unions.

Who? Everyone knows Steve Jobs. And after small, portable music players (iPods) and smart phones (iPhones), cars and space are just the next big things ripe for disruption. Also the other things Elon does (Powerwall, Solar Roof) are just timed very well. He has a sense for such things. Just like Steve. He also informs and educates us (the public) just like Steve did, creating the famous distortion field. I am happy we have a new Steve Jobs.

He does not like the Howard Hughes comparison. He wants his inventions to actually change the way thins are done in everyday live.

Watch this interview with a former Astronaut who worked with SpaceX for Crew Dragon. He made this comparison on TV and talked about it with Musk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNG6ZzDh9C8

Quite a funny story.

Anyone know an estimated static fire/launch date? I'm open to a meetup (and cold beverages under a canopy) within visual distance of the pad.

The chief just said should take 2 weeks for the next 4 major steps: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1423670139615014917

I suppose hot-phase testing after that

Thank you fellow enthusiast!

The FAA will have to conclude its environmental review first, and has warned that they may even order the launch tower to be scrapped:

https://myrgv.com/spacex/2021/07/15/faa-may-not-approve-spac...

https://www.courthousenews.com/as-spacex-races-to-expand-lau...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/spacex-installed-29-...

Looks small.

Yes, its so hard to get a sense of scale, our brains just don't have a reference

To note, there is a human standing in every picture except for one as far as I could see. While it isn't too good of a reference since the size difference is so big, it's at least something.

I found a human in every picture.

The last one was hardest, but in the white cherry picker in the air, and beside the orange cherry picker on the ground.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8HaippVIAEsnIG?format=jpg&name=...

Also knowing a ring is about 1.8m or 6 "someones extremities" high should help, but somehow it still doesn't give a "feel" for the height

It looks small but it is not. I found a photo montage with Saturn V. The size should be approximately correct from what I can tell.

https://twitter.com/raumvektor/status/1423633590743617542

Edit: here is another, including Saturn V, SLS, the Space Shuttle and the Statue of Liberty.

https://twitter.com/DrChrisCombs/status/1423642585868931074

There’s a person in a cherry picker in the last photo for scale.

Someone on reddit photoshopped both StarShip and Saturn V on their respective launchpads next to each other.

https://i.redd.it/13rkrzq0bkf71.png

You could link to the post itself so the author gets credit

This is from a live feed just after the stacking point. Humans in monsterously tall cherry picker for scale:

https://youtu.be/4B2_dfvRZ4M?t=4945

I think this one represents the scale the best.

Gigantic!

It looks like one side of the Starship is coated in some black material.

Is it some form of thermal plating or just kind of "no-scratch" thing just for stacking?

Thermal tiles, they’re waiting for the rest to arrive

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