If it can actually launch multiple times a day without any refurbishment, it will simply totally break space travel as we have known it. This engine makes everything else possible.
There are countless dystopic futures (they sell better) we already avoided so I prefer optimism.
Sounds idyllic.
The rest I find just realistic though. I do not expect humans in space to behave much differently from humans on earth.
However, these "locusts" can discover and create. We can do art, science, understand the Reality and the Universe. I find this absolutely beautiful and breathtaking, especially for a "swarm of locusts".
Citation?
“You def don’t want electric pumps on a rocket engine! Raptor turbopumps alone need 100,000 horsepower per engine. That’s not a typo.” —Elon Musk
x 32 engines. Amazing! For comparison, this is an internal combustion engine with 100k HP:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/biggest-most-poweful-engi...
Edit: What I meant to ask was: Can one use "whatever is powering the turbopumps and delivering the 100k HP" to power say a ship propeller, instead of that 2.3k ton internal combustion engine. Like, make some variant of raptor engine that delivers this power to a shaft.
Yes it's less efficient, you spent all this energy cooling off all the fuel and oxidizer to cryogenic temperatures before using it. The turbopumps in the raptors are also running very far off from stochiometric fuel mixtures (which is fine in the rocket because they're exhaust is used as fuel for the next stage) - which means if you're just using it for the pump your not actually burning most of the fuel. The exhaust is also really hot, and if you're not somehow using that energy it's definitely inefficient.
None of those issues matter to the rocket. Energy used on the ground to cool down propellants is "free", the colder the better because it means you can fit more propellants in the same tanks. The exhaust is just being piped into the main combustion chamber, so it will eventually be fully combusted extracting the left over chemical energy. The heat of the exhaust (after the main chamber) is the whole point, with a nozzle converting it into kinetic energy.
You've also got a bunch of safety issues. High pressures, liquid oxygen, and so on.
Yeah, plus, there’s no fixing a broken or poorly running turbo pump turbine. It either works or explodes, no inbetween.
Think of it as an engineering tradeoff where you get to pick 2 things to optimize for: weight, efficiency and size. A turbopump (and preburner) optimizes for weight/size. A ships engine picks efficiency twice, making it massive and heavy.
And some other images https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Rolls-Royce+MT+30&sxsrf=AP...
It's not as small and powerful as the SpaceX one but I guess it needs some extra bits. Also it runs off air rather than liquid oxygen which must reduce power a tad.
Commercial jets use the same mechanics with their turbofan engines. That is why they are growing huge, we're just encasing the propeller inside the cowling, with some other nice side-effects.
For now there's already a lot of momentum with ICE and they are very polished products. But I think the potential for turbine is there given the shift towards electrification.
Some hurdles include working with materials that can tolerate very high stress, and finding ways to improve efficiency from significant heat loss.
RL-10 can avoid too big stresses, at least not heating to high temperatures, so this is another hint on possibly long working rocket engines...
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron has them and made it to orbit
Its doable if you throw batteries out of your second stage when flying.
But no company that makes a rocket payload then maybe a few 100kg would ever use them. And for sure not launch humans or go to Mars.
Even if you assume gigantic improvements in batteries by 400% you wouldn't use if for anything major.
It has potential for in space applications as there you can charge it with sunlight.
I have seen lot of tweets ( from highly intelligent people and engineers ) suggesting Starship is not possible. Raptor 2 is not possible.
But now it seems it really is coming.
It is easy to fault him for robotaxi and FSD, which a lot of people do. But sometimes he really does the impossible.
Of course RUDs of engines happened but they were the exception and not the norm.
Check out the talk about elevators from Mars Society conference.
They are just iterating each individual part pushing towards ever higher performance.
Perhaps I still have the “rockets are inherently dangerous, mitigate bad outcomes by isolating them” mentality. Maybe designs will get the the point where the likelihood of a bad outcome is so remote that it would make sense to locate a spaceport in the same way one locates an airport. Or maybe the spaceport could be way out there and just connected to the urban center with high speed ground transportation. Either way, if spaceports become commercially viable, it’s an interesting thing to consider from an urban planning perspective.
It's also a great way to fund the development of starship.
Others involve more mundane risks that are pretty much guaranteed to occur once in a while. Things like losing cabin pressure or something catching fire. How do you deal with such situations, how quickly can you get the rocket to land safely, and how quickly can you evacuate the passengers?
https://interestingengineering.com/chinas-new-winged-rocket-...
And SpaceX won a contract to transport cargo: "SpaceX wins $102 million Air Force contract to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world in a rocket"
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-wins-air-force-contra...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust-specific_fuel_consump...
My understanding is that rockets are good at getting a small mass to move really quickly. They will never win moving a lot of mass within the atmosphere. The fuel costs are radically different.
A 747 can lift and land ~80% of Starship's design cargo but uses something like 7 times less fuel.
He was saying that flying to the other end of the world will be 20x faster vs. airplane.
So if you move 20x more cargo per unit of time, then cost of cargo per vehicle + static infrastructure are proportionally lower.
But we need to take into account that number of cycles of a rocket engine may not be as good as jet engines, ground / water infrastructure seems a lot more complicated, fuel costs are higher etc. etc.
I doubt the math will close on it taking everything into account, but maybe there will be some limited use cases. USA army seems to be thinking about it. Extremely rapid deployment capability all around the world may be worthwhile for them.
That's why something like the Sabre engine will always be of interest for a proper space plane.
Reading the recent heat exchanger news [1] the are very careful to talk about Mach 5 airflow temperatures, not velocity. Surely it the product of these two that produce the mind-boggling heat flux that the pre-cooler is tasked with cooling. It feels like they're going to keep carving out smaller and smaller targets until they run out of money.
[1] https://reactionengines.co.uk/reaction-engines-test-programm...
And when I listened to some presentation with the people involved, it seem they had no real understanding of some of the complexity involved. Their history is mostly in academic and British space industry, and all the project they worked on before are canceled paper studies that were kicked around in Britain.
When asked about the structure of Skylon the answer was vague hand waving about some new materials that might exist. Nothing at all concrete that has even begun being tested for high complexity air frames and high requirements.
Elon himself was asked about this when he presented in Britain. And he answered by saying that investing massive amount of complexity in the easiest part of your flight was counter productive.
Pushing the thrust of your traditional rocket engine a little bit higher, is far, far easier then engines.
And if you are really optimizing to that kind of extreme, doing even more advanced version of second stage engines and structural optimization on the second stage would likely always have a higher pay off per complexity invested.
$1M for an orbital flight strikes me as an insanely aggressive target, but if they can achieve that, they can probably achieve half that, or less, for suborbital hops.
So a trip from NYC to Rome of 4,300 miles in a 777-300ER with 350 passengers would cost in the ballpark of $225k.
LA to Shanghai at 6,500 miles in the same capacity plane would be more like $350k.
$1M wouldn’t make much sense because with 350pax you’d need them to pay $2,900 each leg just to cover the operating costs. So a round trip flight to Shanghai that was completely sold out in both directions would need to have an average ticket price of nearly $6k.
Several airlines have tried all business flights. I’ve taken some - Qatar to London for example, Paris-NY I think was all business too when I flew it, and there a London-New York one
But they are rare exceptions. Yes if you can fill a 787 with 100 first class passengers paying 5k each way you can make money, but the demand isn’t there.
Other problems like cost, time from home to spaceport and boarding can be fixed or be irrelevant (if I live too far away, too bad for me, I'll fly.)
But due to noise protection regulation on both sides of the Atlantic, there where not enough profitable routes available to be able to recoup development costs.
I don't think he said that. Maybe you're thinking of:
>44:31 "so the interesting thing is that the
capital efficiency of
of a rocket is is is much better than
the capital efficiency of a plane for
long distance flights"
Elon Musk will be the world's first trillionaire and he also got Tesla's FSD to pull out of the hat.
The limits on launch weight means enormous costs to remove every single grma they can. This makes the launch cost go down in percent. If thy could just make it 50% heavier they could cut development costs by a lot. They could also build one much faster and allow it to fail constructively where you learn a bunch and then build number 2, 3, 4 with the things you learned. So now you have 3 telescopes instead of one.
Launch cost changes everything.
Arguing the merits of these activities is beyond the scope of this thread.
From the presentation, development costs will be 5-10% of the Saturn V program (2020 dollars adjusted). Thats a bargain for the capabilities delivered.
Where have you got this idea from?
SpaceX are a haulage company: they currently haul crew and cargo to and from Earth orbit (plus a few deep-space probes, and one deep-space car); Starship will extend this further through the solar system (Moon, Mars, asteroids, etc.).
At the moment, their main "destination" is the government-run ISS. There are no off-world colonies (public or private); there aren't even any private space stations yet. (NASA recently funded some private space station proposals; SpaceX made a token effort, which was rejected).
Musk himself has stated that he wants humans to be multi-planetary, and doesn't care who does it; that he would be happy for someone to out-compete SpaceX, since that would mean the goal has been achieved. SpaceX will gladly help governments set up off-world colonies; in fact, that seems like the only feasible way to build them. The problem is the cost was too high, even for government; the point of Starship is to reduce that cost.
The only reason Musk started SpaceX was because the Boeings/Lockheed Martins/etc. were happy to keep prices high; and Russia wouldn't sell him a Mars-capable rocket.
If you don't recognize him, one of the authors of this paper is Swedens only astronaut :)