Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

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It didn't take them a year to "get fuel tanks right", they were building while iterating on the upper stage design. ie, the manufacturing of an initial design that was evolving was being built at the SAME TIME.

Think about that for a second. For an orbital class upper stage larger than any ever built, it took shorter than ever for it to be designed AND manufactured through multiple iterative designs and manufacturing techniques than either the design stage or the manufacturing stage for ANY OTHER ROCKET.

All this while they continue to churn out and iterate on heatshield material and design at the "Bakery" which is another manufacturing facility they spun up from scratch in record time, manufacturing nearly a new rocket engine every DAY and that which has been flown and tested to demonstrate higher chamber pressures than ANY full flow staged combustion rocket engine in the history of mankind.

They're much further along than any comment in this thread indicates.

I think SpaceX's efforts have highlighted the huge amount of talent that is languishing in the United States right now. Engineering and operations budgets have been cut so much in US companies that we have engineers and trained professionals like welders, aircraft mechanics, and construction workers stuck in underpaid and underutilized roles.

Elon seems to be dedicated to focusing on Engineering and Operations and it's resulting in the full potential of those engineers and professionals being explored. Instead of focusing exclusively on market capture, lobbying and new marketing strategies, SpaceX is focused on actually getting something done.

I've been nothing but impressed with them so far. While not nearly as financially successful as Tesla, I think SpaceX is closer to reaching Mars than Tesla is to reaching sustainable transportation and power.

There is inherent value stored in all of Spacexs accomplishments thus far that is very, very hard to place financial value on simply because it is the only asset in the world with the capability.

A reusable rocket? How much would China pay for that capability? Don't worry about ITAR rules, it's a hypothetical question to understand the value of having such an asset available for defense or aerospace contracting purposes.

The centuries prior to the digital age, whole private empires were built on the back of shipping and transport. Spacex is presently sitting on the largest payload capability fleet in the world, by tonnage to orbit. Yes, including China. Yes, including Russia, Yes, we're not even counting one single Starship here yet.

The alloy itself that allows their turbines to run as hot as they have demonstrated to achieve such insane chamber pressures. What is that worth? No one else in the World has been able to do that in the history of mankind (In the unclassified realm atleast)

The thing i love about the company that you allude to as well is they're running a ship that converts these "ideas" into tangible business value quicker than anyone we've seen in classic space industries.

I have no domain specific knowledge so would love some feedback…

Once starship actually works it seems like a less complicated task diverting asteroids and mining them. Obviously not easy with a million new problems, but still easier than a fully reusable space transport system.

At that point humanity’s resources will become orders of magnitude larger. It will be a different world.

And I don’t see how this doesn’t happen in my lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt:

The total mass of the asteroid belt is about 4% that of the Moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Size_and_mass:

The Moon's mass is 1/81 of Earth's

So, the total mass of the asteroid belt is about 1/2000 that of earth. Assuming (slightly incorrectly) an even distribution of mass throughout earth, thats’s about as much as in the outermost 1/6000 of the radius of earth, or the top km.

That’s a lot of material, but there also is the complication that asteroids are far away, and far away from each other.

⇒ I wouldn’t count on asteroid mining making our resources orders of magnitude larger.

Space is both big and small though. The distances are large, but everything is measured in Delta-V - once something is on its way, it's going to get there no matter what.

And unlike Earth, we don't live in any of that volume.

Composition is important. Most of Earths metal is in the core and completely inaccessible. However there appear to be some asteroids that are largely composed of metal and are completely exposed.

We mine about 3 billion tonnes of iron a year. A single iron rich asteroid could plausibly have hundreds or even thousands of times as much iron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-type_asteroid

One thing we can be almost certain of: no asteroids will be diverted, in any meaningful sense, in your lifetime. Maybe in 50 years robots will be nipping off bits of some, to loft someplace where they are wanted.

May be so, but it's also quite possible we will have started the diversion process within that period, it's just these things take a lot of time.

I agree. It's like we have so much talent in these occupations and very, very little talent or ambition or imagination or something at the executive and investor levels.

The latter which you refer to receive the most financial gain for expending as little energy and capital as possible to maximize their returns.

You have to want more than financial gain to engage in high risk high reward engineering endeavors (building EVs, building space vehicle build and launch systems with your own capital), although financial gain is likely a side effect of being successful in those endeavors.

> You have to want more than financial gain to engage in high risk high reward engineering endeavors

I think it's more likely that people who are purely motivated by financial gain are likely to lack the imagination or drive to realize anything significantly innovative. Maybe we're saying the same thing?

Note: I say this as someone who has never realized anything significantly innovative :)

I 100% agree.

I don't think I'd like the culture in one of his companies (I like my life outside of work too much), but I agree. So many of our tech projects at big companies and government projects have been taken over by business/bureaucrat folks making them into job factories, not product factories. I've seen this in aerospace, medical, and other areas too.

While the benefit of iterative development is evident in terms of decreased schedule risk, what other risks do you think this may increase?

It did take them a year to "get fuel tanks right". That doesn't mean they didn't know how to make a fuel tank. They were optimizing the design as much as possible trying to go for the best mass fraction they could while still having the necessary strength. They had some pretty requirements in that regard because of their performance goals. All of those burst tanks were steps to the proper design that could meet their goals at a given weight.

I think you underestimate how difficult those were. If it were easy to make a low mass pressure vessel that can handle cryogenic temperatures, and do so at a mass fraction lower than existing designs while also being reusable, then they wouldn't have had to iterate so much. Such a design would have already been in use if it were that easy. Which in a circular way means they probably would have been doing all of this anyways to hit even higher performance goals.

This is silly and underscores my point about splitting hairs while completely ignoring the bigger picture.

They were not just focused on the tanks. That was one component of the structure which involved Spacex testing propulsive landings using test articles of varying designs. . And this is the crucial part. . . While designing those test articles and iterating on the manufacturing systems AT THE SAME TIME.

The tanks are silly to make a point about was the response above if that was unclear. It was one component that was going through changes with the rest of the system in a revolutionary way that has never been done before. Not during the falcon development process or any other rocket development process going back to the Apollo era.

Blank sheet -> Starbase today is ridiculously complex. Each element in of itself that I outlined above takes YEARS. Arguing in a silly way about “oh my, they did take two years, well, technically, kinda, with these caveats” is such a stupid way to approach the measurement of progress where , while being completely wrong , is also not constructive to the discussion.

I don't even know what point you are trying to make now. You say im wrong but then go on to say the same thing I already said.

Saying that someone's comment is "silly," "such a stupid way," and "completely wrong" is also, as you put it, "not constructive to the discussion."

I agree, i apologize. There is no excuse for insults such as those in civil discussion.

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