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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

It looked like something one would cobble together from a garage opener and weld together a bunch of rebar

You should have seen the first tech demonstrator for the Raptor engine (the family that powers Starship). It was basically a water tower (built out in the desert, welded by people specialising in building water towers). But it flew, and it landed, and then it served as a lights & camera mount for the field for a few years.

Starhopper is still there, on a parking lot next to the launch site. :)

https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starhopper

I wonder how many potential designs they considered. You've got the mass of the doors and structure of the ship to consider, the mass of the cargo, actuators for both, the arrangement of cargo in the ship, all of which have interconnected tradeoffs.

Also add pressure management, warping of the dispenser and ship hull & thermal expansion.

And fornlong duration missions also lubricant evaporation, possibility of vacuum welding & atomic oxygen reactions if you spend long in low Earth orbit. :)

The fun thing is that as long as you have the requirements and acceptance right, this could still be solved with a garage door opener and welded rebar :-D

Reminds me of early Google DIY rack PCs. [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1lf6yat/googles_fir...

The garage door opener (literal or metaphorical) is sitting at the end of 50yr of incremental refinement, albeit for a different use.

If you can spare the weight and it meets your specs and the use it close enough you'd be a fool not to use it.

Keep in mind the ship diameter is like 30 feet. It may not seem like that from a camera view, but that pez dispenser is pretty massive.

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