Good article. A small point: ablative cooling is cooling by a sacrificial layer which burns away carrying heat, not cold fuel in tubes - that is known as regenerative cooling. Ablative cooling is something like the natural material cork which chars under intense heat. Rocketry is HARD :-)
Nice post. I think if one is designing a car, for instance, a successful test of a boat is irrelevant. Even if the boat is shaped like a car, "success" means very little. "Something other than what we were working on passed a test" qualifies as a successful test, just not a successful test of what we were working on.
This rocket is made of Swiss cheese. Holes everywhere and it stinks. There's a reason that rocket design in the past took a while and why we have lost very few astronauts. Man-rated is a BFD. This thing is not only not ready for prime time, it's still in the script writing part.
Elon is a FUBAR!!! He is also a ketamine addled NAZI! Not a good combination! His starship reminds me of an early Atlas rocket test which went up about 5 feet and then exploded! One of the Mercury astronauts stated “and they want us to sit on top of that thing?”
What Will describes is a 165 ton payload shortfall so they need to take at least 165 tons of dry weight off the upper stage or 800 tons off the lower stage or increase engine impulse by about 5%.As the upper stage weighs about 130 tons they can’t count on scratching off more than 65
Tons so they need to shake the weight off the booster but the booster is about 200 tons so you can’t get more than 100 tons off that .. so you still need more engine exhaust velocity..right now they are pushing 380 s vacuum so that’s pretty amazing.
Good article. A small point: ablative cooling is cooling by a sacrificial layer which burns away carrying heat, not cold fuel in tubes - that is known as regenerative cooling. Ablative cooling is something like the natural material cork which chars under intense heat. Rocketry is HARD :-)
Nice post. I think if one is designing a car, for instance, a successful test of a boat is irrelevant. Even if the boat is shaped like a car, "success" means very little. "Something other than what we were working on passed a test" qualifies as a successful test, just not a successful test of what we were working on.
This rocket is made of Swiss cheese. Holes everywhere and it stinks. There's a reason that rocket design in the past took a while and why we have lost very few astronauts. Man-rated is a BFD. This thing is not only not ready for prime time, it's still in the script writing part.
Musk cannot lie it into being.
Elon is a FUBAR!!! He is also a ketamine addled NAZI! Not a good combination! His starship reminds me of an early Atlas rocket test which went up about 5 feet and then exploded! One of the Mercury astronauts stated “and they want us to sit on top of that thing?”
What Will describes is a 165 ton payload shortfall so they need to take at least 165 tons of dry weight off the upper stage or 800 tons off the lower stage or increase engine impulse by about 5%.As the upper stage weighs about 130 tons they can’t count on scratching off more than 65
Tons so they need to shake the weight off the booster but the booster is about 200 tons so you can’t get more than 100 tons off that .. so you still need more engine exhaust velocity..right now they are pushing 380 s vacuum so that’s pretty amazing.