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posted by janrinok on Tuesday March 10 2020, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-but-a-scratch dept.

On February 28, SpaceX's SN01 Starship prototype imploded and exploded during a pressurization test (Mk1 failed in November). A day later, Eric Berger from Ars Technica visited SpaceX's facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. Some highlights from the story include:

  • SN01 was not destined to fly, only to serve as a platform for static fire testing. (Elon Musk had previously tweeted that the wrong settings were used on the welding equipment used to build SN01.)
  • SN01's failure has been attributed to bad welding on the thrust puck, which is welded onto the bottom tank dome of Starship and connects the Raptor engines to the rest of the rocket.
  • The quality team raised concerns about the thrust puck to an engineer who did not act upon them. They have been instructed to contact Musk directly with design concerns.
  • SpaceX went on a hiring spree in February that doubled its workforce in Boca Chica to over 500. The goal is to build a production line for Starships.
  • SpaceX aims to build a Starship every week by the end of 2020, with a goal of building one every 72 hours eventually.
  • SpaceX engineers have built an in-house x-ray machine to look for imperfections in welds.
  • Construction costs for a single Starship could eventually drop to as low as $5 million.
  • The Boca Chica site will operate 24/7, with workers alternating between three and four 12-hour shifts per week.
  • A 20 km flight is planned for this spring, and an orbital mission could happen before the end of 2020.

In other news:


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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday March 11 2020, @01:49PM (4 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday March 11 2020, @01:49PM (#969609)

    And a fine summary at that. Unfortunately, I've already read the pieces and had my own impressions of it. Specifically, the dissonance between a decade long promise for reusable rockets and the delivery of cheap disposable rockets built on a factory line out of stainless steel.

    And to give you some heads-up, in a couple of years when the hyperloop is finalized as a sub-par car / monorail tunnel, I'll probably ignore all the bullets points and links and just remind people all the promises never kept and how other contractors promised the same stuff Musk ended up delivering for tenth of the price but were rejected because they didn't flat out lie making all those ridiculous promises.

    And to make it all non-partisan, how that wall looking up?

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:15PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:15PM (#969623) Journal

    Starships being made cheaply does not mean that they will be routinely disposed of. It is just a bonus. In a fully reusable mode, they would already be able to lift more to low Earth orbit than what most customers would require. Cheap Starships make it easier for SpaceX to participate in a Mars vanity project. They could also be disposed of on the surface of Mars, as in literally cut up into pieces by future astronauts needing the steel parts.

    Your Hyperloop/Tesla/etc. hate is off-topic. SpaceX has delivered on partially reusable rockets and appears to be delivering on Starlink (will soon be the biggest satellite operator by any measure). Even this nightmare scenario of Starships being disposed of would still see reuse of the booster and result in an incredibly cheap and powerful launch capability that would revolutionize human exploration of space.

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    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:35PM (2 children)

      by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:35PM (#969802)

      SpaceX has delivered on partially reusable rockets

      No. The rockets they've promised would have had heavy lift capabilities. What they delivered on is a market lead in putting commercial satellites in orbit. Which their competitors all promised as much at lower costs.

      But don't get me wrong. I'm not signaling out Musk. He's not doing anything new. In fact, practically anything to ever actually get done in government comes from those sorts of consumer-market shenanigans where some marketeer bamboozles congress to finance their pet project and barely manages to deliver anything close to usable. I'm just bringing up the fact both the left and right fields of American politics tend to get swept away by well marketed fantasies and the thing about any dream, let alone the American one, is that you have to wake up at some point and face reality.

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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:43PM (1 child)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:43PM (#969904) Journal

        Falcon 9 can lift more than double to LEO than what it was originally planned to. Falcon Heavy is a "heavy lift" launch vehicle.

        You are throwing around platitudes.

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        • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:56PM

          by RamiK (1813) on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:56PM (#970267)

          LEO is for commercial satellites. Falcon Heavy is below the specs of what SpaceX's competitors promised at higher costs being an afterthought following SpaceX's failure to "tie" the rockets together.

          To be fair, SpaceX and Tesla weren't just competing against honest startups but also against Lockheed and GM so it's likely it wouldn't have been the good startups but the too-big-to-fail F35 style disasters winning over.

          It's the only reason Musk gets a pass from so many people who know the score. He's probably the lesser of two evils.

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