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NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

(www.cnn.com)
404 points voxleone | 3 comments | 21 Oct 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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cladopa ◴[21 Oct 25 19:15 UTC] No.45660311[source]▶
Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3 billion it will be ready in 2050 for 50 billion.

Much better for making your friends rich.

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jjk166 ◴[21 Oct 25 21:25 UTC] No.45661926[source]▶
Stainless steel was a questionable choice for starship. If the pros outweigh the cons, which is yet to be seen, it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices. In general it's a terrible choice for rockets. I'm not saying Boeing would do a better job, but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.
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1. shdh ◴[22 Oct 25 00:01 UTC] No.45663339[source]▶
They did experiment with carbon fiber if I recall correctly

Stainless steel is much more cost effective

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2. jjk166 ◴[22 Oct 25 00:52 UTC] No.45663722[source]▶
And they abandoned it to try to eliminate the need for a heat shield. This plan did not pan out.

The whole point of a reusable launch system is the cost of the vehicle is amortized over many launches, so you can use expensive, high performance materials.

3. Symmetry ◴[22 Oct 25 13:44 UTC] No.45669062[source]▶
Partially it was that stainless steel was cheaper. A bigger issue was that making large carbon fiber structures takes much larger than with steel and so it would really have eaten into their iteration time. But also while the strength to weight savings from carbon fiber are a big deal at regular temperatures the heating from Starship reentry erased that.