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NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

(www.cnn.com)
404 points voxleone | 2 comments | 21 Oct 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.55s | 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. jve ◴[22 Oct 25 12:31 UTC] No.45668065[source]▶
> but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.

You seem like commenting on a situation as one would comment about a moon visuals by looking at it without a telescope. But maybe I'm wrong and you are very close to SpaceX engineers and know some folks that work there or other internals...

But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.

I'm no expert that I can attribute the durability of the vehicle to the choice of stainless steel or whatever alloy they have there, but me and online folks have been amazed at IFT1 when starship tumbled and didn't break apart... or IFT11 when heat tiles were purposefully removed on critical spots and the ship still landed. Maybe suffered burn-thru but it didn't prevent a soft ocean splashdown.

Can it be attributed to stainless steel? I'm no engineer, so I don't know. It's just that the observable result is amazing.

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2. jjk166 ◴[22 Oct 25 17:54 UTC] No.45672748[source]▶
> But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.

I've worked directly with both SpaceX and Tesla; this is patently false. Tesla's worse than SpaceX but both are terrible at removing stupid and obsolete requirements.

> I'm no engineer, so I don't know.

I am an engineer. Starship's "durability" is neither particularly technically impressive, nor evidence that stainless steel was a good, nonetheless optimal, material choice.