<story><title>The SpaceX Starship is a big deal</title><url>https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasd00</author><text>to me, it&amp;#x27;s the Raptor engine that is the big deal. And within the Raptor, it&amp;#x27;s the alloy developed on the oxidizer side pre-burner that&amp;#x27;s the big deal. I wish i could have been there the moment that alloy was conceived and the moment it past the first round of testing. I would have poured so much tequila it would have had a budget impact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Robotbeat</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s the whole architecture: a two-stage, rapidly reusable rocket with as much cargo capacity as anything to ever fly. And just as important for interplanetary flight: The upper stage is refuelable and is integrated with the passenger compartment and has a large delta-v capability as well as aerobraking&amp;#x2F;capture&amp;#x2F;entry.&lt;p&gt;It really breaks basically every human spaceflight architecture. It&amp;#x27;s a two element architecture (with common propulsion, simplifying development for the booster) that accomplishes every goal of virtually every other interplanetary human spaceflight architecture conceived. This simple architecture (while avoiding the huge penalties of single-stage vehicles) means that it can be developed extremely cheaply.&lt;p&gt;It really is a gamechanger in spaceflight. All of spaceflight.&lt;p&gt;400 satellites per launch? For maybe an incremental price of about $40 million near-term and $4 million long-term? That&amp;#x27;s, um, $10,000 per satellite. That breaks every model of space development.&lt;p&gt;And it&amp;#x27;s not like all of this was unforeseeable. Even Werner Von Braun proposed refueling-dependent human spaceflight architectures in the 1940s (in his fictional book about exploring Mars) that would enable low cost. But for historical reasons, human spaceflight took another path.</text></comment>
<story><title>The SpaceX Starship is a big deal</title><url>https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasd00</author><text>to me, it&amp;#x27;s the Raptor engine that is the big deal. And within the Raptor, it&amp;#x27;s the alloy developed on the oxidizer side pre-burner that&amp;#x27;s the big deal. I wish i could have been there the moment that alloy was conceived and the moment it past the first round of testing. I would have poured so much tequila it would have had a budget impact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mdorazio</author><text>A friend of mine was one of the metallurgists who worked on raptor. It wasn’t like that... They went through dozens or hundreds of incremental improvements over years with lots of time in the lab looking for micro fractures and other issues after every revision. In typical SpaceX style, the team was working 70+ hour weeks in burnout mode and my friend promptly quit after the alloy was “done”. She seems much happier now.</text></comment>