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Elon Musk frank revealed “Starship’s hardest problem” as well as the entire rocket industry
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“Manufacturing is underrated, design is overrated!”
That’s Musk’s catch-phrase!
According to Musk, “Designing a rocket is trivial. There are tons of books. You read them. You understand equations. You design a rocket… The design is not hard. The making of it is hard. The making of a production line that builds and launches many is extremely hard. And the next level beyond that would be creating a fully reusable system, and having that in volume production and launch. That’s super, super hard.”
He emphasized that developing a production system is 10-100 times harder than designing the product, which proved especially true with Raptor.
For initial test flights, SpaceX will use 33 Raptor engines to power the Super Heavy first stage and six on the Starship upper stages. So for each test flight that either ends in the ocean, with a fiery landing, or with a vehicle that can’t be reused, the company will lose 39 Raptor engines. That is a staggering amount of engines, both in terms of cost and lost production time.
By comparison, NASA provided Aerojet Rocketdyne with $1 billion a few years ago to restart the production of space shuttle main engines. Four of these will power each Space Launch System rocket. Each individual engine, on top of the “start-up” fee NASA paid, will cost an additional $100 million. For all of this money, NASA will get a maximum production of four engines a year—engines that are not reusable and largely based on technology decades old.
Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines also fell into a similar situation. This engine has been in development for more than a decade but has never made a test flight with any prototypes. The production of this engine is still extremely sluggish. Up to now, Blue Origin has delayed delivery for ULA for up to 5 years.
It’s reasonable to expect that SpaceX will need about 10 test flights of Starship to get the vehicle into working order and start reusing the rockets. Therefore, if SpaceX is to conduct 10 test flights of Starship in the next year, it will need something like 300 Raptor engines, which are not much smaller than the space shuttle main engines. That is why, when Musk found production issues were more “severe” than he realized, he sent the now-infamous Black Friday email to employees last November.
Musk has always been so busy with the hard engineering challenges of everything that’s involved that when Lex Fridman mentioned issues related to rockets in a conversation last year, he was very excited to share.
He said that engine production is the biggest thing absorbing his time.
Elon Musk frank revealed “Starship’s hardest problem” as well as the entire rocket industry
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