Comments by "Edward Cullen" (@edwardcullen1739) on "Curious Droid" channel.

@buca512boxer Wow, you really have a hateboner for Elon, don't you? Elon has a degree in Physics and is intimately involved in the design process. If you listen to him talking to Everyday Astronaut, you would know this. Were von Braun's designs fully-reuseable, fully-automated and with the capability for rapid turn-around? Do you even know why methane is used as a fuel? The "issues" you are describing, in terms of refuelling are not "defects" in the Starship design, they are hard limitations of chemical rockets. The only reasonable alternative to Starship, would be to create an orbital shipyard and fabricate vessels better suited for deep space. Like that's easy 🤦‍♂️ Falcon 9 has boosters that have flown 15 missions. If you went back "58 years", and told the Saturn V engineers, they'd be massively impressed. Finally, Starship is at the absolute cutting edge of what's possible. SpaceX is explicitly taking a different approach to the development of Starship and they are not just building a rocket, they are building a mass-manufactured rocket - SpaceX is investing as much into the manufacturing process as the vehicle itself.
7
Awesome! As a ahem "railway historian", I knew of the Deltic's origin as a naval powerplant and use in locos, but not the other, more out-there uses! Great stuff!
5
@SmoochyRoo This is already planned for the lunar lander version. The videos you've seen of this were produced by SpaceX. You're also putting the cart before the horse - if you haven't got to orbit and safely returned, worrying about taking off from Mars in a little premature.
5
Starship and booster use the same engine, with different bells and with or without gimbaling. Saturn V used 3 different engine designs, if you include the command module. Raptor, being full-flow, staged combustion, is the "ultimate" design, so using it on both makes sense. Most importantly of all, reliability requires redundancy. You say "more engines is more complex", I say more engines gives more resilience should one fail. Also, replacing a Raptor is going to be much quicker and easier than replacing an F1 (even if an F1 reusable). Engineering is about trade-offs. You lack of engineering experience/simple Elon hating are obvious. Be better.
3
 @-xirx- "environmental impact" You think Canaveral would be approved today? It is built at a lower latitude, next to the ocean, like most launch sites.
3
 @zvexevz or the hydraulic system exploded and they couldn't gimbal at all? Maybe there's a reason they're switching to electric gimbaling?
3
 @jtbrown51 Which rocket company do you work for?
3
@ZontarDow I see. Tell me, how many rockets have you built and launched in the past 20 years? Given that SpaceX is regularly launching reusable rockets - something that no one has achieved before them - I'd say Elon knows more about rockets than you do. You're obviously just jealous. It's pathetic.
1
@Asterra2 LOL, I wasn't expecting a reference to that guy. Nothing more petty and vitriolic than a jealous "scientist". The guy is a complete joke, who has become a parody of himself. So sad.
1
 @Ushio01 Even that isn't accurate. They use interference to produce effective accuracy at smaller distances.
1
@jtbrown51 The question/issue is one of approach. It took months to build the current pad and infrastructure, that is, if they were to scrap it and start again, it would take about 3 months to rebuild the entire launch mount. The Canaveral pad took 3 years - they did a lot of calculations, added a big safety guess and then built it. This is what is incorrectly referred to as "over engineering". It was done this way because they could not afford to scrap it and start again (time, not money - had to get to the moon first). SpaceX are taking a different approach: instead of guessing, they're testing (to destruction) then adding more design. The point is that you "waste" more during R&D, but once you have the correct solution, you know it is the simplest (cheapest) for when you build many more. This is the key; the one thing that you (and many others) seem to be missing is that SpaceX is not NASA and has a very different perspective. Musk is trying to build a system where launches are happening multiple times per day, versus NASA, where launches happen occasionally. The best analogy I can think of is runways: if you're Boeing building a runway at your production facility, you build a massive (extra-wide, extra-long) runway, so it can accommodate any plane you might build in the future. It's worth doing this because you only need to do it once and the cost of having too large is tiny compared to too small. But if you're a commercial airport, you build a runway as big as you need - you pick a class (say 777) and you build a runway to accommodate that, with as small a safety margin as possible, because you know that this will be all you need.
1