Comments by "ke6gwf - Ben Blackburn" (@ke6gwf) on "" video.
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@PistonAvatarGuy where's the Booster? Lol
From scratch, they have built 2 Starship upper stage prototypes in just a few months, while also building and flying a water tower.
In Cocoa, they already have most of the rings built for Mk4, while they are finishing up mk2.
At Boca, they are going to be using a much faster build process for mk3.
By the time mk3 or mk4 are done, they will probably have the rings prepped for a Booster ready to stack.
And with no curves or flaps or lots of other things that Starship needs and booster doesn't it will basically be a straight stack of rings, 3 bulkheads, an engine mount, and miscellaneous hardware. So it should go much faster than this.
The part they have to wait on is the engines being built, and I guess we will just have to see how they end up working, but a lot of the best rocket scientists are working for Elon, so I wouldn't bet against him. He's got a pretty good track record of making things work.
Also, in Soviet Russia, they they did not have the iterative design philosophy that Elon has, so while it may not be much right now, it's just the first rough prototype, and if it fails, they will figure out why and try again. The N1 was more like an SLS project, and failure killed it politically, and they got no more money to improve it.
Starship is designed by the people who have the benefit of all previous rocket technology, so if they believe it's possible, they have better chance of succeeding the the N1 did.
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@PistonAvatarGuy as for the SLS being a completed design, why do you think they keep having delays? They are making iterative changes too, just using multi million dollar jigs that have to be scrapped, and having to rebuild custom buildings for the changes.
The built a custom rolling gantry for the test unit, and will have to build another later for the full size SLS.
It's working on the same process as SpaceX, just with massive overhead and slow bureaucracy.
And the one they are almost done building now, which then has to go through months and months of testing after transporting it to a different congressional district, is just a test prototype which will be totally destroyed in the test process.
As far as I know, they haven't even begun building the next one which will be prototype number 2, and they haven't started building the upper stages that are able to do the actual exploration missions.
So no, it's not a final design, it's still in the prototype and testing phase.
What SpaceX does differently is cut out all the pork, let the engineers build something, test it, build a better one, test it, and keep going until you get something that works right.
That's how they got Falcon 1 reaching orbit on the 4th attempt, to Falcon Heavy with landing boosters, and then a flying water tank, and now this, in 10 years.
And while you may have a bad opinion about it, their track record is pretty good at actually doing what they set out to do.
And if one gets destroyed in the process of testing, well, every SLS built is going to be destroyed, so what's the problem? Lol
And they will keep iterating until they get it right.
And if Raptor has problems that haven't shown up in testing yet, they will work on it until they solve it.
And by letting the engineers do what they know, and cutting out the bureaucracy, they can work through this process in days and months, instead of years like nasa and contractors do.
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