Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Explains Why He's Building 'Starship' Out of Stainless Steel (popularmechanics.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader darkwing_bmf writes: In an exclusive interview with Popular Mechanics, SpaceX founder Elon Musk explains why stainless steel is the best material to build rocket ships, beating carbon fiber in cost, durability and even weight.
"As far as we know, this marks the first time the material has been used in spacecraft construction since some early, ill-fated attempts during the Atlas program in the late 1950s," reports Popular Mechanics.
"It took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction..." Musk tells them. But among the other benefits "It has a high melting point. Much higher than aluminum, and although carbon fiber doesn't melt, the resin gets destroyed at a certain temperature... But steel, you can do 1500, 1600 degrees Fahrenheit."
"As far as we know, this marks the first time the material has been used in spacecraft construction since some early, ill-fated attempts during the Atlas program in the late 1950s," reports Popular Mechanics.
"It took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction..." Musk tells them. But among the other benefits "It has a high melting point. Much higher than aluminum, and although carbon fiber doesn't melt, the resin gets destroyed at a certain temperature... But steel, you can do 1500, 1600 degrees Fahrenheit."
Musk not using SI units?
Maybe the shorts were right.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
How on earth do you discount the success of Tesla and SpaceX? Musk is obviously far more than just a byproduct of PayPal.
Musk may not be the smartest guy in the room but he has a very solid track record of saying his companies are going to do something people consider outside the envelope, and not just making it work but making it work really well.
It sure seems like with the success that SpaceX has had, anyone discounting what Musk has to say about how rockets should be built and operated, is very probably either a jerk or an idiot. In either case they are even more probably wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tesla makes cars for the rich, sure. But it has also revolutionized the industry by creating the first production electric car that wasn't a glorified golf cart.
As for launching satellites to LEO, most *nations* can't do that yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Because engineers never over-think anything, or immediately discount ideas because of past failures.
Sometimes "why not? I want a real answer" is a very useful exercise for an engineering team, as it requires challenging assumptions.
If this team discounted stainless steel from the beginning in favor of other materials because reasons, and then was made to actually enumerate those reasons and found them lacking, then good work was done.
As always, the proof is in the testing. If the rocket spectacularly fails due to the stainless steel construction, then I guess your idiot trolling will be justified. But if it works, then you're just an idiot troll.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I think you're confusing the companies. Tesla is not SpaceX. Nor vice versa.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You miss hey!'s point.... NONE of these fuckers started seriously caring about making electric cars until Tesla came on the scene. Them most of them banded together against him to try to legislate him out of business. Then finally when Tesla actually started selling cars and it turned out they were pretty decent, got the shit scared out of them and started looking into making their own cars. Even if Tesla is a total failure, Must has brought about the age of the electric car.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.