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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."
funding secured, my man. Now pass the Doritos
Musk not using SI units?
Maybe the shorts were right.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I was frequently Debbie Downer about using CF for BFR. It's not a resilient material, and organics don't play well with LOX, nor does CF like operating at cryogenic temperatures; you're fighting against its innate material properties. I love the use of stainless. It's so much more forgiving, and people who know how to work with it are a dime a dozen. Just everything about this design will be so much easier. And cheaper. And faster. And safer.
I wouldn't be surprised if they outright build Starship and Super Heavy outside, shipyard-style. It wouldn't exactly be the first time giant pressuretight steel vessels designed for dealing with harsh conditions were built outside in salt-air conditions (e.g., almost every refinery on Earth). Corrosion rates in marine environments are on the order of decades to centuries per millimeter, depending on the stainless alloy (unlike alumium which is sensitive to salt) - and galvanic corrosion due to junctions with dissimilar metals (such as alumium) tend to corrode the other metal, not the steel (again, unlike alumium). There should be no issues with an under-construction rocket shell sitting outside for months until they can get it enclosed for more sensitive work on the interior. The LOX tank would need to be well cleaned, mind you, since LOX doesn't play well with contaminants (CH4 isn't particularly sensitive), and as always, welds need to be properly inspected.
It's an unconventional choice, but one which I've been really glad to see.
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
It's actually going to be a time machine, not a spaceship. Musk: "If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits .88 C... you're gonna see some serious shit."
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
The funny part is that the quote is incorrect - either he said Celsius and the article misquotes him or he said something wrong. The melting point of stainless steel is roughly 1500-1600 C (well somewhere in the range from 1325 - 1530)!
E.g. see: https://www.bssa.org.uk/topics...
I think whether you want temperature in C or Fahrenheit is a matter of taste. I grew up with C and think it is easy enough -
0C - melting point for ice - if it is below roughly 0 it might be icy and you should be carefull
17C or so is ok to swim in
21-23C nice indoor temp.
30C a bit too hot.
100C water boils.
What more is necessary to know?
Google Inconel.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
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What more is necessary to know?
I like K. It's better than C or F because it appears later in the alphabet. And you don't have to bother with those silly negative numbers -- HOW can you have a negative temperature?
0K - a bit too cold.
300K - reasonable
3000K - a bit too hot.
6000K - a bit too hot AND bright. (Link)
-1K - you divided by 0.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
What more is necessary to know?
Steel glows cherry red around 1400-1500 F, at which point work hardening is removed. Aluminum melts at around 1250 F. Those are both pretty important to me....
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm in full support of metric units elsewhere, but that doesn't look, nor sound, nearly so exciting... C is just a terrible unit of measurement for expressing temperature. Even more true of weather ranges.
Maybe if you're a dullard...
Says the guy backing the system that's based off of the number of fingers humans have. Converting between cm, meters, km is done by moving a decimal point. Converting between inches, feet, yards and miles isn't some simple shit you can do on your fingers. Plus you have to know how many inches are in a foot, how many feet in a yard and how many yards are in a mile. And none of those are some base 10 crap you can do on your fingers. Hell, it's not even the same from one unit to the next. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile.
Then if you think you have that figured out, you go to a horse race and they measure distances in furlongs, nose, head, neck, and lengths. A furlong is 660.001 feet. A length is 8 feet, a Nose is 0.05 of a length or 4.8 inches, a Short Head is 0.1 of a length or 9.6 inches , a Head 0.2 of a length or 19.2 inches, a Short Neck 0.25 of a length or 24 inches, a Neck 0.3 of a length or 28.8 inches.
Then you think land would be sold in some square of those units, but it's not. That's done in acres or partial acres.
Imperial units may be a pain in the ass, but they're not easy for a lot of people to use. If anything, metric is more suited to dullards than imperial.
Sorry to burst your bubble :P
Of course, if it's below 0K outside, you'd probably want to just stay in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm not sure about yours, but my washing machine doesn't have to operate at cryogenic through incandescent temperatures. Stainless steel alloys can be *really* good at cryogenic temperatures where common steel and carbon fiber composites are brittle. Ordinary steel would rapidly burn if exposed to reentry conditions, aluminum would melt and carbon fiber would start to decompose and burn if not covered with a substantial thermal protection layer.
Aluminum and carbon fiber have their own problems with manufacturability, durability, and ease of modification or repairs. Stainless alloys let them sidestep those difficulties while getting many of the advantages of ordinary steels.
What the fuck does horse racing measurements have to do with anything but horse racing?
Nobody in aerospace engineering gives a shit about furlongs or short heads, and never has.
That's like saying that anyone in aerospace engineering is measuring things in (american) football field lengths, or sides of a baseball diamond. It's completely irrelevant.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
After which they halted production, even though they had customers who wanted to buy.
The point is not to take anything away from Toyota or GM, but what they built in the 90s weren't intended to become production vehicles; they were more like large-run prototypes used to obtain real-world data on EVs. These vehicles were historically significant, but they didn't shake up the market and force other manufacturers to get into EVs.
That's partly a matter of timing. It couldn't be done prior to 2000; ten years in technology makes a big difference. But Tesla invested to get out in front of the curve, which is why Toyota turned to them for the 2nd gen RAV4 design.
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His argument is based on global income figures, because clearly Tesla (and every other car manufacturer) is directing their marketing at poor people in war-torn countries that barely can feed themselves. But somehow that matters for Tesla, and not Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen AG, Daimler, etc.; you know - all the other car manufacturers that sell similarly priced vehicles to the exact same markets, and have all announced EVs meant to directly compete with Tesla.
Oh, but Tesla makes "niche" cars that the rest of the industry is scrambling to compete with...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And if any engineering let themselves convinced by that, fire them. What is important is the tensile strength of steel versus temperature. e.g. in a fire steel beam get weakened at far lower temperature than melting point. At about 600-700 degree celsius your steel lost half its strength. You can see that at warehouse fire among others, steel beam get weakened and it crumples long before meeting melting point. Now the question is, what do carbon fiber at those temp, and is that important versus steel weakening. I can't answer that. I was just indicating melting temperature is not what you look at in most applications.
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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.
It's pretty simple. You round up a group of experts who say one thing, and a group of experts who say the opposite, then you force them to defend their positions to you. The team with the most "uhhhhs" loses. Next.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The reason it hasn't been done since is because it is a dubious idea.
If only Mr. Watt had realized that sticking a bunch of water into a barrel and sealing it then lighting a fire on it was a dubious idea because everyone knew it would blow up and take half the building with it....
He made it work. And not you or anyone else will EVER be able to take the credit for that away from him.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How many of those did it from suborbital flight after delivering a payload?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I hate that about some stainless steel refrigerators and other appliances. Some stainless is ok. Others are fingerprint magnets. All those smudges and fingerprints make it look so unkempt. It's really embarrassing when company comes over. "Look where they put the BFR honey. They knew we were coming and couldn't even take the time to clean it up a little. Tsk Tsk".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Where the hell does the .001 come from?
It's 220 yards, and a yard is 3 feet. int x int = int.
Intel processor.
You are only looking at the room-temperature performance, while the advantages of stainless are under cryogenic and reentry conditions. An aluminum structure (or their originally planned carbon fiber composite) would need to be protected by TPS materials that are either extremely fragile, or thick and relatively heavy (and still rather fragile).
Also look at the problems NASA has had welding the thick aluminum walls of the SLS tank. Steels, even stainless steels, are easier to work with, and their density means the tank walls can be thinner. SpaceX uses the same materials and processes on their aluminum Falcon 9 rocket, and is quite familiar with their advantages and limitations.