the Raptor engine series is an extremely high barrier to entry. I would bet 30% of Spacex's innovation lies in that one engine. Its combination of thrust, efficiency, and small size are beyond anything else. The size blows me away, if you took the nozzle off it's about the size of a car engine.
Without the engineering breakthroughs to produce something like the Raptor engine launches at this scale just aren't possible. There's other engines with thrust to match Raptor but not the efficiency nor size. For example, there's just no way you can put 33 RS25s under an airframe.
from the link below
"The SpaceX Raptor 3 was recently test fired and reached 18% more thrust than a Raptor 2. The Raptor 2 had 25% more thrust than the Raptor 1 and it was 20% lighter."
it's just crazy what that propulsion team is doing...simply crazy
> I would bet 30% of Spacex's innovation lies in that one engine.
Musk often points out that the stage 0 work is harder (and I suspect more innovative) than the rocket (and engine) design. He also often mentions that fabrication is even harder. I.e., all the processes, tools, machines, etc. used to build all those engines and rockets is harder still than stage 0 -- one might even call it stage -1. It's possible that Raptor is not even closed to "30% of Spacex's innovation" :)
SpaceX is by far the best organization in terms of rocket engine design, rocket design and rocket operations. Nobody else in the world comes even remotely close.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are already better by a long distance then any other rocket in the world. All other organizations world wide are trying to catch up to that.
You only really need huge rockets like this if you are launching some truly massive amount of stuff. This just wasn't a thing until today. The biggest ever was during the moon race, US Saturn V and Soviets N1. However the Saturn V was expensive and NASA wanted to have a reusable Shuttle instead, so they dropped it. The Soviets did the N1 but when they lost the moon race (and a few failures) they didn't want to pay for it anymore.
So really since the moon race, rockets of this scale just were not necessary. If you can't reuse the rocket, a rocket of this scale is just to expensive to be practical.
It took SpaceX making re-usability real and mega constellations to make it worth considering a rocket like Starship.
Just for reference, this thing is far more powerful then the Saturn V or N1. It has almost double the liftoff thrust. So really humanity has never operated this scale of rocket before.
I thing the talent is there, I mean the incredible scientific and engineering accomplishments made by government research bodies make that point clear. The problem is governments are filled to the brim with committees and competing priorities. Frankly, to most people and therefore governments, Starship/Superheavy just isn't that important or at the very least, there's a thousand other things of equal importance competing for talent/money/attention.
Also, the risk of failure is so high. Musk was literally laughed out of the room when he proposed re-usable orbital boosters. I'm sure he was laughed at again when he proposed a full-flow staged combustion engine (Raptor). And again when he said they were going to put 33 engines beneath a stainless steel water tower.
Governments can't weather the ire of public opinion the way a private company can.
edit: after all that typing i just realized i'm basically saying "i agree" to your comment hah. The risk of failure is just too high for governments to stomach.
From what I understand about space exploration, this is an opposite-world position. Can you expand on what you mean?
Governments ("gov organizations") have been defining the term "space exploration" since 1944. First object in outer space, first object in orbit, first human in outer space, first space station, first interstellar space flight, first human on the moon, first man-made objects on mars, venus, all by "gov organizations."
I'm super confused why you think the comparatively young private space industry, which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit, is somehow more capable?
At insanely massive expense. Note that this isn't a bad thing, R&D is expensive and humanity has benefitted from this. The problem here is just the government doing it never leads to cost decreases. The lack of cheap orbital access has crippled the expansion of space industry.
Industry tends to be exceptionally capable in producing assembly line style production. Up until this point rockets have been much more custom productions, use once and throw away. There was pretty much zero headway in the government achieving this scale of production. SpaceX in two decades has dramatically decreased the cost to orbit. And with their new rocket will drop costs by order of magnitude or more. This will lead to far more government R&D expenditure in space.
>which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit
And by that you mean "has accomplished in putting more satellites than all other governments/entities added together into space". I don't know, you tell me.
A key advantage of the assembly line production of these things is fast iterative development. At first, in a 'move fast and break things' way, when doing tests. But just as significantly, by learning about non-fatal flaws in a working design so you can improve it.
The 100th rocket you build and attempt to fly will be much more optimized than the 5th. So by ramping production you can develop much quicker.
Another related point is tolerance of failure. A failed test for a government program will immediately see pressure to cancel the program by it's political opponents. Any detractors for a company will have a much harder time exerting influence.
I mean ISRO is a government organization and it's been provided pretty cheap services. I don't know enough about rockets to comment further. Just wanted to say that govt does not always mean expensive
> I'm super confused why you think the comparatively young private space industry, which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit, is somehow more capable?
i would say the appetite for risk and prioritization in the private space industry makes them more capable. Don't forget the Apollo program and the space race was in response to a real existential threat. Once the threat lessoned the appetite for risk went down and other priorities took center stage.
The private space industry has taken all that innovation, adding to it, and moving forward where the governments don't because they have other fish to fry. To mangle a quote, "If [private space industry] have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants [government science/engineering]". I think the private space industry is further validation the public investment in space is worth it.
> Don't forget the Apollo program and the space race was in response to a real existential threat. Once the threat lessoned the appetite for risk went down and other priorities took center stage.
Yes, there are various motives and pressures at play, but that doesn't change for private industry. And I worry about the core motive of the private industry: Profit. If a launch won't be profitable, why would it happen, no matter how much it benefits humanity?
I worry about the profitiziation of space. I don't think profitization has done good things to the internet, media, and technology in general.
Profit is exactly how we make sure individual and societal interests are aligned. Otherwise, how do we know what "benefits humanity"? Who decides? One says "let's feed the poor". Another "let's explore space". Yet another "let's build an AI". Who decides the allocation?
During Cold War, everything USSR did here in the Eastern Block was "for the benefit of all mankind". We all know what a crock of BS that was...
> Profit is exactly how we make sure individual and societal interests are aligned.
That's interesting, I disagree, but I'm curious why you think so? Slavery is extremely profitable, the only reason it doesn't happen is because it is illegal - a distinctly unprofitable decision made and enforced by a government for the sole purpose of it's better for mankind. Arguably all regulation under capitalism fulfills this purpose, outside of those designed to form regulatory capture. If what you say is true, wouldn't we be able to just remove all law and let the divine will of profit determine our every action? Or, where do you see the line?
> Otherwise, how do we know what "benefits humanity"? Who decides? One says "let's feed the poor". Another "let's explore space". Yet another "let's build an AI". Who decides the allocation?
You genuinely feel that profit motive will allocate this better than the normal way of "who decides," that being debates and appeals to rationality and ethics? What profit is there to be gained from feeding the poor? The most profitable thing to do is to collude to ensure there is a class of people who are one paycheck from a missed meal or missed rent, therefore you can pay them as little as possible and they have to accept that because they can't afford to spend the time to look for a new job. I just don't see how profit could possibly align with actual human ethics. Sometimes, certainly, but rarely.
> During Cold War, everything USSR did here in the Eastern Block was "for the benefit of all mankind".
What do you mean? Where does that statement come from? I'm searching for uses by USSR fokls but the most definitive historical usage I can find is from a US navy officer saying of the nuclear weapons, "We are testing these bombs for the good of mankind." Hm, I agree, that is a crock, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the USSR or why you brought it up. The USSR was a state capitalist nation, it suffered similar issues with profit motive, though exacerbated by a centrally planned economy. Hence the holomdor: caused partially by the purging of wheat fields in Ukraine so as to plant cash crops instead to fund Stalin's feverish mega-projects. That's the heart of my argument: profit almost never puts the needs of humans first.
Edit: IIRC "for all mankind" is also inscribed... yes, on the moon, by the USA lol. "We came in peace for all mankind."
Because human nature is inherently selfish. The great majority of people generally tend to do stuff that benefits them and their close ones. Capitalism recognizes that and realizes that the great majority of value created by self-interested people is captured by the society in form of innovation, creation of products and services, jobs and taxes.
Societies that reject this truth (communism) tend to starve since nobody does anything anymore and everybody tries to steal from the State.
> Slavery is extremely profitable
This is false at a society level. In the USA for example slavery was abolished when the industrialized North won the war thanks to its better industrial and economic performance. Turns out a society of self-interested free individuals is much more profitable and successful than reluctant slaves in chains. As soon as countries realized it - they abolished slavery.
> where do you see the line?
Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build) and finally some are frivolous and should be avoided at all costs (EU's USBC charging ports come to mind).
> You genuinely feel that profit motive will allocate this better
Absolutely. Read up on how markets work and how they they are only mechanism we know for solving the pricing (valuation) and resource allocation problem.
> rationality and ethics?
The wallet always hits above. No starving person is ethical. During my life under communism I saw the worst human abuse imaginable all from people who in theory had no profit motive. Human nature is human nature.
> What profit is there to be gained from feeding the poor?
Are you kidding? Why do you think all those food companies exist if not for profit? In capitalism there is a glut of choice to the end that obesity is a big problem. In communism we kept looking hungry at empty shelves.
> I just don't see how profit could possibly align with actual human ethics.
This is getting too much to explain for me. I recommend reading up on free markets. Watch Milton Friedman's series, it's free on YouTube and it explains things extremely logical and much better than I ever could.
Who knows? They had to pretend some higher purpose to cover the fact that we were cold and staving. We knew how much better things were under capitalism so instead of denying it they went for heroics. No food but the state built ICBMs? It was "for world peace". No heating or A/C but with a space program? "For the betterment of all mankind". All kinds of pharaonic projects, monstruous brutalist monuments dedicated to our leaders were justified that way. We didn't believe them of course, but they just had to lie.
Watch some Cold War era movies or documentaries if you want to understand how it really was. I am sure you can find a bunch on YouTube. I can't recommend any, the memories are too painful for me.
> USSR was a state capitalist nation
So "war is peace, freedom is slavery" then. Communists always had this funny habit of trying to rename things, to pretend they were somethin else, trying to muddle the waters. Orwell saw right through them. Us that lived their horrors too. But I am not interested in discussing dialectics. The end result of all communist experiments was starvation, no matter how you want to call them.
> This is getting too much to explain for me. I recommend reading up on free markets.
I didn't mean to tire you, I have read a great many things on this subject over the decades, it's how I got to be how I am now (I wasn't always a dirty anticapitalist). At this point I'm less interested in debating the pillars of ideologies and more interested in individuals and why they believe what they do, and conversation around that.
Thanks for the video recommendation, I'll check it out. Please don't feel the need to continue, I'm just going to go through your post and make some notes mostly for myself, it helps me organize my thoughts and consider my own ideas.
> Because human nature is inherently selfish
I heard this all the time but my every life experience speaks against this. Have you ever been in a natural disaster? If our nature is selfishness, why then are we our most selfless when everything but our nature is stripped away? Others have noticed this, I recommend "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit.
> The great majority of people generally tend to do stuff that benefits them and their close ones. Capitalism recognizes that and realizes that the great majority of value created by self-interested people is captured by the society in form of innovation, creation of products and services, jobs and taxes.
Is that truly what capitalism does? Is there a possibility that a capitalist society instead repeatedly tells people to fear their selfish neighbor, and "get yours" before they do? In particular, does it really disperse selfish behavior to the benefit of all? I'm particularly skeptical of this point because while I agree that capitalism rewards selfish behavior, the very existence of billionaires seems to indicate that the "great majority of value" is not "captured by society" at all. If it were, I feel we would have fed our hungry children before we had launched a tesla car into space. At the very minimum, capitalism is a poor allocator of this great majority of value.
> Societies that reject this truth (communism) tend to starve since nobody does anything anymore and everybody tries to steal from the State.
Some semi-socialists states didn't starve, and one of them (Cuba) has better healthcare outcomes than the most powerful capitalist state on earth (the USA), though there are many other issues with its society of course. Furthermore, I can point you to many inherently anarchistic, share-and-share alike communities that aren't starving. In my experience this is because people love doing things for many reasons, and profit is often the very last reason. It's not just me saying this, I was taught this time and time again from my sales leaders: there's a reason a sales contest prize is a car and not a cash prize. Money is just not a good motivator for most people.
> This is false at a society level. In the USA for example slavery was abolished when the industrialized North won the war thanks to its better industrial and economic performance.
Well it certainly had better industrial performance, but even afterwards near-equivalent slavery was maintained in the South for quite some time. Where they couldn't pay no wages, they paid almost none. Then there was the industrial era upgrade in the form of Company Towns. Why did those go away? Because they also weren't profitable?
> Turns out a society of self-interested free individuals is much more profitable and successful than reluctant slaves in chains.
I argue that the chains haven't really been cast off. Though slavery was made illegal, black americans still worked fields at penny wages, and their cheap labor class was maintained through racist law. Even today the Americans maintain a slave labor pool in their prisons. So the richest country on earth still seems to think it's quite profitable.
> Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build)
> Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build)
This is interesting to me because one of the largest issues I've found with modern capitalist society is that these laws ostensibly maintain "rule of law" but in practice seem to maintain class boundaries. A great example is in most capitalist nations, wage theft in the form of stolen time, missed paychecks, etc, outstrips retail theft losses by orders of magnitude. And yet the society spends a great deal of money and time on police and judiciary efforts to prosecute one and not the other. I don't see how these "essential" laws are doing anything useful.
> Absolutely. Read up on how markets work and how they they are only mechanism we know for solving the pricing (valuation) and resource allocation problem.
Hmm, I have read quite a bit on the subject, but I'm always open to more suggestions. Regarding resource allocation, I mean, I can allocate resources from farm to table for my home without ever considering "value" or "price." Perhaps I've exchanged the calorie for the dollar, though!
> The wallet always hits above. No starving person is ethical. During my life under communism I saw the worst human abuse imaginable all from people who in theory had no profit motive. Human nature is human nature.
I'd like to learn more about this if you're willing to share. Where were you living, and what sort of things did you see?
> Are you kidding? Why do you think all those food companies exist if not for profit?
But... the poor can't pay for food lol.
> In capitalism there is a glut of choice to the end that obesity is a big problem.
I believe a lot of the obesity issues in America in particular are also due to food deserts and malnutrition. However, doesn't this just further demonstrate that profit is poorly determining what is good for people? It seems there's more money to be made by showing people commercials for food that's mostly just corn (one of the cheapest vegetables to grow) in various forms, getting them addicted from a young age, and continuing to feed them corn throughout their lives as they grow obese from malnutrition.
> In communism we kept looking hungry at empty shelves.
If you mean the USSR I do still hold to the theory that this was less an issue with the idea of resource allocation without profit at the heart and more an issue with a centrally planned economy. I don't support the idea of communist centrally planned economies, the failure modes are too obvious.
> Orwell saw right through them
Orwell is a great man, and I think it's good you bring him up, because he's an example of a marxist who was disgusted with general communist approval of a monster like Stalin. His quote: "One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten." I know it's common to doubt his leftist tendencies, but I feel it's undeniable: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it."
I wasn't trying to be cute with my state capitalist comment, and I don't want to dredge up painful memories, I was merely stating what I believe to be the generally agreed upon understanding of the USSR economy. Communism may not be a popular idea but it is relatively well defined by its theorists: no state, no currency, no class, and workers owning the means of production. It sounds that you witnessed first hand that of course none of this was true in the USSR. I would in fact be quite happy to call the "no state, no currency, no class, and workers owning the means of production" ideology something other than communism at this point, too much dialectic debate has been fought around both that word and "socialism."
The litmus test for all these funny ideas about human nature, societies and economy is the reality. Remember: communist countries during the Cold War had machine guns on the border turned inwards so people couldn’t leave. We were trying to vote with our feet, to escape the “utopia” being pushed down our throats…
Do you know of a communists society that works? Go ahead, live there for a while and tell us how it is. There are a few “experiments” running in the world right now. Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, even China. What I know is that when I was in Cuba people were asking me how we got rid of communism. They were still trying to swim/float to the USA instead of appreciating their excellent healthcare. When my country (Eastern Europe, not USSR) made the switch to capitalism we got the “privilege” to experience the difference live and it was night and day: we (slowly) transitioned from fear, cold and starvation to full shelves, city breaks and fat people.
I am not aware of any successful communist society but feel free to provide examples.
Simply not accurate. NASA budget today is actually about the same as the avg during Apollo. The problem is how the money is spent. And the 'risk aversion' isn't really the problem either.
So what? Governments are clearly capable of achieving these things, they've done it before. Private industry, remains to be seen. Worth nothing that it has to be profitable for it to work for private industry - possibly not what we actually want for space exploration. Would private industry have kept the voyager probes going this long?
There are two parts to profitability. Revenue and costs. I don't want space exploration for unlocking massive new revenues, but reduced costs would be amazing. Not just for opportunities that get unlocked, but also for freeing up resources for other things.
China official reusable rocket are even further away.
And in fact its not that China is closing the gap, its actually that SpaceX is INCREASING the gap. SpaceX is not standing still, going from landing to doing it 100+ times successful and 20+ times with a single rocket.
And in addition SpaceX is already moving on to Raptor engines and Starship, further increasing the gap.
So lets be clear about the fact, China is not closing the gap, they are falling further behind.
Small correction here - the leading Falcon 9 first stage has done 18 missions. Which is still the stuff of Sci-fi, but I checked when you said 20+ as I wasn't sure of that and it is actually 18. (B1058)
I think you're letting your hatred of China blind you to the fact that they are definitely chasing SpaceX's coat-tails - but don't forget that this answer was in response to "is anyone else doing anything like SpaceX in the world today?", and the answer is an emphatic YES: China is watching SpaceX' progress and it is making its own progress, just as SpaceX did 10 years ago, in building reusable rocket systems. Nobody else is catching up as quickly as China, in the new space race.
Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place. Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..
How exactly do you know I 'hate' China? Because I actually don't. I'm Swiss very natural, China is just another evil empire like the US.
> and the answer is an emphatic YES: China is watching SpaceX and it is making its own progress
Ok, but I am watching SpaceX too. And so do many other people and agencies. Watching is meaningless.
In terms of progress, there are many others that are doing as much. RocketLab and Relativity space are working on things more advanced then anything China is currently working on. Even BlueOrigin is building a more advanced rocket.
The iSpace vehicle is barley more advanced then European tests that will launch in the next few years. And that is not much more advanced then what NASA did in the 90s. The rocket the iSpace demonstrator was supposed to be for is already canceled by the way, because the company knew they wouldn't have a market. iSpace also had issues with its smaller launch vehicle.
> Nobody else is catching up as quickly as China, in the new space race.
Again, everybody is falling further behind. That was my whole point. SpaceX is innovating faster then anybody else is catching up.
What I recommend to you is to actually look at what China is actually doing rather then just assuming they are great and fantastic.
Because while China is launching a fair amount most of their rockets are not very advanced, mostly copies of former Soviet rocket. The same goes for their human space flight. The rocket engines they are using aren't very advanced.
Non of the private space companies in China are particularly advanced either and its not clear they have much of a market. I would say all of them are behind the major US companies, Firefly, Relativity, ABL, RocketLab.
Neither US, Europe, Korea, Japan or India wants to launch on rockets from China. Even if these companies had launch capacity.
Its a real question if China has enough commercial launches as the state still uses its own rockets for the most part.
> Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place.
Well, SpaceX will commercialize it first. And maybe years or decades later others will copy it.
Sure eventually these technology will be commodities.
But you are moving the goal post. That wasn't the argument I object to. I object to the idea that China was hot on SpaceX heels and catching up fast. And that's simply not the case.
> Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..
Maybe, but designs on paper are a small part of what it takes to actually build many rocket.
SpaceX is not using lots of part you can just buy. Its pretty much all costume designs by SpaceX all the way down. Up to SpaceX having their own materials. And the suppliers SpaceX does have are American suppliers that China can't easly buy from.
So if China steals everything they still have to reverse engineer everything and then also reverse engineer the manufacturing.
And the other thing is, China has its own existing Aerospace industry and government. These people are proud of their own things and NIH is very, very real. The idea that they would just throw away 60 years of China history to copy an US company and spend billions trying to reverse engineer the exact same rocket just isn't gone happen.
And of course given that SpaceX is a huge supplier to the US military, such an act could be a huge international relations crisis and the US could retaliate in many way. So China would have to hid the fact that it did so in some way.
Therein lies the crux of why we can't have (as a species), nice things.
Too bad about that. But on the flip-side it means that when China finally overtakes rocket flight (like its done with manned space station missions), it'll give the US military a reason to exist.
