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Wiki Super Heavy/Starship - General Development Discussion

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Am I the only one who sees this as a bug and not a feature? You have three nozzles for space and three for in an atmosphere. All six will be required to achieve LEO and they'll be alternately underexpanded and overexpanded along the way.

I'd much rather see Musk have his (excellent) engineers design a dedicated craft to get massive payloads to LEO, then another group dedicated to get things from LEO to other in-space destinations and back, then another dedicated to orbit-to-surface.
 
Am I the only one who sees this as a bug and not a feature? You have three nozzles for space and three for in an atmosphere. All six will be required to achieve LEO and they'll be alternately underexpanded and overexpanded along the way.

I'd much rather see Musk have his (excellent) engineers design a dedicated craft to get massive payloads to LEO, then another group dedicated to get things from LEO to other in-space destinations and back, then another dedicated to orbit-to-surface.

I fully expect to have specialized Starships in the future. For now there will be the more universal Starship that will be getting to orbit and landing for reuse.
 
Am I the only one who sees this as a bug and not a feature? You have three nozzles for space and three for in an atmosphere. All six will be required to achieve LEO and they'll be alternately underexpanded and overexpanded along the way.

I'd much rather see Musk have his (excellent) engineers design a dedicated craft to get massive payloads to LEO, then another group dedicated to get things from LEO to other in-space destinations and back, then another dedicated to orbit-to-surface.
Eh?
Starship_HLS_Moon_landing.jpg

(But don't look under its skirt)
 
I've watched it once. I probably need to watch it about 10 times more to soak it all in. Elon giving a master's class in manufacturing and production.
Design engineers used to be the rock-stars and manufacturing engineers the grunts. Musk has turned that on its head. He has elevated the manufacturing engineer to rock-star status. But a key enabler to that was to give them the power to make changes in real-time.
 
Design engineers used to be the rock-stars and manufacturing engineers the grunts. Musk has turned that on its head. He has elevated the manufacturing engineer to rock-star status. But a key enabler to that was to give them the power to make changes in real-time.
Extending that: when you are building the machine that builds the machine, the factory is the product.
 
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Design engineers used to be the rock-stars and manufacturing engineers the grunts. Musk has turned that on its head. He has elevated the manufacturing engineer to rock-star status. But a key enabler to that was to give them the power to make changes in real-time.

Absolutely. And in practice it was even worse than that. All the MBAs said to move manufacturing to low cost countries. So you'd have spectacles of startup companies trying to manufacture some complex never before manufactured object 3,000 miles away from design engineers. The manufacturing "engineers" spoke a foreign language and were on a different time zone. And they knew nothing about the design. Tell me again how well that works?

My wife actually ended up in China in 93/94 helping an American company debug their Chinese manufacturing operations. It was a nightmare and often darkly humorous. And people forget that in the very early days of Tesla, they made the same mistake. My memory is failing, but I think Tesla tried to manufacture the Roadster battery pack in China early on - it was a disaster.

So yeah, Musk realize early that manufacturing was just as important as design. And then somewhere along the way, he realized that a closed loop of having manufacturing engineers and even technicians suggest design changes in an iterative loop was the way to go. He basically threw out waterfall design away for manufacturing and brought in iterative techniques that were starting to get traction in the software world to manufacturing.

And while he was doing this, the know nothings were chastising him for not knowing anything about manufacturing.

BTW, another high volume manufacturing shibboleth he threw out was "manufacture the same thing all the time". Tesla and SpaceX are famous for never quite making the same manufactured article twice. In SpaceX's case that is probably literally true, for Tesla, it's probably every month or so, the "same" Model 3 gets a swapped out part or two.