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tater

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Posts posted by tater

  1. 2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

    I personally think SpaceX is overboard with the "build it before we even know what the design will be" thing, but maybe that's just because they are so far out of their previous experience that they feel like the lessons learned for the production process are worth the wasted production.

    Given the diameter and engines, I suppose getting production up makes sense—they can always alter the steel (thickness, type, etc), height of vehicle, etc. My guess is that having employed people full time, making stuff they throw away only wastes the steel, as they are paying workers regardless.

    Guess we'll know soon enough how it turns out, lol

  2. One feature (problem, lol?) with current Starship testing is that they are optimizing for both the vehicle, and the process of making the vehicle. As a result, they are truly hardware rich. The feature/issue with this is that the current build might be several vehicles newer than the next one to fly. They are not shy about scrapping deprecated designs, but some seem far enough along they feel it's best to dispose of them by flying them to gain data, even if some aspects of the design to fly are currently irrelevant.

     

  3. 6 minutes ago, darthgently said:

    I admit, I was harsh.  But I find it hard to say their committee space system is working well and that makes it hard to be gentle.  They were in a position to move to compete with F9 but the web of existing contracts held them fast to the past.  Very familiar story. 

    I agree with you completely. I was merely saying that their method was the norm pre-SpaceX. No government(s) are going to be as agile as required I think.

  4. 4 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

    Participation trophy mindset. 

    Probably because the politicians are so stupid that handing them a lollipop entitlement to their district is about as far as they think. 

    This is why market driven scenarios work better (well, actually, war driven scenarios also work) to drive innovation and efficiency. 

    To be fair, this is the model that the US used from the early days of the Apollo program, and pretty much all other space programs have been top-down affairs. If everyone plays the same game it's slow, but it works.

  5. Secret makes more sense than patents for reasons stated above. With both Tesla and SpaceX I think the idea is to simply move faster. Tesla has to actually be competitive at some level, but the how is less important than just doing it. SpaceX has no need to be competitive except maybe in the sat internet space, since launch as a business is chump change—unless there is a state change in access. In the latter case, competitors don't actually matter. If a new multi-trillion dollar asteroid mining economy is a thing, or whatever, then there's enough for multiple companies to make money.

    I missed this eating a late dinner:

     

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