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9 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

It does, doesn’t it? It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re making the GSE tanks on-site too, since they have all the equipment....

They have been for a while, this is the first one rolled out though.

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I used to never wash my track car. It had bits of rubber all over it. I kind of felt like that was sort of earned the hard way.

That being said, almost everyone else thought I just never bothered to clean it because I was being lazy about it. And they had a point.

Edited by mikegarrison
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In his article on teslarati, he mentioned they'd otherwise need to buy off the shelf 100,000 gallon tanks (there are some available for sale in McGreggor, TX google shows me).

Hard to find prices (sites here allow you to get a quote), but google results say 100,000 gallon water tanks run around $1/gallon to purchase. Alibaba has 100,000 gallon liquid propane tanks available for $26,000, less in quantity.

SpaceX need not build tanks for more than they can just buy them...

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6 minutes ago, tater said:

SpaceX need not build tanks for more than they can just buy them...

I noted earlier that it actually looks very similar to starship.

Maybe they're trying to get extra fabrication practice ,or using new techniques, but instead of on a prototype, it's on something less essential?

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1 hour ago, Spaceman.Spiff said:

I noted earlier that it actually looks very similar to starship.

Maybe they're trying to get extra fabrication practice ,or using new techniques, but instead of on a prototype, it's on something less essential?

True, but that GSE tank (they are building others) is ~400,000 gallons (~25m tall, 9m dia). Dunno what shipping is on 100k gallon propane tanks, but retail plus shipping times 4 is likely about the cost of that tank, or they'd just buy them (as they have for the rest of the tank farm). That GSE tank is about half a SS worth of steel work, and about 1/3 the work of SH.

SS stage costs minus the expensive bits (engines, etc) are ridiculously cheap.

Back in the BFR/ITS days, talk was that a BFS was maybe 230M$ in production, and BFR was around 200M as a guess, then amortize per launch. A whole SS/SH stack for stages could be single digit millions. Then add 100M in engines, lol, but that is supposed to go down as well.

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1 hour ago, tater said:

In his article on teslarati, he mentioned they'd otherwise need to buy off the shelf 100,000 gallon tanks (there are some available for sale in McGreggor, TX google shows me).

Hard to find prices (sites here allow you to get a quote), but google results say 100,000 gallon water tanks run around $1/gallon to purchase. Alibaba has 100,000 gallon liquid propane tanks available for $26,000, less in quantity.

SpaceX need not build tanks for more than they can just buy them...

I estimate that GSE tank is ~2000m3, or about half a million gallons.

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Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief have given up the chase and are headed for other waters. Hey, at least they tried, but it seems catching them was trickier than expected  and fishing them out of the sea is good enough.

 

Edited by StrandedonEarth
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On 4/6/2021 at 10:16 AM, RCgothic said:

I estimate that GSE tank is ~2000m3, or about half a million gallons.

I'm still unable to stop thinking about this.

Shipping oversize loads in the US can run "well in excess of $10/mi" according to a company that does that for specialized gear, but they also quote $3/mi as being common (those are surcharges past the normal base per weight I assume). Even if it cost $100/mi to ship the tanks available for sale in McGregor to Boca Chica, that's only ~$100k each. No idea what the tanks cost, but it can't be that much more than the alibaba price, right? 2X and $50k in shipping and it's $100k total cost, times 4.

That makes a Starship "hull" (tank? fuselage?) cost under $1,000,000, and SH maybe 1.5M$.

<blink>

 

 

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