News Changes to the SpaceX BFR rocket.

[Thunder Chicken]

I mentally heard Randal Monroe say "If the inside of your rocket is on the outside you will not be going to space today."

 

[RisingFury]

Apparently they managed to cut the booster in half and remove the CH4 tank.

 

[GLS]

Apparently they managed to cut the booster in half and remove the CH4 tank.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1992427673201910081

https://twitter.com/x/status/1992543769107812582

Plane view looking in the hole

https://twitter.com/x/status/1992514239756738610

 

[N_Molson]

Must have been the hell of a job.

 

[Urwumpe]

Must have been the hell of a job.

Sure raises the heart rate a bit.

 

[GLS]

If anyone has 3 hours to burn, here is a review of the aerial imagery:

 

[GLS]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1996326904706572398

Interesting how much vertical displacement exists when the engine is thrusting...

 

[diogom]

Interesting how much vertical displacement exists when the engine is thrusting...

Check out the RVacs position at shutdown:

 

[diogom]

Spaghetti shot on B18:

 

[GLS]

Oops

https://twitter.com/x/status/2013841164768620922

 

[garyw]

"v3 booster" - maybe if they picked a design and stuck with it then iterated that design rather than seemingly throwing everything at a booster to see what works they'd actually have something usable.....

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Oops

https://twitter.com/x/status/2013841164768620922

Yikes. Move fast and break things, I guess.

 

[garyw]

Yikes. Move fast and break things, I guess.

They've got the break things down but move fast? Where? when?

 

[Thunder Chicken]

They've got the break things down but move fast? Where? when?

"Move fast and break things" is something of a paradigm-disrupting philosophy of our tech-bro billionaires. I think it is originally attributable to Zuckerberg. Musk / SpaceX adopted a semi-empirical iterative design process that allowed for the possibility of learning from failures because they were trying to do something complicated (recover rocket stages) that had never been done before. That's actually not a bad way to go if you actually take the time to deeply understand the failures and learn from them. But now it seems that they are rapidly trying to iterate the design but are moving so fast that they are starting to see low probability failures of unknown origin in fundamental subsystems occurring, stuff they thought they had sorted and understood, possibly exacerbated by inability to do proper quality control. They are doing re-design to correct flaws that they really don't understand as well as they think they do, and every redesign can introduce more flaws.

They are now having repeated major weld failures on this booster, in different places, while it is just sitting on the pad with pressurized tanks. No rockets firing, no shaking or other violent motion. That's really not good.

 

[garyw]

Agreed with you, they can't learn from a failure on a v3 booster if they are already working on v4 because they won't know if they've fixed it or got a whole other new set of issues.

The approach they are following is an engineering approach but it's chaos engineering. I wonder what it looks like inside? Engineers must be getting so frustrated.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

The approach they are following is an engineering approach but it's chaos engineering. I wonder what it looks like inside? Engineers must be getting so frustrated.

It's basically the mechanical engineering equivalent of vibe coding, but the AI is probably replaced* with overworked engineers who don't have enough time to do due diligence to verify design changes, or even fully understand the problem their redesign is meant to address. You also have a whole second process of fabrication which can be harried to the point where manufacturing flaws start to doom even good designs. The organization starts adding flaws faster than they can fix them, and this continues until the project is cancelled and/or someone dies.

*I sincerely hope that they are not using Grok to "help" with the redesign work.

 

[N_Molson]

*I sincerely hope that they are not using Grok to "help" with the redesign work.

Yeah, honestly, you never know...

Also I feel like one of the problems is that "It is the Boss' design, and the Boss can't be wrong." At least the Soviets had great rocket designers.

 

[GLS]

It took a few years, but he now sees the light

https://twitter.com/x/status/2020640004628742577

For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.

The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars.

It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.

That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.

Just as soon as Starship stops exploding, and they find people willing to ride the thing, well, anywhere.

That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.

 

[jedidia]

For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon

I like how he says something like "self-growing city" as though it was a well-solved problem. An engineer the man is definitely not!