Tuesday, November 30, 2021

The raptor that's eating the Starship

SpaceX is a lot of things; but mostly what it is, is a mass-production facility.

Elon Musk has raised the red flag on the Raptor engine. Each Starship needs 39 Raptors, and if a Starship crashes (as is predicted for Starship 20 because it's testing a new tiling-system) those are 39 Raptors SpaceX need to remake. Fast.

We are now learning what happened during that D-suite shakeup. Will Heltsley, ex-director of propulsion, hadn't been doing well and also hadn't been informing his boss on how well he wasn't doing. So Musk's email implied. I reckon some lawyers were at work last weekend too.

Raptor itself is something of a prototype, note.

On topic of those tiles: I wonder if a Starship can Disassemble itself on event of a Rapid Unscheduled, in midair. Even if the chassis be screwed, maybe Rocket Lab can run after some Raptors with their helicopter(s). So instead of losing many millions of dollars per RUD, SpaceX loses only a few millions of dollars - admittedly some of that to a sometime competitor but then, Rocket Lab doesn't need to compete in space.

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