https://twitter.com/raumvektor/status/1423633590743617542
Edit: here is another, including Saturn V, SLS, the Space Shuttle and the Statue of Liberty.
It looks like one side of the Starship is coated in some black material.
Is it some form of thermal plating or just kind of "no-scratch" thing just for stacking?
It was surprising to see that it only took them about an hour to unstack (I didn't catch the stacking but I think I heard it was around the same amount of time ?).
I'm still very perplex about the "catching" mechanism they are designing, Musk mentioned in the Everyday Astronaut interview [1] that it was a very hard problem and I'm very curious to see if/how they can solve it.
> Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. 'Cause you can't ask the departments, you have to ask a person, and that person who's putting forward, the requirement or constraint must agree that, they must take responsibility for that requirement.Otherwise you could have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with, off the cuff and they're not even have the company anymore. But it came from the, let's say, air loads department. They're like, actually there's no one at our current department that currently agrees with that.
This crane is neither boring, nor old. It's an engineering marvel itself. It's a Liebherr LR 11350 [1], one of the most powerful mobile cranes available worldwide, modified by SpaceX for their own use case [2].
[1]: https://www.liebherr.com/en/int/products/mobile-and-crawler-...
Originally they hired a company that normally builds water towers to construct it. The idea is that the rocket needs to be a commodity, not something built in a clean room by specialists.
Watch this interview with a former Astronaut who worked with SpaceX for Crew Dragon. He made this comparison on TV and talked about it with Musk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNG6ZzDh9C8
Quite a funny story.
https://myrgv.com/spacex/2021/07/15/faa-may-not-approve-spac...
https://www.courthousenews.com/as-spacex-races-to-expand-lau...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/spacex-installed-29-...
I suppose hot-phase testing after that
Looking forward for all the great space missions that will be made possible by this (europa, enceladus, more comet missions & many more space-telescopes), not so much for humanity becoming multi-planetary, as the scientific value is lower imo. E.g. a great project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI
A whole industry bootstrapping itself into transforming exotic, mission critical hardware into a commodity; SpaceX is making flight hardware a commodity, just like Silicon Valley did with semiconductors!
Meanwhile Europeans are playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 (already 11 years old) and it looks like Ariane 6 won't be competitive with SpaceX anyways [0]. And China is still raining toxic fuel and spent rocket stages on villages. [1]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/europes-challenger-t...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...
