Apparently taken with an iPhone Pro.
You can find a stream of today Starship update below from Space X.
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Starship to the Stars - Update Today
- Thread starter super chimp
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Apparently taken with an iPhone Pro.
You can find a stream of today Starship update below from Space X.
StellarVixen
macrumors 68040
That thing will take humans to Mars??? That looks like a silo, a water tower, it looks like something someone assembled in their backyard.
T'hain Esh Kelch
macrumors 604
I am curious as to what you'd expect? A saucer?
You need three things in a spaceship: Great thrust, aero dynamic shape, storage. This thing provides all three.
StellarVixen
macrumors 68040
I dunno. Something looking more structurally solid, maybe? This looks like it will fall apart on first launch. I mean, riveted steel sheets do not look very stable.
T'hain Esh Kelch
macrumors 604
Price is the only thing I can think of. But they also do it for airplanes, so it must work I guess? Of course, airplanes don't really go through nearly the same conditions..
ThunderSkunk
macrumors 601
Yeah from the look of all the welded panels, I thought maybe it was an inflatable. By the late 80s you could just about push a finger through the composite wall on some of those rockets they were getting so thin. ...but this is just an early welded version of what turns out to be a really slick design by v.3, when the whole things made of a single enormous sheetformed piece of steel with a single seam down one side. It’s taking them a bit to make the tooling on that large a scale, so in the mean time, they’re squeezing off a couple early shots on these versions.
This is a mk1 technology demonstrator. If you listen to the presentation he mentions they will be changing how they construct prototypes. This one isn’t even designed togo into space just fly suborbital.
Actually, THIS is a prototype Starship that will never reach orbit. It is designed to fly 20 Kilometer up in the atmosphere and land near where it launched from.
Yes, it was built literally in the backyard. We have to assume the version of the ship that reaches orbit will be built with better precision. Musk himself said it would be and side they'd used thinner skin and not nearly so many welded joints And the ship that flys to orbit will have a heat shield made with glass tiles.
What you see in the photo is an early prototype that will be improved with each revision.
StellarVixen
macrumors 68040
No. This Mk 1 prototype will not even come close to suborbital flight. Musk said it will fly 20 Km up into the atmosphere. (Likely at a very slow sub-sonic speed.)
The word "suborbital" usually means a ballistic trajectory above the atmoshere where the trajectory intersects the Earth's surface. The Starship will never be able to do that on Earth without a "super Heavy" booster.