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Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Bonus round of WTF. I always thought commercial case making sense is when the government is not the only customer. There isn't even a hint of anyone else wanting the use of a Mars Sample Return vehicle, what he describes is the usual process of businesses building unique things for government.

$Ars: Rocket Lab has expressed interest in Mars recently, both the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter and a Mars Sample Return mission. As Jared Isaacman and NASA think about commercial exploration of Mars, what would you tell them about what Rocket Lab could bring to the table? Beck: I’m a great believer that government should do things for which it makes no sense for commercial entities to do, and commercial should do the things that it makes no sense for governments to do. Consider Mars Sample Return, we looked at that, and the plan was $11 billion and 20 years? It’s just, come on. It was crazy. And I don’t want to take the shine off. It is a deeply technical, deeply difficult mission to do. But it can be done, and it can be done commercially, and it can be done at a fraction of the price. So let industry have at it.$

November 24, 2025 at 2:09 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

It gets worse down the text. The guy describes how a small rocket still has to have all the complexities and systems of a big one, and then they somehow don't have an many people ensuring it all works well? What gives?

Ars: It’s surprising to me that after so many years and so many startups, there really isn’t a viable competitor in Electron’s class anywhere in the world.

Beck: It’s pretty hard to build a small rocket. I call it the pressure transducer equilibrium. A pressure transducer on a little rocket is a meaningful amount of mass. A pressure transducer on Neutron is totally irrelevant. Just throw 10 at them, and who cares? But on Electron, if you throw 10 pressure transducers at a problem, then you know, you’ve added a kilo. That’s a meaningful portion of the lift capacity of the vehicle. And there’s no super-magic store where you can go and buy a pressure transducer that scales with the size of the rocket. So you end up with a bunch of stuff that just doesn’t scale, that contributes meaningful mass to the vehicle. If you look at Electron’s payload performance, it’s really high for the size of that rocket. So that’s really hard to do because in an instance where you would throw 10 pressure transducers at a problem, we can only afford to throw one at Electron, but we still want the same redundancy and the same reliability and all of those kinds of things. So that just drives really, really difficult engineering solutions.

And then from a financial standpoint, it’s got a sticker price of $8.5 million, let’s call it. Your flight safety team doesn’t care if it’s a big rocket or a little rocket. Your range team doesn’t care if they’re opening a 12-inch valve or a 2-inch valve. All those teams just have to become ruthlessly efficient at doing that work. So if you go to a big rocket, you might have a flight safety team of 20 people. You come here, it has to be like three. So you have to find ways of really streamlining all those processes. And every little person and dollar and gram has to be ringed out.

November 24, 2025 at 2:09 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

...or getting divorced. Actual 16 hours a day with no days off for months type of stuff. So, seeing the familiar "mission driven team", a comparison to SpX's parking lot and trying to "out hustle" Musk's outright abuse of his workers i get questions. Do Rocket Lab people also pee at the work place?

Ars: In reading through the book and considering the history of Rocket Lab, I’m continually amazed that a handful of engineers in the country with no space program, no space heritage, built the world’s second most accomplished commercial launch company. What do you attribute that success to?

Peter Beck: It’s hard to know. But there’s a few elements within Rocket Lab that have always remained steadfast, no matter what we do or how big we get. And I think a lot of space companies have tried to see how much they can get away with. And it turns out, in this industry, you just can’t get away with taking very many shortcuts at all. So I think that’s part of it. The attitude of our organization is like, nothing’s too big, nothing’s too hard. We just make it happen. The team works extremely hard. If you drive past the Rocket Lab car park on a Sunday, it looks just like the SpaceX car park on a Sunday. And, you know, the team is very mission-driven. They’re always fighting for a goal, which I think is important. And then, above anything, I just think we can never outspend Elon (Musk) and Jeff (Bezos). We have to out-hustle. And that’s just the reality. The Rocket Lab hustle comes down to just not accepting no as an answer. If a barrier comes up a lot of space companies, or a lot of companies in general, whether its regulatory or technical, it’s easy to submit to the problem, rather than just continue to attack it.

From: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/rocket-lab-chief-opens-up-about-neutron-delays-new-glenns-success-and-nasa-science/

November 24, 2025 at 2:09 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Speaking of postage stamp sized, i must scream and the keyboard isn't enough. (link in alt)

Look at Eric Berger casually describing the goal, comparing it to the past, comparing the Starfactory to Hawthorne, and then going "yep, the math checks out!". All in just 2 graphs.

*endless screaming*

From Eric Berger's article: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/spacex-has-built-the-machine-to-build-the-machine-but-what-about-the-machine/

The ultimate goal of this factory is to build one Starship rocket a day. This sounds utterly mad. For the entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets. Over the course of more than three decades, NASA built and flew only five different iconic Space Shuttles. SpaceX aims to build 365 vehicles, which are larger, per year.

Wandering around the Starfactory, however, this ambition no longer seems undoable. The factory measures about 1 million square feet. This is two times as large as SpaceX’s main Falcon 9 factory in Hawthorne, California. It feels like the company could build a lot of Starships here if needed.

November 24, 2025 at 8:14 AM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Here's a pic of the older long since scrapped Booster 4, showing the same COPVs before they were arranged in a neat column under those chines. You can also see the remains of the left column of these pressure vessels post accident. (3/n)

Bottom part of the Starship Booster 4 being lifted to or from the launch mount. Directly facing the camera is its quick disconnect plate, flanking it from both sides are two pairs of COPVs. They look like 4 vertical black cylinders.

November 23, 2025 at 3:40 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

This is how Booster 18 looked like rolling out of the production site, just hours before the failure. This is a very nice picture as it shows the very spot it failed at - one of the two long fins, aka chines. The one that is completely missing post incident is directly facing the camera. (2/n)

Starship Booster 18 rolling out from the production site. It's 9 meter wide main body diameter, 72 meters tall, it has 4 chines on its side, 2 of them taller than the others, both are filled with COPVs.

November 23, 2025 at 3:34 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Pictures of the destroyed Starship B18 by Jordan Guidry from the other site.

Looks like it was one of the chines with COPVs that was at the epicenter of the failure. Combined with SpX's statement, looks like it was again the COPV's, same as Starship 36.

A wide view of SpaceX's Masseys test site near Brownsville, TX.
The damaged booster stands in the middle of it on one of the test stands, surrounded buy various test rigs, tanks, construction equipment and other things. The bottom half of the lower tank is split open, the upper half of it is crumpled.

Closer look on the Booster 18 from a different angle. The tear in the LOX tank is now visible, it's very jagged along the vertical axis and it's located right where one of the booster's chines filled with carbon-overwrapped pressure vessels used to be.

Even closer look at the tear. The booster's transfer tube is still intact, and is probably what is keeping the while thing standing, except for an inwards hole at the bottom. The tear clearly happened right where the chine with COPV's used to be, the remains of its attachments still visible both above and below the tear, the uppermost part of the tear is almost separate from the rest of it and two of the COPV's used to be right in the middle of it.

November 22, 2025 at 8:35 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Fascinating how you spend an hour dunking on the guy in the replies of one of his biggest haters and what you get is scammers seeking your attention. Just a layered cake of trash. The man's trash, he's surrounded with scammers and the scam itself is low effort trash.

My newest follower: Elon Musk. Who just reposts another Elon Musk. Low effort matryoshka doll of impersonation.

November 21, 2025 at 12:12 AM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Here, look at my emotional support yellow Zaporozhets.

A yellow ZAZ-968M, just pulled out of a garage at night to pose for the photo. It's a night time shot, with the lights of the car and the much whiter garage lamps creating a very moody look. The Moscow City (aka The Mordor) skyscrapers in the background contrast nicely with one of the cheapest and most miserable cars you could get in the USSR back in 1979.

November 18, 2025 at 6:03 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Okay, fine, i'll read more than half a paragraph of this stuff...

...Yep, utter AI slop. This sentence alone is enough for me to want to close the site and never see it again.

The angular, polygonal form followed directly from these material properties, as the steel's work-hardening during cold rolling favors flat panels over curves, aiming to disrupt the rounded, stamped-steel norms of conventional trucks by leveraging economies from high-volume battery production to achieve viability.

October 28, 2025 at 3:09 AM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Top Gear's endurance race BMW. The right door reads "ARSE buscuits", the left one - "Penis"

October 27, 2025 at 12:42 AM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

You'll probably guess correctly how that nuclear industry acronym is pronounced.

Foreign Material Exclusion Process and Methods
Foreign material exclusion (FME) is vital to the safe and reliable operation of nuclear power plants. Foreign material intrusion into primary or secondary ...

October 25, 2025 at 1:07 AM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

Here, look at this thing to improve your mood!

Koenigsegg Gemera. View from the front. It looks like a normal high end supercar, but it has a secret!

Koenigsegg Gemera. The two doors are actually fairly long, enabled by the dihedral synchro-helix mechanism, aka doors open slightly outwards and upwards, and there are two rows on seats inside!

October 20, 2025 at 2:42 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

I've got a bunch of this stuff in my collection.

A Russian car number plate covered in mud along with the rest of the trunk lid. The mud was wiped off from symbols that read "18 cm".

October 14, 2025 at 12:16 AM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

I feel compelled to skeet these for your viewing pleasure. Don't they look great?!

Cybertruck towing a trailer with SpaceX's Raptor Vacuum engine.
View from the side, launch pad in the background. It's a fascinating visual dissonance between the round shape of the massive nozzle extension and the triangle shape of the truck. Somehow it makes the truck look even uglier.

Cybertruck towing a trailer with SpaceX's Raptor Vacuum engine.
Black and white photo, view from the front. It's also a visually dissonant photo, where you can see the flat planes on the front of the truck and all the complex geometry of the engine's forward components. The two dudes inside of the truck don't look too pleased with their predicament.

October 13, 2025 at 3:12 PM

Raging Spirit

@ragingspirit.bsky.social

And another thing: it's called Trust and Safety because, imagine using a list to block users and trusting the list's creator and that list creator turns out to be an asshat and does stupid things... It's unusable, not scalable and not an excuse for the platform to be bad at moderation.