Everyday Astronaut
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
41:22 · 2.8M views · Jul 9, 2022
Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut gets a close-up walkthrough of SpaceX's Raptor 2 engine from Elon Musk at Starbase. They cover how Raptor 2 was simplified and upgraded relative to Raptor 1, including cooling and thrust vectoring details.
HN points to it as a rare, detailed first-person explanation of Raptor engine design from Musk himself.
3 comments from Hacker News
Here's a video of Elon explaining the Raptor engine design, and comparing Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 (Raptor 2 is much simpler): this video
I'm no Elon fan but as an aerospace engineer, I can at least vouch that he knows what he is talking about when it comes to rockets (wasn't the case when SpaceX started) and has steered his army of engineers in useful directions that weren't obvious to other people at the time (reusable rockets, Starlink, etc.) If you have watched Everyday Astronaut's tours of Starbase with Elon[0], where he explains in significant detail pretty much everything that is going on with the various prototypes, you'll know what I mean. He's not a guy with an MBA that has somehow lucked out by throwing gobs of cash at various Hard Engineering Problems (although there's that, too.) Of course the bulk of the work is done by "rank and file" engineers. [0] e.g. this video and [LINK]
Elon Musk, in a tour last year mentioned SpaceX’s philosophy that “a high production rate cures many ills.” [0] That’s really what DevEx is about. Whatever you are building, you will get it wrong. The faster you can iterate, and the less you can care about each iteration, the faster you will eventually get it right. [0] this video