Elon Musk Explains SpaceX's Raptor Engine!
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as a rare, detailed first-person explanation of Raptor engine design from Musk himself.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends Geee · 2023-04 · on “Starship Flight Test (Launch in 3 hours)”
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]
Cites jdiez17 · 2023-05 · on “I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter”
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
Cites teeray · 2024-06 · on “Developer experience: What is it and why should you care? (2023)”
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]