{"id":386,"date":"2012-10-22T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/2012\/10\/22\/the-merlin-engine-by-spacex\/"},"modified":"2013-06-30T19:45:08","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T19:45:08","slug":"the-merlin-engine-by-spacex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/2012\/10\/22\/the-merlin-engine-by-spacex\/","title":{"rendered":"The Merlin engine by SpaceX."},"content":{"rendered":"<div><a href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-3eHM-vPvyLg\/UITEu0aH9gI\/AAAAAAAAKAs\/DiiLBTArOjk\/s1600\/ff_musk2_f.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"640\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-3eHM-vPvyLg\/UITEu0aH9gI\/AAAAAAAAKAs\/DiiLBTArOjk\/s640\/ff_musk2_f.jpg\" width=\"520\"><\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><b>Musk<\/b>: I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, OK, let\u2019s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2 percent of the typical price\u2014which is a crazy ratio for a large mechanical product.<\/p>\n<p><b>Anderson<\/b>: How does that compare to, say, cars?<\/p>\n<p><b>Musk<\/b>: It depends on the car. For Tesla it\u2019s probably 20 to 25 percent.<\/p>\n<p><b>Anderson<\/b>: An order-of-magnitude difference.<\/p>\n<p><b>Musk<\/b>: Right. So, I thought, we should be able to make a much cheaper rocket given those materials costs. There must be some pretty silly things going on in the market. And there are!<\/p>\n<p><b>Anderson<\/b>: Like what?<\/p>\n<p><b>Musk<\/b>: One is the incredible aversion to risk within big aerospace firms. Even if better technology is available, they\u2019re still using legacy components, often ones that were developed in the 1960s.<\/p>\n<p><b>Anderson<\/b>: I\u2019ve heard that the attitude is essentially that you can\u2019t fly a component that hasn\u2019t already flown.<\/p>\n<p><b>Musk<\/b>: Right, which is obviously a catch-22, right? There should be a Groucho Marx joke about that. So, yeah, there\u2019s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2012\/10\/ff-elon-musk-qa\/all\/\">http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2012\/10\/ff-elon-musk-qa\/all\/<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Musk: I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, OK, let\u2019s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then I asked, what is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spacex","category-vehicles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1104,"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/1104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/factualfiction.com\/marsartists\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}