Re:SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video]
by phkahler on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @11:13AM
(#24061702)
>> which included independently working out the secret sauce of the best Russian-made engine.
Another hurdle was that there was no material available for some of the parts. SpaceX - so we'll get some materials science people to develop a new alloy that does what we need. Not an easy sub-task but one that needed a solution, so they found one.
It's basically a sweet-spot between being very powerful, very efficient, cheap and easy to operate and highly reusable. To get all these, they implemented a design that never got past the basic demo stage before, which included independently working out the secret sauce of the best Russian-made engine.