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A comment on SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk. Parent comment

Re:SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking... by pclmulqdq on Friday June 17, 2022 @11:39AM (#31779828)
$200,000 is the cost of the atoms in the fuel. Most of the rest of the $15 million is the cost to get those atoms to the right temperature and pressure when they are stored at a different temperature and pressure, transport those atoms, and put them in the shell. Not to mention the cost of cleaning and coating the fuel tanks to make sure that they are inert and won't react to the fuel (this has to be done on non-reusable rockets too).

This is the typical sleight-of-hand that comes at Musk companies. The atoms in the fuel are cheap, but the process of turning those atoms into usable fuel is very expensive. This is the case for almost all rockets.

The Soyuz is partly cheap to launch because it doesn't need a lot of special fuel handling.

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Re:SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking... by saberience on Friday June 17, 2022 @12:39PM (#31780787)
err, are you forgetting the cost to literally build a rocket? Or are you arguing somehow that fuel costs more than building the first stage of a rocket?

The idea somehow that Soyuz is cheaper than Falcon-9 is laughable.

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Re:SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking... by thraway11 on Friday June 17, 2022 @01:59PM (#31781923)
Looks like SpaceX should've kept those employees after all. Apparently they work for free!
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Re:SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking... by joenathanone on Friday June 17, 2022 @01:41PM (#31781648)
> is the cost of the atoms in the fuel.

Are you being obtuse on purpose? The atoms of the fuel, really? Where can I buy fuel by the atom?

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Re:SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking... by pclmulqdq on Friday June 17, 2022 @02:07PM (#31782031)
You can buy the atoms from Sigma Aldrich or any other chemical supplier. You have to buy a lot of atoms, and you have to buy them by the liter.

If you want rocket fuel from those chemicals, you are going to have to pressurize them and cool them or warm them, and you need a lot of energy and equipment to do it. That is the expensive part. Often, rocket fuels are heavily pressurized orsupercooled, and supercooling a gas is expensive. That allows you to store more energy in a given volume.

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Re:SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking... by jimrandomh on Friday June 17, 2022 @03:13PM (#31782941)
Rather than digging in after your initial mistake, it'd be better to google it. This is a no-stakes random internet argument, so you've gotten the lesson cheap; but if you repeat the same mistake elsewhere you could do yourself a lot of harm.
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