Here’s an inside look at how a #NewGlenn 7 meter fairing is designed, and the capabilities it brings to commercial, civil and national security customers.

“I said, ‘OK no problem,’” Musk recalls. “I said, ‘You can hire people—just know your reputation is on the line. Don’t bring your brother-in-law who can’t ever get a job. Not that person, OK? You’re going to be responsible for them. Everyone’s got their relatives that they know at the family gathering who, man, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to work with that person. Don’t bring that person. Bring the person who you’d put your reputation on the line for.’”

Let’s just step back for a moment to acknowledge how nuts this is. Starship is only the upper stage for SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket, but it is arguably the most novel spacecraft ever built. No one has ever built a fully reusable rocket, and the second stage that goes into space is the hardest part. SpaceX remains a long way from making the interior of Starship habitable for humans on a journey to Mars. But even building a fully reusable vehicle that can lift 150 tons into low Earth orbit would be a marvel. That’s more throw capacity than the Apollo Program’s Saturn V rocket had.
 
And Musk wants to build one of these each week.
 
Compare that to NASA and its Space Launch System, the big rocket that the space agency has been developing for a decade and for which Boeing only recently completed a single core stage. This core stage is about 15 meters taller than Starship but lacks its complexity. NASA will, in fact, toss each SLS core stage into the ocean after a single use. And Boeing doesn’t have to make the engines, as the rocket uses 40-year-old space shuttle main engines. Despite this, and with nearly $2 billion in annual funding from NASA, Boeing’s stretch goal for building core stages is one to two per year... some time in the mid-2020s.
 
SpaceX’s stretch goal is to build one to two Starships a week, this year, and to pare back construction costs to as low as $5 million each.
 
“That’s fucking insane,” I said.
 
“Yeah, it’s insane,” Musk replied.
 
“I mean, it really is.”
 
“Yeah, it’s nuts.”
 
“As I look across the aerospace landscape, nobody is doing anything remotely like this,” I said.
 
“No, it’s absolutely mad, I agree,” Musk said. “The conventional space paradigms do not apply to what we’re doing here. We’re trying to build a massive fleet to make Mars habitable, to make life multi-planetary. I think we need, probably, on the order of 1,000 ships, and each of those ships would have more payload than the Saturn V—and be reusable.”

The hardest part of any rocket is the engine. And SpaceX is almost there with the Raptor engine iterations. “We’ve done this with Raptor,” he said. “Like, we’re on Raptor engine 23 or something, Maybe 24. It’s lighter, cheaper, better in almost every way than Raptor version one, which sucked and blew up, basically. One of about six or seven Raptors that blew up, I’ve lost count.”
 
The point is, Raptor is now in a good place. The next step involves building a spaceship with the tanks and plumbing to harness the power of six Raptor engines. The first two Starships have blown up during pressurization tests, but with each new iteration of Starship, Musk and his band of engineers are learning.
 
“A high production rate solves many ills,” he said. “If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next.”

Here's a peek at our @NASASpaceflight view of the @SpaceX #CRS20 Falcon Nebula last night.
 
Full res video coming once I get back to a computer that can handle the raw 4K footage. Old laptop almost melted

Sonic Booms!  
You'll want to grab headphones for this...
 
Placed 2.5 miles away, binaural microphones capture the intensity of @spacex #Falcon9 returning to Earth
 
Special thanks to @spacecoast_stve for getting them even closer for us. BTS out tomorrow
 
#CRS20 @elonmusk

SpaceX is using "petal" reinforcement skeleton, which is not "elegant" and is heavy (hence Mask's whining) but it is good enough for test articles and the cone variant is infinitely easy to make than dome.

We’re recruiting two more pilots into our Pilot Corps. Ever wondered what the office view would be for that job? Check out the reflection in our Chief Pilot, Dave Mackay’s, visor from our last space flight.  
 

As NASA prepares to launch American astronauts this year on American rockets from American soil to the International Space Station

Additional crew members will be assigned by NASA’s international partners at a later date.

J. Hofeller, VP Commercial Sales #Starlink @SpaceX, "we produce 6 satellite per day". #SATShow