Fun fact about SpaceX's stainless rocket

[totient]

SpaceX just officially unveiled a ridiculously large rocket. Rockets are usually made out of fancy, expensive aluminum alloys because these have the best strength to weight ratios at room temperature, but at cryogenic temperatures it turns out that stainless steel is better, so they're making it out of that.

I've heard a lot of crazy ideas from SpaceX of course, and it's always nice to calibrate just how crazy Elon is being. So, I ran some numbers. To give you some idea how large a rocket we are talking about: during the time that it took to build Starship Mk.1, it accounted for 1% of world stainless steel production.

Comments

[vettecat]

Fascinating, thanks for sharing.