Elon Musk's pasta monster

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

A funny text about Musk's successful and not very rocket experiments.

My young reader! Of course, you go to the rocket modeling section, and you are wondering why Russian engineers are laughing like horses from this Canadian poop Elon Musk - in the engineering sense, and not in the sense of a clever swindler who threw the Invisible Hand of the Market into the American budget up to the shoulder. (And he would have remained in the American budget, like his patrons from Congress, and God would be with them, with blue (in every sense) thieves, but we will talk about, in fact, engineering nuances that are not customary to remember in the era of qualified consumers).

Boring at first.

Rocket engineering, as a mechanical engineering industry, absorbs knowledge and technologies of metalworking, materials science, instrumentation, mathematical modeling, flaw detection, etc. requirements, restrictions, tolerances and landings, this knowledge accumulates over the years and decades, this whole complex is worth not even hundreds of billions, but trillions of dollars, state trillions, trillions from the pockets of the American people.

But if you, as a government lobbyist, have a trillion-dollar NASA, which, as a government organization, is accountable to a bunch of strict doctor-auditors, and you really, really want to steal, then you need to come up with some super-expensive project that, like a toad through a straw, it will be possible to inflate on the stock exchange, simultaneously pumping out money from the budget.

To do this, you:

- you hire a chatty dude with shiny eyes, - you hire a team of PR people, designers and others, no matter how energetic, so unprincipled, - register a private company in California, and this private company is not obliged to disclose the nuances of your financial health (gygy), - merge into this sharaga: patents, technologies, finished projects, technical documentation (thousands of volumes and hundreds of thousands of drawings - but since this is the most shameless privatization of state intellectual property worth hundreds of billions of dollars from the people's pocket, you declare the chatty dude a super-duper Inventor) and ready-made labor collectives of real inventors (this is important - whole teams) directly from NASA, - pushing through the Congressional Budget Committee the idea that in this way you reduce the burden on NASA's budget, especially on its pension lines (we remember that NASA's staff - the coolest engineers - are gradually aging?), - you provide the newborn sharaga with technical, technological, patent support, connect the military, intelligence and counterintelligence, silence hundreds and thousands of patent holders, you silence dozens and hundreds of journalists who suddenly understand where it is better to never try to "dig" in your life, otherwise, the fuck with a wolf ticket will be fired, you connect tens and hundreds of first-class media to the Ingenious Company of the Unique Suddenly Out of Nowhere Genius Inventor, - you provide the Unique Brilliant Team of the Young and the Daring with dozens and dozens of orders on the satellite services market (yeah, anyone, anyone can go where four-star generals and tanned congressmen with noble gray hair are grazing), - you negotiate with stock exchange traders, brokers, rating agencies, bankers, with all this wolf pack, so that they “should look where they should, and where they should not look, the head will snow, it will be very bad, doctors will be sent, you can accidentally fall out of the window, choking on an olive oil, rape the maid in flight - a choice of Jamesbond services ", - but you cannot launch the production of rockets directly at NASA facilities, so you help the newly-minted team find factories (a whole cooperation is dozens and dozens of private, semi- and completely state-owned companies, often from the Pentagon department) with an aerospace background where it will be possible rivet rockets according to projects leaked (free of charge, i.e. free of charge) from NASA), - and - cherry on top - you promise everyone that you are not just making rockets (NASA can do this - and why fence a vegetable garden?) - you promise that you are doing a Unique Program, BREAKTHROUGH INTO THE FUTURE !! landing on planet Earth! Hurray, victory, Hollywood catches multiple orgasms.

If you can do it all within a few months, then you are from the home team of America, no less. So, everything is ready to divorce suckers, everyone is ready, charged, discharged and excited.

But these are fucking missiles! This is fakinshit, planet Earth! And on it is gravity, the laws of nature and various minor engineering constraints.

What are they?

This is a geostationary orbit where satellites must be "hung".

This is the ISS orbit, where (well, everyone can do that, right?) Delivery of cargo by trucks and, in the future, astronauts - living human people. (At the same time, the state NASA was offered to buy the services of a private private company, which - see above - is not obliged to report on the structure of financial flows, shareholders, etc. - what a charm, isn't it?).

These are the dimensions and the average mass of telecommunication and military satellites - at least several tons (not to deal with microsatellites? All serious people, we work in a serious way).

Consequently, from the orbital mass being thrown into the geostationary orbit and from the mass of trucks (and ships with people), the rocket's energy comes out.

Naturally, you cannot just get a ready-made NASOV engine out of your pocket, because everyone will be surprised - what is the uniqueness and ingenuity? Therefore, in your pocket you accidentally find worked out nasov drawings of an old engine from an American lunar lander (who said patents? Who said stands?) And take this engine as the main cruise engine. But you need a lot of such low-power engines, nine at the start - but you shout loudly that this is a Breakthrough into the Future - and the people hawk.

Naturally, the technology of soft landing on the planet has been worked out for more than 60 years, so you take the same ideas from the lunar lander and attach the landing legs to the rocket. But here an engineering anecdote begins - normal disposable rockets have reached such perfection that the walls of their structure are as thin as possible, so normal engineers even take into account the strengthening of materials when filling tanks with liquid oxygen. And they tell you that it is simply impossible to attach landing supports to these thin walls - therefore, you need to fence support belts, thickenings along the entire shell, strengthen the structure, put drives for the "legs" - and this is all difficult, this is all construction, strength, and constant weighting designs, and not at all like at the beautiful presentation that you showed in Congress (or not you, but your tanned patron with noble gray hair - and why does he need all this headache? Decide, redneck, they gave you money!) - and you put up unique (I'm not joking) engineering teams (which they gave you, like slaves, in bulk) - and they do the impossible - they work out the unfortunate folding landing supports, they do it perfectly, as real American engineers can … but all the meanness is not over yet.

Naturally, for a soft landing of a rocket, you need a lot of fuel and oxidizer - this is the same "dead" mass that is useless for putting a satellite into orbit, but you need to carry this weight in order to ensure that your rocket land on a platform in the ocean (here you yell a wild cry, because for every extra kilogram of structure you need to take additional fuel - or reduce the declared, promised orbital mass).

Naturally, having lunar technology, a bunch of lunar engines, you are trying to somehow save on construction. The most important thing is that you cannot produce your rocket at the cosmodrome itself - there are simply no fakinshit technologists, workers, welders, metallurgists, locksmiths and all this rabble who wants to eat and fuck women, so you, trying to somehow save money, should deliver the missile in parts to the Vanderberg military base (who said - the Pentagon?) - but how to do this, except by rail ??

And then His Terrible Majesty - the Railroad Gauge - comes into play. You cannot change bridges, crossings, contact lines along the entire length of the route from the factory to the launch complex, so you must fit the structure into the maximum dimension of 3.7 meters. THREE INTEGRAL SEVEN TENFACES meters. That's all you can. Do you understand? You, the ruler of the United States, who put everyone in cancer, have to reckon with the rail gauge.

Oh Kay, cowboys, so what happens with our nine Merlins and a 3.7 meter railroad gauge? And then it turns out the wild, sticky horror of an engineer - in order to stuff so much fuel and oxidizer in order for you to pull the promised load into orbit, you need to make a rocket high … high … (raise the calculator, it is ugly lying in a swoon) - 70 (in words - SEVENTY) meters …

You feel bad. You really feel bad - with a diameter of 3.7 meters, you need to ensure the flight strength of the "macaroni" 70 meters long (divide 70 by 3.7 and we get a ratio of 18.9 - one to nineteen!). The worst thing is that you need to ensure the stability of the first stage of this "macaroni" on a platform in the ocean (who said - waves ?!) - a column, 55 meters high - and keep it under a normal breeze (who said - wind pressure ?!). It is very bad for you - you need to increase your "legs". They simply have to be longer. With their dimensions, they need to be made thicker, stronger (who said - we cut by weight ?!). For every extra kilogram of "legs", for every extra kilogram of "pasta" - you need additional fuel and oxygen. Fakinshit. Riley is fucking.

You are trying to improve the engineering quality of this pasta monster. You, quite by accident, pull out the technology of supercooling kerosene and oxygen from your wide trousers - so at least a few percent of fuel and oxidizer can be shoved into the same tanks - while you are silent about the price of such technology - these are losses and costs, it all costs money, not provided for in any estimate, but you do not care about the estimates - you need to serve the "pasta god" and the physical laws of the planet Earth. But you are the owner of America. You have a headache. Your clown is jumping all over the media, and your colleagues from the Committee are asking you: "Hey, Billy, buddy, how's it going with the dividends?"

Inconvenient in front of the boys. And so your engineering bastard, the size of a heavy rocket, squeezed by a railroad gauge, weighed down by "legs" and a dead supply of landing fuel, begins to put into orbit (after all, you have first-class slaves who once worked at NASA) an orbital load that a light (well, well, light-middle class) rocket can launch. Under the friendly neighing of Russians and Europeans. Even the Chinese giggle.

But you are the master of America. And you, stung by a coyote, through hundreds and thousands of pocket media, howl to the entire planet Earth that your "macaroni" is about to sit down. She falls once, she falls twice - but here's a landing !!! You managed not to drop the macaroni! You have the best programmers on the planet.

What's next? And then - the most boring thing - you need to re-defect the whole "macaroni" and examine - can it, the space structure, the triumph of materials science and engineering, start again - you need to study how the overload, temperature and vibration survived each element, each gasket whether there are microcracks in every detail, in every welded seam, are there defects in every data cable. And you have - ma-ka-ro-ni-na - with nine antediluvian lunar engines, consisting of hundreds of thousands of parts, assemblies and mechanisms. And each node should work flawlessly - after landing - and again work at super-overloads.

And you, almost the master of America, a brilliant promoter who has supplied hundreds of thousands of specialists with cancer - from a fucking engineer to four-star generals, from a PR girl to a cunning banker from a Bank About Which Better To Forget - you understand that you have to endure the end of the presidential the term of that too dark guy with a tired look, not to get a bullet, not to fall out of the window, not to choke on an olive oil and, God forbid, not to rape the maid.

And what about your lively kid with impudent eyes? And today he is forced to publicly declare that a successfully landed rocket - according to the results of the survey - is unsuitable for re-launch.

Oh fucking shit …